Hacker News Reader

Comment by 9dev | Hacker News Reader

If I shutdown every voice other than the optimist's one in my head, this, along with other recent AI research, will mark the advent of never-seen-before role play game possibilities. If the current pace of progress continues, we'll see games with complete narrative freedom for players, where you aren't limited to pre-written answers anymore, but can actually talk to in-game characters with your actual voice, goals, and motivations. And those virtual conversation participants can talk back to you, react to your words and actions in a believable, fully immersive manner. That's a dream come true for every gamer on the face of this earth, I believe.

The more rational voices in my mind, though, become more and more afraid of a world where the only thing you can trust is people sitting right in front of you. That makes the world of information pretty small again.

View on HN

I’m an amateur music producer and vocals are by far the toughest part of making music. I have to find a singer, convince them to work with me (I am an amateur and not particularly good tbh), and book studio space because its very tough to get a clean recording at home.

I’m hoping that like digital instruments, I’ll be able to splice in digital voices instead of finding singers.

This already exists, ex. Audimee: https://audimee.com/

And the millions of other RVC websites. Musicfy, Uberduck, Coversai, Kitsai, FakeYou, Voicemyai, Voicify, Bangerapp, Tryreplay, Weightsgg ...

RVC is so easy anyone can spin up a website for it. No moat. Over a hundred thousand trained weights files in the open, so it's easy to bootstrap.

For anybody else who also hadn't come across the term RVC before:

"The RVC model is a Retrieval-based Voice Conversion system using AI for high-quality voice cloning. It utilizes artificial intelligence to modify or clone voices in real-time." Source: https://speechify.com/blog/rvc-vocal-models/

Wow. I'm going to give each family member a password and make them prove that they're real when they call me :)

or go pro and issue a One Time Pad to each of them.

Would make a nice vignette in a film about a dystopian future where video can be be generated cheaply and of sufficient quality.

Yeah but I tried Audimee too and they are working on giving best quality voices. It is not about u train or use RVC, it is about quality and save time.

Now if only the prices would drop and I could start making custom audiobooks for the price of regular audiobooks.

Great, so the competition is going to yield cheap services with a nice UX.

An English language and accent bias in most current models

https://voice-swap.ai/ may be of interest, you can covert your rough singing to use a real singer's voice (apparently! I've not tried it)

This is already somewhat available (check out Dreamtomics Synthesizer V and the voices like Solaris etc)

I have been using Synthesizer V for a lot of my music and the quality is very high, even with little manual tuning. There are a lot of voices to choose from now, and they added a cross-synthesis feature which lets you use the voices originally intended for Japanese and Chinese in English, and they don’t have a strong accent (I do find that I have to mess with the lyrics input a little). Also SAROS is coming out which has experimental Spanish support.

Definitely recommend looking up some Synthesizer V covers to see how realistic singing voice synthesis has become in recent years. It’s also free to try lower quality versions of the voices.

Save your money and record at home under a blanket.

Closet full of jackets works too. That’s what a lot of podcasters do when traveling

They also do pillow forts, e.g. http://PillowFortStudios.com/

Layered towels are surprisingly capable too

Or if you want to feel a little fancy, a 3-sided folding project board with foam glued to it.

Part of me looks forward to these experiences. A larger part of me already mourns the decline is purely human creativity that they suggest. Perhaps AI models will make the perfect game or music or write the perfect novel. I'm certain they'll be programmed to reproduce the funky jank and humans bring to everything they create. At some level, though, we each have our own story that we want to tell and when there are so many automated voices in the room, it's going to be harder to tell those stories.

It'll affect linear entertainment far before it impacts games seriously (Especially the 'full immersive' games where you chat with AI agents)

AI is still too expensive and performance intensive to run in games cost effectively, and truly powerful AI is probably another 10-100x cost increase.

On the other hand, novels will be rapidly replaced by visual novels. The cost of having a novel fully illustrated and voiced will go down 1000x. A high quality illustration used to cost $500-$1000 (A day's work from a high-tier commercial artist), soon it will be about $0.5. I'm not counting in the author's time to prompt the images, because it would have costed them way more time to communicate with the illustrator anyways.

The entire boundary between novels, comics, cartoons etc will blur. Like if a newly written Harry Potter can have thousands of illustrations set in Hogwarts and be fully voiced, the standards for a movie adaptation will be astronomically high, which will in turn drive AI use in movie production just to keep up.

> It'll affect linear entertainment far before it impacts games seriously

Maybe. But I think you make the mistake of considering games that combine existung AAA features + AI as where it will first impact games, where I think it will first make its mark in games that don’t use hardware heavily for 3d rendering by opening up new modes of gaming.

> novels will be rapidly replaced by visual novels. The cost of having a novel fully illustrated and voiced will go down 1000x.

The cost if having art made isn't the only reason novels aren't fully illustrated now, and AI doesn't impact any of the others.

Are you sure of this? LLMs seem like a pretty low-hanging fruit for game studios, even if they don't implement fully immersive player actions upfront. Even just generating background sound or NPC banter during build automatically seems like a no-brainer to me, enabling huge savings on content writing - and that's really the lowest-cost solution imaginable.

> The more rational voices in my mind, though, become more and more afraid of a world where the only thing you can trust is people sitting right in front of you. That makes the world of information pretty small again.

Gives me cosmological analogies: in the far enough future, the only things you can see in the night sky are the members of the local supercluster.

> That's a dream come true for every gamer on the face of this earth, I believe.

There's definitely some gamers who would like to never talk to a character in a video game, even if it means hours of bumbling around for the blue key that some NPC just told me about while I ignored 100% of the text in the game.

I'm old and I sympathize with your last sentence, I _imagine_ certain reinforced paths through repeated experience are myelin covered so much as to be almost static. But if I think of generations growing up, their brains aren't reinforced/seasoned enough to spot these "Wait... What?" moments in online content that is almost sensical but not quite. In a world with ever increasing AI hallucinated content, when children absorb fake content and build strong paths in their brains, at some point the words/meaning could be so distorted that you cannot understand anymore the person in front of you? I think of the political landscape where we have similar problems, social media algorithms curate content to keep you entertained within subjects A and B, and you have a community with shared values and you are seasoned and share its language domain. How would the landscape look like when the net can be bombarded by content that appears to be true, valid and useful but it really is not, for young generations? Also if somebody can paint the right myoline picture in my head (not plausible text generation but science) I would really appreciate it.

I think that an answer to finding a 'true' reality on the net comes back to the centuries old dicipline of philosophy. The world has been full of 'garbage-thought' for ever. I might suggest that there is less 'garbage-thought' now for those that wish it than there ever has been.

The AI-Voice revolution leads us instead to the problem of authority, and of imitation of authority. Too many of us take it as given that an authority has the truth.

The AI-Voice / AI-Content revolution allows low quality actors to imitate relevant authorities.

So, to address your question, we need to study philosophy in schools, so that kids learn to think for themselves.

The amount of context needed would require quite a bit of novel R&D that doesn't exist on the horizon yet. I think it's more realistic that it'll be a mixture of real & fake in the interim (e.g. the LLM will record important game state changes / information & then use that as context but it'll still forget a bunch of things you'd expect a human to).

>If the current pace of progress continues, we'll see games with complete narrative freedom for players, where you aren't limited to pre-written answers anymore, but can actually talk to in-game characters with your actual voice, goals, and motivations. And those virtual conversation participants can talk back to you, react to your words and actions in a believable, fully immersive manner. That's a dream come true for every gamer on the face of this earth, I believe.

It's basically Dungeons and Dragons with an AI dungeon master who can generate video in realtime. Which would be awesome, but like Dungeons and Dragons it wouldn't be easy to keep the player on track.

I'd imagine everyone else has an agenda, a schedule and ordinary life which is pre-written, so the game actually wants to tell an interesting story, but as a player, you can choose to listen or just do all shenanigans in the context of the game you can come up with. If you want to be a farmer instead of defeating the dark overlord, so be it -- until the world ends because the overload has achieved his goals with no resistance, or maybe someone else becomes a hero instead. ...Gosh, the more I think about it the more awesome it gets.

Edit: just one more! Imagine actually having to complete quests in a given amount of time, because the rest of the world continues to revolve. People being mad at you because you left their children to die in the dungeon after arriving a day too late, because you were busy running an errand for someone else.

What I have been thinking would be really cool and fun to try would be to remake zork with llms, speech to text and text to speech.

I think you might be able to do it with a lot of prompting, and having a database that functions like a wiki for the current and past states of the game world.

If you got really fancy, you could also make it a pseudo MMO where the content of the story you create with a character could be used as the basis for a NPC plotline in other people's worlds, possibly reducing the amount of content needed to be written.

If it got popular you could also use it as a research tool, where you could force some subset of the player population have some interaction, and be able to test and get a dataset for counterfactual reasoning.

The next 5 years will be wild.

> The more rational voices in my mind, though, become more and more afraid of a world where the only thing you can trust is people sitting right in front of you.

You could care less if the content you already consume on forums like HN were generated by AGI. Just sayin.

It would be fantastic to put a bunch of different LLMs in a game map with “senses” fulfilled by multimodal inputs and agency to carry out actions within the game’s universe. With a goal such as make the most money or rule the most kingdoms, it would be super interesting to see how it self organizes.

I used to be an LLM until I took an arrow to the knee. Aside from the joke, I think the barrier would definitely reduce and in-game characters would be contextually far more aware but how do you enforce plot progression in such a truly open world? Can you control the boundary of LLM expression?

> but how do you enforce plot progression in such a truly open world?

I'd imagine a mixture of general prompting/training the LLM on techniques like those used for plot progressiom by human game masters in TTRPGs and guidance via systems tracking progress and injecting contextual prompts based on mechanisms like those used for tracking and guiding plot progression in GM-less/GM-replacement systems (e.g., the Mythic Game Master Emulator) for TTRPGs.

Definitely agree with your last point, but regarding games with endless possibilities. Mm I rather have a game that is created by someone with a clear goalbin mind. One with boundaries. A good single player experience. Like for example Alan wake 2.

Approaching a full life simulation.

Maybe soon game developers will realize black holes and the uncertainty principle are great for efficiency.

Back to Descartes

So on one hand there is the prospect of "complete narrative freedom for players" and on the other hand there is a fake information dystopia right ahead of us. Well, I would suspect, that the more dystopia we are going to have, the more people will want to flee that reality for a while into ever getting better role playing games. Is that, what people once called progress?

"a world where the only thing you can trust is people sitting right in front of you"

Oh and I think real people can be a source of missinformation as well. Also holograms(or brain implants) might have a breakthrough soon, as well. So all in all I think we are living in interesting times.

> Oh and I think real people can be a source of missinformation as well.

Yeah, definitely. But at least you have a chance to detect their intentions; for some forged digital information, you don't even have that. "Interesting times" is one way to put it...

> react to your words and actions in a believable, fully immersive manner

“I’m sorry, but as an ethically trained AI I cannot engage in this sword fight. Violence is never the answer.”

Yeah. It’s gonna be very immersive :P

you can use an uncensored model. not everything will be connected to open ai.

I could see Microsoft making the first move next generation since they're knee deep in it.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com