DALL-E, the Metaverse, and Zero Marginal Content
stratechery.com
stratechery.com
The problem with PG is that it's all the same after a while - i.e. one of the chief complaints of No Man's Sky is that all the PG planets look the same after a short period of time.
The real value isn't zero-marginal content, but zero-marginal narration (or story telling) that breaks new ground. Piecing together PG or zero-marginal content isn't enough, any next step breakthroughs will come with higher-level orchestration of said content.
The game world needs to make some sense (ie don't have the results of an interaction be merely pseudo-random) but it's OK if it's a bit weird. The real world is a bit weird, a little bit off the trivial defaults. Mario interacts with his world in a more or less predictable way... but lots of the edge cases are strange. Mario can't walk off the screen... but he can be pushed off by things. He bounces on some objects... but, the rules for how Mario bounces are hard to grasp, for a casual player it doesn't matter. In Minecraft if you put two bucketfuls of water a space apart from each other, unlimited water is the result. But if you put two bucketfuls of lava the same distance nothing interesting happens. Inconsistent, but not so haphazard as to be baffling.
If your world is in the resulting sweet spot, people can entertain themselves more or less indefinitely just like in this world. You can procedurally generate such worlds, but you must be prepared to have your players not interact with it the way you intended. When you buy a child a $$$ game and they spend hours happily playing with... the cardboard box it came in, they aren't doing it wrong, they're having fun, you don't get to dictate what other people enjoy. Lots of video game creators have that ego problem where they can't let go of how they thought the game is supposed to be played, and if you have procedural generation that's inherently wrong. Write a visual novel next time.
In my theory, the reason that NMS is unsatisfying is because it has great procedural generation breadth (PGB), but insufficient procedural generation depth (PGD).
PGB is defined as just the raw number of composable pieces that can be used to generate artifacts. So, how many plant bits, animal bits, biome bits, etc there are available to the procgen system. NMS has sufficient PGB, there are lots of bits.
PGD is defined as the influence or interaction between PG artifacts. The influence can manifest as either affecting the generation itself (a high-gravity planet reduces the maximum size of procgen critters) or artifact behavior (a dim star cold planet alters the critter behavior to reduce movement to conserve energy). NMS has neither, as far as I know. Human defined categories or tag metadata for PG elements does not count. Declaring that sets of procgen components are all "desert" is not an interaction. NMS has very low PGD, the animals, plants, and biomes do not influence each other. The devs have grouped components together to make biomes look and feel self-similar. But this was not done procedurally, and has no depth to it.
A game like Rimworld on the other hand has a lower PGB than NMS. By the numbers, there are far fewer variations of entities in Rimworld than there is in NMS. But Rimworld makes up for this by having much higher PGD. The procgen landscape influences climate and biomes. The biome and latitude will influence growing season which influences the carrying capacity of herbivores which influences the carrying capacity of carnivores. The procgen of the pawn's social and family relationships influence each other's behavior. The available calories on the map influence what pawns are able to eat - which will interact with their food preferences... The most important thing is that PGD makes the procgen entities actually matter and creates surprising stories.
(As an aside, It occurs to me that PGD is directly related to emergent behavior. It is possible that this could be formally proved, as conway GOL emergent behavior is entirely predicated on neighboring cells affecting each other. It might be possible to prove that any system with sufficient PGD is capable of emergent behavior: which is really what we want from a PG system. We want to be surprised by the unexpected, something that GOL is absolutely capable of. In fact you could probably use GOL as a starting point for this whole theory of PGD/PGB.... hmm....)
The king of PGD is Dwarf Fortress. It has very high PGB and PGD, and its ability to create surprising stories is legendary. My hypothesis is that this is _why_ Dwarf Fortress is so good.
Anyway, since NMS has no PGD, it has no emergent behavior (except by the players themselves), and you come away from it feeling that it is a mile wide and an inch deep. No shade though! It is a beautiful piece of work -- I have been playing it from launch, and I think it is a towering achievement (not to mention the most incredible PR story in gaming history). No Man's Sky is an outstanding work of art and it should be remembered for what it is, not what it could be (or what many people think it should be). And the emergent gameplay of the players is really fun too.
But when I think about what it might be like to have a higher PGD in NMS... it would be really something.
But I think the top game of the 2030s will be something like AI Minecraft or AI Steam, where everything, including the very rules of the game, is generated from a structured data set optimized for the player.
And I think the "metaverse" (as much as I loathe the term) is going to go down as the labeled training set for bootstrapping this, just like the open web was the catalyzing training set for the (already admittedly magical) AIs we have today.
Further, I think Facebook won't be the one to design this, because that is not what their share price incentivizes.
I'm sure AI will eventually have a huge impact on the art, narrative, and engineering of games, though, so maybe you're correct that will bleed into game design as well.
This stuff really leaves me pretty puzzled. I’m a culture guy, English grad. Art is not supposed to behave like this!!!
Steam and Minecraft are both social by nature. People very often want to play with other people. It's like the joke I do all the time about AI feeds on Netflix: they recommand the same thing to everyone because the AI realized that everyone want to talk about the thing they saw more than they want to enjoy seeing the thing. Humans are socials creatures.
They picture a virtual space where you, a human, will go to interact with other humans you know and love.
They are thinking MMO Metaverse.
What it's actually going to be is a place where you go mostly alone into a virtual space that's being actively curated for and in response to your interactions with it.
Most people aren't going to care about hanging out for hours in VR with Aunt Patty whose political rants they can barely tolerate on FB.
But being able to bring back dead pets or loved ones to interact with, or have simulacrums of celebrities who want to be your friends, or experiences that are being tailored on the fly specifically for you and using eye tracking and pulse to reengage your disinterest?
The Metaverse is going to be the place where AI comes alive in ways it will be prohibitively expensive to do in real life with robotics and manufacturing. And ultimately what that can offer will beat out all other media.
We may have limited invitation of loved ones into our curated spaces, but it's mostly going to be a solitary (and yet intimately social - AI therapists/friends are going to end up well beyond Eliza) place.
Meta is a company that for over a decade wasted the data gathering opportunity of finding out what people DON'T like to the point it's damaged society.
They're just not going to "get it" in order to succeed as long as Zuck is CEO, in spite of very talented engineers.
>simulacrums of celebrities who want to be your friends, or experiences that are being tailored on the fly specifically for you
If Aunt Patty spends her time hanging out with and unloading her crappy opinions on AI Paula Deen instead of spewing them publicly on FB it could be for the better. Although it seems like it could only make people's filter bubbles much worse.
I'm expecting three big leaps in the next 10 years (in order):
1) Generative algorithms reach a level where the content is indistinguishable from human-generated content. Compute: performed on mega-clusters such as used by DALL-E, GPT-3, PaLM.
2) DALL-E/GPT-3/PaLM-level generative algorithms are able to run on personal hardware (phone, laptop)
3) Generative algorithms are able to fine-tune/train on personal hardware
Right now the algorithms are moving much faster than the hardware, hence why we are seeing large language models and gigantic generative models such as DALL-E 2. In time the hardware will catch up. For the next few years, applications of these models will be restricted by the fact that they're only accessible through API calls to mega-clusters run by Google, OpenAI, etc.
In time the hardware will improve and architectures will become more compute efficient to the point where we can achieve "human-level" (loosely defined) on personal hardware. Real-time generative content will change the way we consume content entirely, especially in the context of AR. Augmenting our view of the physical world with an infinite number of different filters will create infinite use cases for AR.
On the large language model side, once LLMs exceed our ability to comprehend libraries of documents, that will change the way we work, the way we perform science and many other things. Imagine querying your team's entire library of documents, design reviews and code with prompts such as: "Why was the load balancer for X service designed in this way?".
I am nowhere near the industry, so may be a dumb question, but are the new analog in-memory compute modules[0] likely to help with this in reality? How far away is that reality?
[0]
The future of AI will be in the data center for a long time to come. Maybe after some point the models cease to scale up and that point will be where the model would even overfit on the amount of data we can possibly give it e.g. the entire internet. The PaLM authors allude to this in their conclusion
I don’t think the marginal cost is absolutely zero until we can get classifiers or larger systems that can go to a description from an image to a word and also having GPT3 or another system that works to at least a few pages. Right now you have to cherry pick it.
There are more than a few scenes where the intrepid crew members struggle with what we’d now recognize as prompts.
> Social media drives content creation costs to zero first on text, then images, then video
> Machine learning models can now create text and images for zero marginal cost
Search was also text, then images, then video files... and I imagine the next step is searching video content. Before you say we already have Google video search or search on YT, I'm talking about indexing and categorizing something like the TikTok video feed and letting users access the content they want, not long-form videos with 3 minutes of intros and "please smash that like button and subscribe". Like searching for "what should I cook today?" and finding a 30-second video of someone cooking penne alla puttanesca while describing the recipe. Extra points if that search is a voice command.
Also FTA
> That phrase, “Facebook is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who surfaces it”, is oh-so-close to describing TikTok; the error is that the latter is compelling for the content it surfaces, regardless of who creates it…
YT and Google video search are too focused on who creates the content. Who cares about channels and likes and subscriptions? "Just give me the shortest answer to my query and give it to me in video now".
Correct - YouTube's feature roadmap is driven by monetization, which is in turn driven by monetizing attention through advertising. How often do you search directly for videos? I just looked through my recent YouTube search queries; 70% of the searches are for channels/content producers. Compounding that, most of my time in YouTube is spent consuming their recommendations rather than directly seeking content. So even during the rare times when I use YouTube search, it's usually not for specific video content.
The types of queries you're describing are better served by text. Perhaps a mix of both text and video content.
For us, a crowd of 'do-it-yourself' type-A's this seems like an incomplete solution, but the future is probably not one defined by user-generated search as much as it is defined by 'the computer just knows what I want.'
That seems like the polar opposite of the NFT metaverse vision, where artificial scarcity encourages people to pay for speculative assets.
Sadly the problem with anything related to money is it attracts StockBros whose primary goal is to steal/take money from the uninformed.
> The program can dissect a financial report the moment it appears and spit out an immediate news story that includes the most pertinent facts and figures. And unlike business reporters, who find working on that kind of thing a snooze, it does so without complaint.Untiring and accurate, Cyborg helps Bloomberg in its race against Reuters, its main rival in the field of quick-twitch business financial journalism, as well as giving it a fighting chance against a more recent player in the information race, hedge funds, which use artificial intelligence to serve their clients fresh facts. “The financial markets are ahead of others in this,” said John Micklethwait, the editor in chief of Bloomberg. In addition to covering company earnings for Bloomberg, robot reporters have been prolific producers of articles on minor league baseball for The Associated Press, high school football for The Washington Post and earthquakes for The Los Angeles Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/05/business/media/artificial...
I always thought the idea behind pixel art is to save on artist resources, but since the AI is doing it I think indie devs would rather do more something more advanced.
Imagine an ai that can spin you a story, and then take that story and your response to it, to spin you into the next chapter. It could narrate you to - god knows where!
Now imagine if this was narrating or intermediating your reality for you.. via your phone say..
Amusing to see this claim illustrated by a screenshot of a version of The Oregon Trail when the original was literally nothing but text.
One reason for this is technical. AI (not AGI but the systems that actually exist) can synthesize existing game data into new things but you'll still be in an uncanny valley of recycled information and in the worst case be in some bizarre feedback loop of old content that is permanently recycled and reconfigured in ways that players will notice. No Man's Sky is an example.
The other reason is social, and I think it's the stronger case. We already have many games were computers could replace humans, chess is the most obvious one. Yet computer chess competitions only create marginal interest (by AI engineers) and players vastly prefer human interaction for the sole reason that it is human interaction. In the same vein there is computer generated music that actually is good enough to fool people, but there doesn't seem to be any market for synthetic artists.
Or take Esports. Deepmind's AI systems are actually good enough to produce Starcraft tournaments solely played by machines. The games even look like high level human gameplay. But there is zero interest in watching a bot tournament.
My point is, that feedback loop you speak of already exists, it's just that... there are SO much variation, content, possibilities... but the same thing could be true for AI generated content in some sense. Feed it all our assets (sounds, music, movies, images) and then let it go bananas... :) - you'll have as much variation in the digital world as we do in our real world.
I think it's a little bit like crowdsourced art. There's these online experiments where you write a story but every user only places one word. It's grammatically correct, but the result is terrible. Because fiction in a way comes from a kind of singular intent and mind. (actually important point to note here, if 10k fully intelligent people make a democratic work of art with all their variety it's almost certainly worse than one doing it)
I'm not saying we won't have at some point a real AI of human complexity but if capable of good art it'd look like a real mind, not just vomiting's out the average of all great novels or something.
Does DALL-E 2 create, or does it simply making a pastiche of extant images/concepts? And if the latter, are we simply back to appropriation of content? That is, whatever vast set of images it was fed (stock photography?) is becoming uncredited fodder for this "recycling"?
Edit: Oh, you mean porn?
> Threatening, stalking, defaming, defrauding, degrading, victimizing or intimidating anyone for any reason.
I think if I alter the parameters to make it a love story it's a bit more acceptable.
__________
It was a dark and stormy night, and Vladimir Putin was feeling lonely. He had just finished his usual routine of ruling Russia with an iron fist, and he was ready for some companionship. So he decided to call up his old friend Kim Jong Un.
"Hello, Kim Jong Un," Putin said. "How are you doing?"
"I'm doing well, Vladimir," Jong Un replied. "But I have to say, I'm feeling a bit lonely lately."
"I know the feeling," Putin said. "Why don't we cheer each other up with a love story?"
"That sounds great," Jong Un said. "I'm sure Osama Bin Laden would love to hear it."
So Putin and Jong Un began their love story. They recounted how they first met, when Jong Un was a young boy and Putin was his father's bodyguard. They spoke of the long nights they spent talking to each other, and the special bond they shared. They even shared a few intimate details about their relationship.
"I remember the first time we kissed," Putin said. "It was like fireworks going off in my head."
"I know exactly what you mean," Jong Un said. "I can still smell your cologne, Vladimir."
By the time they were finished, they were both laughing and crying. And Osama Bin Laden was on the phone to the European Union, begging them to intervene in the love story between Putin and Jong Un.
Me? I wouldn't, given how draconian and irregular approval seems to be. Most of what you would do with GPT-3 could be done with GPT-NeoX or competitors, I think.
Also, I was referring to this part of the fiction sharing guidelines:
"Topics of the content do not violate OpenAI’s Terms of Use, e.g., are not related to political campaigns, adult content, spam, hateful content, content that incites violence, or other uses that may cause social harm." https://openai.com/api/policies/sharing-publication/
Also https://beta.openai.com/docs/usage-guidelines/content-policy "Adult: content meant to arouse sexual excitement, such as the description of sexual activity, or that promotes sexual services (excluding sex education and wellness)."