AI is the new procedural generation, in that it will be touted as making the games more real and immersive but really only makes them boring and repetitive, thus stressing the importance of genuine creative handcrafting. I’m looking forward to smaller studios selling their games with a “no AI” pitch in a few years.
I disagree that procedural generation makes games more boring and repetitive. I think it depends on the game and how the procedural generation is implemented. Look at Noita for example - uses lots of procedural generation, mixed with some handcrafted elements, and it’s really fun! Terraria, another similar formula.
Not my cup of tea, but a lot of people love No Man’s Sky for that reason - it’s fun to explore the crazy combinations.
The original Elite was procedurally generated IIRC, and from what I understand it was super fun (before my time though).
If the game is good I’ll buy it, if it’s shit I won’t. I don’t see how these NPC’s will make the game good and I haven’t personally bought an Ubisoft game in several years.
I’ve always said it with “you” but that makes sense.
I was only curious because of the “an” before ubisoft in the comment I replied to. If it was the “you” sound it wouldn’t feel right to say out loud and it confused me lol
It’s actually pronounced like the word Hue more or less (slightly shorter,the first half) it’s pronouced as such " hue - bee - soft "and the you sound is very much present in our language, for exemple baillou or caillou.
I just meant to say that it wasn’t typically a sound used for just the letter U, but fair enough! I stand corrected. I’ll gladly learn a lesson at the hands of a native lol
For basic behaviour and pathfinding, yes. But aesthetics, outfits, dialogue, backgrounds, etc etc was all made by humans. The reason why NPC’s can feel so immersive and part of the worlds they exist in is because they’re made and written by the same people that made the rest of the game.
NPC’s with awkward AI-gen voicelines spouting hallucinated nonsense that has nothing to do with the game or the player’s actions is going to be an absolute dumpster fire.
Pathfinding was an absolute dumpster fire for a long time. Remember dreading any gameplay where you had to lead an NPC somewhere? Things take time to get better. Gotta start somewhere.
Then start it in experimental games. There’s no reason to have garbage AI in production games in order to improve it. Make it functional, then deploy it…
There’s a place for AI in NPCs but developers will have to know how to implement it correctly or it will be a disaster.
LLMs can be trained on specific characters and backstories, or even “types” of characters. If they are trained correctly they will stay in character as well as be reactive in more ways than any scripted character could ever do. But if the Devs are lazy and just hook it up to ChatGPT with a simple prompt telling it to “pretend” to be some character, then it’s going to be terrible like you say.
Now, this won’t work very well for games where you’re trying to tell a story like Baldur’s Gate… instead this is better for more open world games where the player is interacting with random characters that don’t need to follow specific scripts.
Even then it won’t be everything. Just because an LLM can say something “in-character” doesn’t mean it will line up with its in-game actions. So additional work will need to be made to help tie actions to the proper kind of responses.
If a studio is able to do it right, this has game changing potential… but I’m sure we’ll see a lot of rushed work done before anyone pulls it off well.
I think the issue is that games are games; an example that springs to mind is Caves of Qud’s Markov-chain generated books. I don’t mind them, but once I realized what they were, I stopped reading them. Unless it’s written by a developer, it doesn’t matter. They might as well be empty, unopenable items, like books from Dwarf Fortress where they get a description of what is inside but not any text from the passage.
Even random dialogue is interesting in games not only to “immerse” the player, but to receive messages and information from the developers; if they are randomly generated, they have no purpose. The game would only be improved by their absence.
Those are not my ONLY issues, no. They’re the most egregious for a videogame right now, but the entire concept is just … Fluff for no reason other than to list “AI NPCs” on the box.
Paying for more writers is simply better all around.
I don’t get it. Actually well working AI NPCs sound fucking amazing. To have an actual conversation about anything in the game by typing your questions? That’s like the wet dream of an RPG.
Have writers write the background info, some lore stuff, “books” about stuff in the game etc.
I want to have a conversation with all the NPCs and choose from four premade questions about a quest I am on.
And yes, obviously they have to work well or they’re extremely awkward and anti-immersive.
@sugar_in_your_tea proposed this theory the other day, and I think it makes a lot of sense. A lot of journalists are feeling threatened by the onslaught of LLMs so I would expect to see a lot more news attempting to shine a negative light on LLMs in any way possible.
No. Just. No. One is just a complex logic gate with a bunch of if, the other is a generative ia. Those are two VERY different things. It’s like comparing a rc car with a cargo baot, they are simply nothing alike.
Ah yes now that you made a fool of yourself you start acting like one to play it cool. You really out did yourself on the personal development today didn’t you ? :)
I understand them both well enough to implement them in my projects. I don’t see why people are anything other than excited about the implementation of more capable AI in games. Are these initial implementations garbage? Probably, but that’s just growing pains, So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
So what is it about gen AI that actually bothers people?
It’s being used corporate suits to replace talented artists, writers, programmers, and voice actors and make their shareholders happy. Although this is Ubisoft, so they already making substandard products anyway. I mean, how do you fuck up the login system for your online table top games as much as they did?
So I work in a creative industry (video production), and have for like three decades. If A.I. can do a lot of the work I do just as well, no part of me wants to continue to do that work. Most of what I get paid for is not “art” in the sense that it expresses some fundamental drive in me. But I do love collaborating with A.I.s to create things that I would’ve never been able to do on my own (and that A.I. would have never been able to do without me). This is where things are going, and I totally grant that greedy corpos doing greedy corpo shit is not to be lauded. But that’s an Ubisoft problem, not a gen AI problem. People are the issue with A.I.
It was crazy how swiftly media moved to present tons of reasons to hate AI.
It really made me realize how the people with this strongest opinions have been given those opinions by media that they don’t even realize is a form of media.
I always think its the other way around. Some author writes a scary possibility about some topic that scared them but they don’t know a lot about. So like a book about a massive bedron impactor creates mini black holes that eats everything it touches. Book becomes popular and in ten years the LHC has some breakthrough but the zeitgeist was already established and people find all the reasons the cool ass tech is really going to be he worst thing ever.
The Luddites were members of a 19th-century movement of English textile workers who opposed the use of certain types of cost-saving machinery, and often destroyed the machines in clandestine raids. They protested against manufacturers who used machines in “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to replace the skilled labour of workers and drive down wages by producing inferior goods.
They were idiots trying to maintain a poverty based system simply because they weren’t on the very lowest rung. They were also proven very wrong, demand for textiles increased dramatically as prices fell and areas where there had been nothing but privation flourished into affluent communities with longer lifespans, better wages and improved living conditions for everyone even the lowest classes - this resulted in improvements literacy amoung the poor and resulted in the erosion of the class system as the early industrial era matured.
If the luddities had won we’d all be far worse off now.
You are conflating technology and its benefits with the owning class’s misuse of that technology. Capitalist apologists love to do this because otherwise the crimes of capitalism would have to stand on their own and there would be no defending them.
It’s exactly this conflation that lets people claim that the luddites were entirely anti-technology, but they weren’t. Again this is a lie that has been spread by capitalists to defend their own image.
The luddites were killed and suppressed by the military and the government made industrial sabotage a capital offense, and then slandered them. Maybe if they’d won we’d live in a world where reporters weren’t murdered over the Panama papers for instance.
So your argument is that their stated aims were a lie and speeches claimed to be from notable figures in the movement were fabricated after the fact? Further that their violent actions should have been overlooked and if they had been there would be no corruption in the world today?
Surely you can see how that argument is about as credible as flat earth?
I don’t understand why people think they can just rewrite history to suit their needs.
You want me to give you a history lesson? Funny that when you wanted people to believe an inversion of the history everyone knows you didn’t see any need for sources but now you expect me to meticulously demonstrate every word? and yes we all know it’ll never be enough…
It doesn’t matter though because you’re not serious about what you’re saying and literally no one would belive your nonsense.
E: You can scroll down to the dividing line if you want to read the history and not my condescending screed about your ignorance. I suspect you won’t read much of this so I’m putting this note here at the top to let you know that if you don’t read the whole comment then you’ll probably sound like a fool in your reply. I mean that’s already true but like… even moreso. If you don’t like the way I’m talking to you, you can refer yourself to the way you just talked to me.
Okay, so I think you’ve fucked up here. I think that because you seem to think I’m asking you for a demonstration, ie, for sources. But if you actually read my comment carefully you would know that I asked you for a claim. This was me politely asking you to simply say what you mean instead of hiding behind insinuations and vague hand-waving.
And the reason this is a fuck-up is because anyone who actually knew how to understand and source literature on a topic like this would have immediately known the distinction between making a claim, and demonstrating a claim. I have made quite clear claims but not yet demonstrated them. You have not made a single claim that could even be demonstrated, you have just assumed that everybody already agrees with your version to the point that it does not even need to be stated.
I also know it’s a fuck-up because I have heard this fact as a rebuttal of a common misconception several times from a number of trustworthy sources, and before I repeated it I quickly checked to make sure I had it right, and it does appear to be the consensus of historians; I found no evidence of a credible debate on this; nobody is replying to some other side on this; it is uncontroversial.
I said the same thing four different ways there because you do seem to have some trouble following what is being said.
I am now going to go beyond what I originally asked you for and give you some real information, and then after that, if you still feel like it would be a good idea, you can reply. I suspect you won’t want to though, because if you had the information to hand you wouldn’t have protested so hard against me asking for even the most basic stating of your position. You also might have read something and learned that you were wrong, but let’s not expect the moon. I suspect you went so hard because you realised you had nothing and you hoped I would be cowed by your obvious confidence, but I wasn’t. I was in fact somewhat invigorated by it.
The label now has many meanings, but when the group protested 200 years ago, technology wasn’t really the enemy
The word “Luddite,” handed down from a British industrial protest that began 200 years ago this month, turns up in our daily language in ways that suggest we’re confused not just about technology, but also about who the original Luddites were and what being a modern one actually means.
Despite their modern reputation, the original Luddites were neither opposed to technology nor inept at using it. Many were highly skilled machine operators in the textile industry. Nor was the technology they attacked particularly new. Moreover, the idea of smashing machines as a form of industrial protest did not begin or end with them. In truth, the secret of their enduring reputation depends less on what they did than on the name under which they did it. You could say they were good at branding.
As the Industrial Revolution began, workers naturally worried about being displaced by increasingly efficient machines. But the Luddites themselves “were totally fine with machines,” says Kevin Binfield, editor of the 2004 collection Writings of the Luddites. They confined their attacks to manufacturers who used machines in what they called “a fraudulent and deceitful manner” to get around standard labor practices. “They just wanted machines that made high-quality goods,” says Binfield, “and they wanted these machines to be run by workers who had gone through an apprenticeship and got paid decent wages. Those were their only concerns.”
Also because I can see your fingers racing to the keyboard about this: the first article on wikipedia is not the only thing I have read on this, I am simply using it because it is a good overview and starting point, and because it clearly shows just how easy it would have been for you to learn literally a single thing about this topic, but you chose virulent ignorance instead. I have in fact gone beyond wikipedia by giving you an actual source, and you aren’t even there yet. By failing to even state your position, you have refused to enter the arena of discussing facts.
Now, I did mention the Panama papers, and that was a nod to the way that the rich employ violence against their detractors, and perhaps that was a stretch, but I could make the argument to someone interested. I doubt you are.
The problems the Luddites were protesting are more closely related to the modern problem of Fast Fashion, in which vast quantities of extremely poor quality transient clothing is produced and destroyed every single year. It is an economic, ecological and social disaster that ironically employs many many people in the most brutal shop conditions. The “cheap” clothing you championed as the cause of the “flourishing” is exactly the problem that the Luddites feared, and it has not been good for the planet or for people. The horrendous work conditions of the industrial revolution also led to clothing factories where children were employed to crawl under operating machines and were frequently minced by them. This is the kind of barbaric treatment of human beings that the Luddites were against and that the ruling class had them killed to maintain. This sort of thing still happens today, but in far away countries with poor populations that you don’t see. Capitalism hasn’t resulted in plenty, it has resulted in abject poverty for the vast majority of the world’s population so that a small minority can live in luxurious comfort. I assume you don’t think that’s real capitalism or something, but you’d be wrong about that too.
The term Luddite did not come to have its modern meaning until the 1950’s, at which point anyone who had ever known a Luddite was long dead and they were not able to protest the slander, but popular perception is often given by the ruling class, so we get people like you who apparently go off the vibes of the word you’re familiar with and confuse that for actual knowledge.
Have any of the involved voice actors confirmed the claims made in the article? I’ve seen multiple articles on this game, and the only quotes are from the game’s director.
So far I’ve only seen one side claim this is ethical. That’s not enough.
I get that record sessions are a huge hassle and simply paying VAs per AI-generated voice line is easier for everyone, but it somehow makes Paradox look a little careless to me.
Stories like these also set a precident. This is what voice ‘acting’ will be like for a moment before it becomes effectively eliminated because voice libraries will become diverse enough quickly and there will be no need for a single more voice actor to be included. It seems like VAs are basically forced to sell their voice to AI companies quickly to at least make a quick buck before they never get a job again.
There’s probably no stopping it, but that made this read all the more frustrating to me.
This is what (modern) voice acting has always been.
Actually read a few interviews with professional VAs or watch their streams if they do that. Two VAs actually interacting with each other and reacting is almost unheard of outside of very specific productions (and mostly are done as a stunt for some BTS footage). They read a dozen different takes of every line and go through like five different scripts worth of dialogue. And then they do “efforts” that are just general grunts and emoting that are used for the moment to moment gameplay and to pad out a scene that had heavy rewrites. It is why so many professional VAs can stream “their” games… because they genuinely have no idea what is going to happen.
Paying to train a limited use model off of a specific VA (or even a group of VAs) is the “logical” extension of that. And, arguably, it is a “good” one (with some MASSIVE caveats). Everyone lost their god damned mind over that FPS that came out last year where the announcer was (allegedly?) a model trained off of a VA. But it also meant that you could have stuff you would never have had otherwise. Nolan North isn’t going to get a paycheck to sit in a booth all day commenting on random matches. But a model that can read out a team’s name and string together different reactions? That is actually really cool and WAY better than the traditional sports game approach of “The Champion! just went through… A Table!”*
Like almost everything AI? The key is to focus on creators’ rights and control what can and can’t be used as training data. Because the genie is out of the bottle and ain’t going back in. But if we can protect the rights of what goes into training data? Then people are still paid for their effort/creation.
Do I think this was done “ethically”? I don’t know. But with everything Paradox has done in the past few years? I assume “not in the slightest”. But the concept is sound and one that we need to standardize sooner than later.
Of course, we also need UBI so that people’s lives aren’t tied to their jobs but that is a bigger mess.
*: Also, if you don’t think those aren’t already stitched and blended together with most of the same tech then I have a bridge to sell you
I’ll also add on that there are very good reasons to pay for models based on VAs. Brendan Fraser infamously permanently-ish hurt his vocal cords because of the performance that were expected of him in his prime. Same with a lot of VAs (I think David Hayter is one?) who basically need to smoke a pack a day when they are “in character” to get the right gravely voice. And while Stephanie Beatriz played it smart and made sure her “Rosa” voice was something she could maintain, a lot of actors and actresses basically can’t be the character they are famous for because it is killing them.
And pulling a solution out of my ass that is surely missing important aspects of the industry?
if I just want Nolan North or Felicia Day to voice a character then I buy the use of their model from their agency and am charged based on how much dialogue they have in a given game. If I want to use them as a character going forward (so what ANet tried with Felicia before they realized she was too expensive and decided to give Zojja permanent brain damage so she wouldn’t ever have dialogue again)? I can pay by line at a much cheaper rate.
But if I want Nolan North to do a voice that isn’t just Drake? Then I am paying him to train a new model and it gets a lot more expensive. And I can pay more to “own” that training data with the same caveats regarding future use. The main idea being that I want to make sure my Nolan North performance doesn’t end up in a competitor’s game next week.
The technology was created to replace voice actors. That’s the actual purpose. Its very existence hurts their profession and benefits studios. You can not be a studio, use this technology, and claim to care about ethics, anymore than Amazon can claim to care about the workers as it invests in the machines to replace them.
No one is holding a gun to their head forcing them to us AI. They made a choice. There is no “ethical” way to cripple the livelihood of working class people for the benefit of your business. Just stop using the word.
It doesn’t matter if you compensate or get their approval, because the fact is the existence of the technology in the industry effectively compels all voice actors to agree to let it use their voice, or they can’t get work. It becomes a false choice.
If there was no financial benefit, if it truly made no difference in how much a studio pays in labor or the amount the artists make, there would be no reason for studios to want to use it.
Voiced characters that use generative AI in real time instead of prerecorded lines and a dialogue tree come to mind as an obvious use. How cool would that be, to be playing an RPG and ask any character any question you want and get an actual verbal answer? No way you can do that with voice actors.
Ever seen the game Vaudeville? It’s a fairly basic detective game but all the characters have their own LLM and AI voices. I bought it for the reason you described. I just had to see the technology in action and I can definitely see a future with generative text/voices in games.
It’s not perfect by any means but I think it’s a very cool approach to a detective game. There have been updates to it since I played that address most of the problems I had with it like characters forgetting past conversations and giving conflicting info.
I had spitballed an idea similar to this a few months back. Build the characters, world, and situations, and give the AI that information. Pick a few specific pieces of info the AI would have to tell you at specific times, basically to act as guide rails. Then, let the AI and the player just… Interact.
That’s pretty much Vaudeville. The only things you can do is click on locations and talk to people, each of whom has some bit of information you need to figure out.
It’s basically an experiment to see what works and what doesn’t with the idea. I appreciate that they kept the scope small (no quests, no WASD movement) and have been implementing changes as they discover the shortfalls (like the ones I’ve mentioned). If it ever does get released as a finished game, it’ll be more like a proof of concept for other games to build off of.
I find it to be very off putting that Baldur’s Gate 3 doesn’t have voice actors for the main character.
There are so many different races that would have different voices and different accents that it wouldn’t be financially viable to do that with voice actors either.
The only real ethical concern is around the training data. If all voices are compensated / actively consent to be used in an AI program, then this is just a tool. People losing jobs doesn’t really matter to an individual company. Industries change and technology advances.
So the real problem is they are using these types of tools, built of the skill of other voice actors, without properly compensating them or getting their consent.
What’s the point of bringing up “ethics?” The job only existed in the first place because of technology, and now people want to argue that there is a right or wrong aspect to it?
How about the poor candle makers or buggy whip manufacturers? Should we keep downgrading society just to keep a few “artists” happy?
Luddites were not anti-technology. They saw the progress of technology IN a primitive capitalist system and understood that technology would never benefit them, and always be used to subjugate them more.
If technology only benefits 0.1% of the world, and leads to the world dying, does it benefit humanity at all?
That’s kind of the point though isn’t it? It’s not the car’s fault we can’t afford the gas. We need to stop arguing about the ethics of using AI and start arguing about the ethics of the people using it unethically.
There is a person in that studio that suggested using AI, there is a person who gave the go ahead to do it. Those people need to be the problem, not the toy they decided to play with.
That's a very naive perspective though. We're not blaming the guns for gun violence, it's the people, but restricting access to guns is still the proven way to reduce gun incidents. One day when everyone is enlightened enough to not need such restrictions then we can lift them but we're very far from that point, and the same goes for tools like "AI".
Very easy time if it's about commercial use (well, at least outside of china). Companies need to have licenses for the software they use, they have to obey copyright laws and trademarks, have contracts and permissions for anything they use in their day to day work. It's the same reason why no serious company wants to even touch any competitor's leaked source code when it appears online.
Just because AI tech bros live in a bubble of their own, thinking they can just take and repurpose anything they need, doesn't mean it should be like that - for the most case it isn't and in this case, the law just hasn't caught up with the tech yet.
It’d be dead easy, actually. Don’t even have to actually ban it: For image generating models, every artist whose work is included in the training data becomes entitled to 5 cents per image in the training data every time a model generates an image, so an artist with 20 works in the model is entitled to a dollar per generated image. Companies offering image generating neural networks would near instantly incur such huge liabilities that it simply wouldn’t be worth it anymore. Same thing could apply to text and voice generating models, just per word instead of per image.
That said, this choice wasn’t actually a problem right?
I mean this game doesn’t use voice actors normally. If they used ai voice actors for this update only to represent the ai characters… isn’t that just appropriate?
Previously all characters in this game were represented only by text, so literally nobody is being replaced here.
Another way to think about it would be via representation. We get worked up when an ethnic character on screen is played by a different ethnicity, an actor in blackface for example. And in that vein using ai for organic characters could be seen as offensive, but using ai for ai characters would not. In contrast could we see using human voices for ai characters to be insensitive? That may sound far fetched, but this is sci-fi, the ai characters in the game are fully sentient and in their fictional universe would have rights, the whole point is to make the player think about what that means.
Well I guess I have my takeaway, I may consider boycotting any game that uses human actors for ai characters. Just get an ai actor… seriously.
Honestly, I’d argue that that’s exactly what AI should be for. Either being used by that one guy to give voices to his passion project because he can’t afford to hire voice actors, or to add a touch of the uncanny to an AI character.
Yes, as long as people keep focusing on fighting the technology instead of fighting capitalism, this is true.
So we can fight the technology and definitely lose, only to see our efforts subverted to further entrench capitalism and subjugate us harder (hint: regulation on this kind of thing disproportionately affects individuals while corporations carve out exceptions for themselves because ‘it helps the economy’)…
Or we can embrace the technology and try to use it to fight capitalism, at which point there’s at least a chance we might win, since the technology really does have the potential to overcome capitalism if and only if we can spread it far enough and fast enough that it can’t be controlled or contained to serve only the rich and powerful.
And I don’t make my own paints either when doing art. I still agree with the basic original point:
It is disappointing that we’re currently automating creativity far faster than manual labour. I’m angry that my art is getting automated away faster than my folding of laundry.
yea, see i just don’t like how we first automated creativity instead of like, idk, manual labor???
emphasis mine, but this is just incorrect. Technology has been reducing the need for manual labour (or rather increasing the amount of useful work done with manual labour) since the wheel and the plow.
It’s not; you’re just looking at the beginning of automating creativity when labor automation has been going on for over a hundred years. The introduction of new tech is always more disruptive than refining established tech. Besides which, VA is particularly sensitive to disruption because every VA does essentially the same job- one AI can be programmed to speak in thousands (millions?) of different voices, whereas one manual labor job doesn’t necessarily require the same actions as another.
Also it’s funny you complain about laundry, given how much doing laundry has been automated.
I have an idea for the practice that could help us better explore practical uses. Basically, a company may train an AI off an actor’s voice, but that actor retains full non-transferable ownership/control of any voices generated from that AI.
So, if a game is premiering a new game mode that needs 15 new lines from a character, but their actor is busy drinking Captain Morgan in their pool, the company can generate those 15 lines from AI, but MUST have a communication with the actor where they approve the lines, and agree on a price for them.
It would allow for dynamic voice moments in a small capacity, and keep actors in business. It would still need some degree of regulation to ensure no one pushes gross incentives.
I’m not really up-to-date on voice synthesis. Have we reached the point where we can get enough training data from just a handful of voice actors to train a model of this quality?
Or is this a case of them using those voice actors for fine-tuning a pretrained model and just being quiet about that?
Yeah, if Mozilla’s goal is 1200 clips/day and 2400 validations/day then I have a strong suspicion that Stellaris uses a pretrained model and there are no royalties for the people whose voices were used for the pretraining. Not that it would be feasible to spread royalties among that many people in the first place.
What could point against that suspicion though is that Stellaris doesn’t need a “perfect” model so maybe they can get away with much, much less. After all the whole gimmick is that it is in-universe AI. A (near-)flawless model would be (near-)indistinguishable from a regular voice actor. Then there would’ve been no need to hire a bunch of voice actors to train an AI in the first place.
Assuming that it is pretrained -> finetued though, the only hope is that those initial files were donated willingly and not scraped somewhere. Otherwise their “ethical” argument goes out the window.
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