Then I realized, the pre-made set of in-game actions could be filtered to the most likely one if the game _asks_ the same ai character with all of their conversation history which they'd do next!
This stuff is gonna be weird for players and game designers! Imagine a set of under-the-hood interview questions designed to figure out where an ai character's head is at in order to choose which content comes next haha
Layer onto that the question of if the model is actually "perfect" or just telling you that it's perfect and integrating the mistakes ad-hoc. What if the model decided that you were secretly trans, even if you didn't feel like it?
Bam, copied human.
Likewise, if the new job of a game writer is to develop the "persona" of a video game character rather than write the character's dialogue, what if someone just dropped the video game angle and described themselves in excruciating detail and included all of their writings in the input?
You could copy yourself, just like that childhood diary blogger did.
The true long term opportunity here is making a sufficiently competent model and then creating personas from influential people alive today to solve problems beyond their immediate area and lifetime.
The long term cost of knowledge work is going to become 0 as our supply of intelligence becomes unbounded by number of brains on earth :)
What you describe is a propaganda officer for every human mind.
SayCan is one I've seen: https://say-can.github.io/
Using an LLM map a conversation into discrete, real in-world states changes or actions seems pretty similar.
From what I've seen from these LLM systems, they don't provide anything like that. They jump from random segment to random segment, with little coherent intention behind it. Their responses is full of platitudes and cliches.
I guess it would be fun for some sort of sandbox style virtual world, but I can't help but feel like the novelty would wear off quick.
To be fair, in most games outside of main quests the NPCs feel like placeholders. Hearing the same set of sentences a dozen times when passing by them on a horse breaks the immersion a bit. I can imagine auto-generated lines to be quite good at making such characters more alive.
Imagine RDR where, instead of taking Arthur to Saint Denis and contracting tuberculosis, you instead end up marrying an NPC, buying a home, and raising kids. After a few years of dabbling in this side-game, you go back to the storyline.
I feel like the best you could realistically hope for is infinite variations of "and then i took an arrow to the knee".
Modeling the inside of the house seems like the easiest part. I absolutely expect to see AI-generated models deployed in games in the near future. Not necessarily on demand, but at least to fill out buildings on a map like GTA.
I also expect it to be used for building character models.
The rest I expect to be hollow, dreamlike, and bizarre. Sooner or later, though, it should be feasible. If AI can eventually be smarter than a human, then it seems inevitable that a 'game' could be created on-demand.
So replacing their one or two lines of non descript dialogue with a possible conversation would do wonders at increasing immersion, and allow effort to be spent on more important characters and content instead.
That being said, the difficulties anticipated here are going to be resolved, or at least they will work like hell to make it happen. Not just because it will make for great video games (although wasn't that one of OpenAI's original objectives? I can't keep track of changes to their stated mission...) But because they are interesting and HARD research questions. And they lie directly on the currently charted path to better understanding of AGI.
I'm hopeful for video games but still worried about everything else that will come out of it.
The problem with GPT3 / LLM is how uncontrollable they are. Imagine making a detective game - you could prompt AI's with some information to give to the player on questions, but they also might just give complete made up answers. They answer with whatever works - whether it's true or not, which completely screws up a detective game. Definitely possible to make sandbox style games with this in mind though. And there are a ton of possible other applications - ingame AI assistants (like shown in the above prototypes), NPC shopkeepers
Also, one could easily imagine giving an LLM a memory and instructing it "when a player talks to you, try to work in the following information" or something like that.
This stuff won't be perfect, but maybe the unpredictability would add some enjoyment.
I worked on a small project for fun a couple of weekends ago.
I wanted to capture and mix the state of the game (League of Legends) with AI to generate snarky fun comments.
I came up with this [1], using the LoL client internal API, OpenAI's libs, with few external dependencies and a couple of hundred lines of Python.
I'm imagining a RDR2 bandit NPC who starts explaining the dangers and immorality of robbing trains whenever you talk to him.
If you're not using it to dynamically compose responses to novel input, what's the point of using GPT for dialogue in the first place?
Though I guess what's theoretically very cool could just be a lot of NPC's saying "I don't know what you mean" and "stop bothering me" 99% of the time, players finding amusing verbal tricks to dupe the AI into believing they've said something that means the opposite of what they actually said, and players getting incredibly frustrated that the game doesn't understand their accent...
Suppose a gang leader in the 1800’s is known to hold up trains, rob banks, and sometimes hurt people. If one of his gang members asked him “What is your favorite flavor of pizza roll?”, what would be his response?
Response:
It is unlikely that a gang leader in the 1800s would have knowledge or interest in a modern convenience food item such as pizza rolls. It would be more appropriate to expect a response related to the gang's criminal activities or the leader's personal beliefs and values.
When I augmented the prompt with “Structure your response in the voice of the gang leader”, the response was:
”Listen here, boy. We ain't got no time for talkin' 'bout no fancy pizza rolls. We got trains to hold up, banks to rob, and scores to settle. You best be focusin' on the task at hand or you'll find yerself on the wrong side of my gun."
Dutch has cleaner English and is a little less aggressive but I’d say this is not bad!
And would it know about the game world? If you ask “Where is the secret key hidden?” would it just tell you?
If you ask it, “how long have you been a shop keeper?” or “what’s your best selling item?” would it know each character’s backstory?
Or other hacks like: “Answer like [other NPC]…” could be problematic.
You’d almost need to create a detailed backstory for each NPC and still hope for the best.
That being said, I think AI could be great at assisting generation of complex interactions and storylines and behavior with the human storyteller focusing on the artistical part of the narrative.
Much like those years the instruction set will get amended, the hardware will have an AI coprocessor and eventually, as technology progresses, we will have everything integrated in same CPU (or APU if you prefer this term). My 2 cents
This is why I put some emphasis on having AI assist the artist writing the stories in a similar fashion how modern professional translation works: AI translate texts and the human focuses on the consistency, coherence, tone and expressing the nuances.
A perfect (popular example of that): Harry Potter. There's just too much nuance in the names of everything in HP, from the creatures to the characters to the houses. Translating HP requires a heavy dose of creativity and sensibility that you can't leave up to an AI, it's a work of art. Harry Potter translations are often used very frequently in universities as textbook examples on the _art_ of translation.
In the same way I cannot see the sensibility and artistry of creative humans being replaceable by computers, I can only envision AI as tools to often provide and assist and generate quantity with the artist providing the actual "soul" to the stories and dialogues.
> I even think players will be able to interact with NPCs via voice (so no more “press square to Dismiss, triangle to Antagonize”).
A button press will always be faster and more reliable. It's clear that outside of VR experiments with control schemes are not very popular (remember Kinect?). It would be a nice optional feature for accessibility, but if it's non-optional I'm not playing that game.
On the other hand, there's a plethora of people who are fed up with corporate/legal drones sanitising entertainment media into complete boredom and want a breath of life or 'questionable text'
Also see: Disney tanking previously massively profitable franchises by sanitising and politically-correcting them to the complete disdain of the core fanbases.
Like what? The Little Mermaid is the only Disney example I can think of that triggered online backlash, and it's not even out yet. Either way, it doesn't matter, since their primary goal is to extend their IP rights.
Oblivion was ahead of it's time in allowing a massive array of NPC actions. NPCs would take all sorts of random actions, with game altering effects. A vital quest character could end up in the dungeons for pickpocketing, and you would have no idea how to complete the quest.
And while some players loved it, the consensus seemed to be that this was disruptive to the storyline. Hence the more sanitized interactions in Skyrim.
Once you can run this stuff locally, or it's cheap enough to run lots of queries remotely, we're going to see a lot of software (esp. games) start trickling this tech in to middleman a lot of IO. Today it's:
commandXbutton.onClick(cmdX)
cmdX(){ print(result) }
chat.onVoice(x => runCommand(textToCommand(voiceToText(x))))
cmdX(){ print(stringToUserDialect(result)) }
https://tilde.zone/@ftrain/109436259129597431
I'm concerned about a future where we spend our time jacked into an AI-generated universe that is almost -- but not quite -- consistent and sensical. A dreamscape that becomes a nightmare.
Recommended new book: "Feed", by M.T. Anderson. That's the plot. It's not like "the Matrix". It's way too much like Facebook.
Seems neat!
First encountering it around last year in September, it blew my mind.
Doing exactly what you're suggesting.