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Comment by QuixoticQuibit | Hacker News Reader

This research reminds me of one of their April Fool’s videos [1] with a gaming USB stick that you plug into your computer to offer various gaming enhancements. One of which is a “Ghostplay” feature where an AI program can mimic you after training on your gameplay.

I remember that video because it always struck me as not being far off from reality. It’ll make the current set of online game cheats/hacks seem like child’s play if it can be done effectively (read: human-like and undetectable). Maybe then a server-running AI will be needed to detect AI-like gameplay mimicry.

[1] https://youtu.be/smM-Wdk2RLQ

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Something similar to what you describe is already being done. Game video is streamed to a Raspberry Pi Zero that sits between the real mouse and the Gaming PC and adjusts the mouse movements. Google for "Valorant RPi0" for videos to see this in action.

Here is an excerpt from a now deleted Reddit comment where the setup is described:

> "My pi is connected to my pc as a HID device with all the descriptors matching a legitimate mouse. My actual mouse is not connected to my pc and the movements are relayed through to the pi over wifi (UDP). My pc records my screen and streams info to my pi over wifi which my pi happily adjusts as seen in the video."

There are cheats that work solely off of game recordings?

In many non-fps games of course - even in FPS games you can make an aimbot (admittedly a crappy one) with nothing but autohotkey. The reason is because in most FPS games the enemy is highlighted a specific color, so you just move the mouse until that color is centered and shoot.

There are cheats that work just with input modification: FPS games often have a recoil simulation which requires you to adjust your aim downwards as you're firing (and it's predictable). You can make a hardware cheat device which just replays this motion when you click a button to fire, improving your aim substantially.

And neural network upsampling, this can't be true, right?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0X1RtXCvPFQ

Servers are already running AI to try and counter cheating in quite a few games.

2018 video on Valve's use of deep learning for anti-cheat in CSGO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ObhK8lUfIlc

Neat, I wasn’t aware of this application of DL. Very cool!

Aside, but, I'm said this is an acceptable use of the term AI, to mean "big statistics".

I find it amusing you seem sad because one hyped term was used, only to go on to prefix the word statistics with "big". Statistics was comfortable with large quantities since inception.

I agree with you, ‘big data’ is silly too.

AI these days just means principal component analysis

But if the AI is functionally indistinguishable from a human player (human-like and undetectable), does it even matter really? https://xkcd.com/810/

(Conversely, if they're _not_ functionally indistinguishable from a human player, then that means it's possible to write an AI or other algorithm to detect them.)

AI-based detection systems have to be fairly conservative about banning accounts. so there will probably be a transition period where the clientside AI mimics a human well enough not to get banned, but makes enough "dumb computer" type mistakes to get noticed by other human players. this would be very annoying for the humans.

if the AI is truly indistinguishable from a human player, then it sort of depends on the human player we are comparing to. if the AI plays like the best human players in the world, this would be a big problem for games without a good ELO system.

>> does it even matter really?

Because, even if acting like a human, AI can play/fight 24/7. Many online games still have leader boards that can be climbed through steady play rather than short-term bursts of skill.

One more reason to fix those games, I guess.

You don't let chess engines compete in the chess world championship for humans

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