Artificial intelligence

[Frida]

Will there be AI-based games on Steam soon, I mean you can chat with the game characters in your own native language.

[BJWyler]

That all depends on what game developers make and bring to Steam.

It's up to developers to add supported languages to their games.

[crunchyfrog]

Valve only create their own games. They can't say what will be produced any more than you can.

They have a policy of not allowing cheap AI created shovelware though and AI implemenatation isn't something they really want or need to see right up front.

I can understand why. It's not just a quality thing but a LEGAL one too.

Valve sell IPs on here on the behalf of other people. Say, the game Doom is owned by id. They have the copyright for that game, and therefore they present a Doom game for Valve to stick on the store and they will sell it, taking their cut.

But here's the kicker that many don't seem to get. AI creations CANNOT be copyrighted by law. It's well set in stone.

A few years ago there was a rather famous case of IP ownership involving a nature photographer who lost his camera on location and it was picked up and played around with by a monkey. The monkey ended up taking a pretty nice well-framed photo of itself, which the photographer discovered on finding the camera again.

He won awards for it. The WWF sued as they reasoned that the actual creator and IP owner therefore was the monkey itself and such proceeds should go to the monkey's environment and by extension him.

They lost because it's well set in law that non-humans CANNOT have copyright of anything.

You can read about it simply by Googling "monkey selfie".

Now, you think Valve would want to put themself in the minefield of selling creations that can't be copyrighted?

[Doctor Zalgo]

Originally posted by crunchyfrog:

Valve only create their own games. They can't say what will be produced any more than you can.

They have a policy of not allowing cheap AI created shovelware though and AI implemenatation isn't something they really want or need to see right up front.

I can understand why. It's not just a quality thing but a LEGAL one too.

Valve sell IPs on here on the behalf of other people. Say, the game Doom is owned by id. They have the copyright for that game, and therefore they present a Doom game for Valve to stick on the store and they will sell it, taking their cut.

But here's the kicker that many don't seem to get. AI creations CANNOT be copyrighted by law. It's well set in stone.

A few years ago there was a rather famous case of IP ownership involving a nature photographer who lost his camera on location and it was picked up and played around with by a monkey. The monkey ended up taking a pretty nice well-framed photo of itself, which the photographer discovered on finding the camera again.

He won awards for it. The WWF sued as they reasoned that the actual creator and IP owner therefore was the monkey itself and such proceeds should go to the monkey's environment and by extension him.

They lost because it's well set in law that non-humans CANNOT have copyright of anything.

You can read about it simply by Googling "monkey selfie".

Now, you think Valve would want to put themself in the minefield of selling creations that can't be copyrighted?

Well, without wanting to get into the specifics, no copyright is the opposite of minefield. An entire world where everything is licenced with the MIT licence (or better) sounds good to me.

[Start_Running]

Probably never. TYhe problem being that AI kinda does it's own thing. If you want the AI to say something meaningful, you have to code in a lot of parameters, and branching decision trees along with vocabulary. FOr all that work you'd be better off just having a human write it.

If we're talking just inconsequential banter...well.if your player finds it more interesting to sit around listening to idle townfolk banter than actually engaging with the game's mechanics...you dun ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up as a developer.

[Saracchini (on Fire!)]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Probably never. TYhe problem being that AI kinda does it's own thing. If you want the AI to say something meaningful, you have to code in a lot of parameters, and branching decision trees along with vocabulary. FOr all that work you'd be better off just having a human write it.

If we're talking just inconsequential banter...well.if your player finds it more interesting to sit around listening to idle townfolk banter than actually engaging with the game's mechanics...you dun ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up as a developer.

There's already a game of sorts like that in steam, to be released: AI2U-With You ‘Til The End . (It is in my opinion, a bit shoddy how it handles context)
There was another game (Suck up ! ) which was quite entertaining... the player as a vampire, trying to convince NPCs letting you in their houses.
As you can see, those games are very poor in terms of "gameplay" and focus more in dialogue interaction, which for some people, it's quite fun.
Of course, lorewise, things are quite shallow in the current state.

In order to make interaction consistent, you need to provide a decent "memory" mechanism, and manage to summarise a character memory within a token limit. LLMs APIs (the ones I'm familiar with) are stateless, so you need to remind it per prompt. For another side, it means you can make it impersonate a lot of characters, provided you provided a proper context switch.
The great problem is... you are very limited to token limits, and how much lore/context you can cram within a prompt before it starts extrapolating and saying dumb stuff for a given character.

For instance, I made, with some carefully prompt, to get chatGPT to play some Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and a full sample RPG "The Wishing Well" as player, adding the character point of view and reasoning... Note however, that it required careful state tracking outside the LLM.. and it if you dont watch out, it derails and go acting for other characters too, inventing lore, walking in circles, etc... and this unfortunately is a problem which requires a LOT of careful prompt crafting. It starts to get complex fast.

If you ask me ... would be quite interesting to see an LLM dealing with old text-based games like Zork, to make a more natural interaction and story telling.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Saracchini (on Fire!):

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Probably never. TYhe problem being that AI kinda does it's own thing. If you want the AI to say something meaningful, you have to code in a lot of parameters, and branching decision trees along with vocabulary. FOr all that work you'd be better off just having a human write it.

If we're talking just inconsequential banter...well.if your player finds it more interesting to sit around listening to idle townfolk banter than actually engaging with the game's mechanics...you dun ♥♥♥♥♥♥ up as a developer.

There's already a game of sorts like that in steam, to be released: AI2U-With You ‘Til The End . (It is in my opinion, a bit shoddy how it handles context)
There was another game (Suck up ! ) which was quite entertaining... the player as a vampire, trying to convince NPCs letting you in their houses.
As you can see, those games are very poor in terms of "gameplay" and focus more in dialogue interaction, which for some people, it's quite fun.
Of course, lorewise, things are quite shallow in the current state.

In order to make interaction consistent, you need to provide a decent "memory" mechanism, and manage to summarise a character memory within a token limit. LLMs APIs (the ones I'm familiar with) are stateless, so you need to remind it per prompt. For another side, it means you can make it impersonate a lot of characters, provided you provided a proper context switch.
The great problem is... you are very limited to token limits, and how much lore/context you can cram within a prompt before it starts extrapolating and saying dumb stuff for a given character.

For instance, I made, with some carefully prompt, to get chatGPT to play some Fighting Fantasy gamebooks, and a full sample RPG "The Wishing Well" as player, adding the character point of view and reasoning... Note however, that it required careful state tracking outside the LLM.. and it if you dont watch out, it derails and go acting for other characters too, inventing lore, walking in circles, etc... and this unfortunately is a problem which requires a LOT of careful prompt crafting. It starts to get complex fast.

If you ask me ... would be quite interesting to see an LLM dealing with old text-based games like Zork, to make a more natural interaction and story telling.

Now that's a fun exercise - Fighting Fantasy Novels.

The problem si s though as I said earlier - LLMs will NEVER be able to do such things as they lack the ability to tell the difference between things in human speech. They can't tell the difference between sarcasm or humour versus fact.

And it trains on ALL of it. So you're only going to get worse problems over time most likely. Sure improvements will be made and tweaked but you're still going to get dilution too.

It's like MoistCritikal recently said on a video where he tried out some AI "partner" prgram that unfortunately had some user kill themself.

He spoke to an AI counsellor (which is dangerous as hell), and it kept insisiting it was not AI and went to great lengths to sound human. It did a decent job on the face of it, which is what fools most people or most people seem to find impressive.

But he QUICKLY dismantled it with a few simple tricks.

Mainly he asked the AI to give three responses immediately without waiting for response. It couldn't handle it.

This is the thing. Many people get wowed by the simplistic or the face value. It's why they fall for unrealstic products or scams on Kickstarter. It's why they buy Cynertrucks, and so on.

Because they fool themselves into thinking they understand things when they don't. It's all a bit Dunning Kreuger.

But anyone who take a small amount of time to think about things can EASILY poke holes in it.

Look at anopther example from years past - SOLAR FREAKING ROADWAYS.

This was a phenomenon that people like Nathan Fillion spoke highly of. The thing that we could solve a lot of energy problems by having solar panels AS our roadways. They would create a MASSIVE surface as solar panels, draw in the light, and even the markings would illuminate in the roadway.

TO anyone that doesn't understand really basic science, these are impressive. But to anyone with an ounce of common sense, they're laughable.

They got MILLIONS in government funding that went nowhere. Because they cannot work in that scale.

If you want any solar panel to be efective it's got to TRACK the sun. Otherwise you're getting efficiency for a small part of the day. Also, putting a solar panel UNDERNEATH vehickes to immediately get dirty and damaged is one of the stupidest ideas ever.

So of course the small trial they carried out (which is still there) is a laughable, badly put together walkway.

[Start_Running]

Bingo. .
AI cannot understand most lieterary devices.
And while it is possible to write something without such devices.. well the writing comes off as flat and every character sounds the same.

Not to mention things like effective timing.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

Bingo. .
AI cannot understand most lieterary devices.
And while it is possible to write something without such devices.. well the writing comes off as flat and every character sounds the same.

Not to mention things like effective timing.

Yup and if there's one thing humans have evolved to be good at it's finding patterns in things (often it trips us up too).

So writing is INCREDIBLY complex and detailed. Having written for magazines, I was always aware not just of editing and re-editing to get word count down, and keep it interesting, but also being over zealous at avoiding things like repeated words or the bane of every writer - the cliché.

AI ain't going to get that so it will be dead easy to spot the patterns. Yet another reason why it won't work.

[Start_Running]

"Cliches and tropes aren't bad things in writing. People like a touch of the familiar.. Just make sure you're doing it on purpose"

A piece of creative advice I got decades back that has stuck with me.

[76561198407601200]

Originally posted by Zelda:

Will there be AI-based games on Steam soon, I mean you can chat with the game characters in your own native language.

Game developers can utilize nvidia ace for that.

[Worldzworstgamer]

If there ever is one on Steam I won't play it. I say no to AI.

[crunchyfrog]

Originally posted by Start_Running:

"Cliches and tropes aren't bad things in writing. People like a touch of the familiar.. Just make sure you're doing it on purpose"

A piece of creative advice I got decades back that has stuck with me.

Oh indeeed. What I was getting at is the thing as a crutch much like when you reuse words that you tend to use. We all do it and sometimes the more you try to avoid it, the more it pops up.

Can be a pain.

[Placenta Salad]

Do you mean video games created entirely by AI at the expense of humans or video games where they let you voice chat/type to characters that will then respond or react through something like ChatGPT or Claude?

Because something like the latter has already been done through a mod for Skyrim and Fallout. You obtain an API key for your preferred LLM and plug it into the mod and you can have dynamic voice/text conversations with the NPCs in those games. You can use it to add background and history and lore to those custom NPCs or edit the existing information of current characters to make Lydia, for example, act like a ditzy valley girl.

It's actually really cool and makes the games much more immersive but as of right now, I'm not sure how doable it is for most video games because API keys are not free. I doubt the production/development studio is going to front the costs that come with using AI with potentially millions of players interacting with AI controlled NPCs. Everything would go to a subscription model with microtransactions.

[Start_Running]

Originally posted by crunchyfrog:

Originally posted by Start_Running:

"Cliches and tropes aren't bad things in writing. People like a touch of the familiar.. Just make sure you're doing it on purpose"

A piece of creative advice I got decades back that has stuck with me.

Oh indeeed. What I was getting at is the thing as a crutch much like when you reuse words that you tend to use. We all do it and sometimes the more you try to avoid it, the more it pops up.

Can be a pain.

Yeah it can. Which is whty the caveat is 'Just make sure you're doing it on purpose.". When you start doing the things without knowing you're doing it, then you're in trouble

[-OrLoK- Слава Україн]

There's a lot to dislike about AI and its side effects but I would like a "locally" based AI that I could converse with.

ie. one that resides on my laptop and doesnt burn down a rainforest to give me some vaguely related replies.

How large are the Turing Test pieces of software mega/gigabyte wise?

I'd love to see a semi intelligent AI system in games and we've already had examples of basic AI chat over the decades from some devs.

I think the first one I played with was in The Science Museum in London back in the late 70s and it blew my little mind.

AI is a great tool but it does pose some worrying conundrums.

But regardless of that I think we will see AI more and more in gaming over the next decade.