What are your thoughts on this? Specifically, could AI be used in the arts? Or only in coding? Or both/neither?
LLMs are fun in mods.
I love dynamic NPC dialogue and actions in Rimworld/Skyrim. The Cyberpunk quest mod and the Starsector mod look interesting too, though I haven’t tried them yet.
And I can use whatever model I want, with whatever settings, including a self-hosted one. I’m not touching anything OpenAI/Anthropic/Google doing it.
Now, shipping it in games? That’s a whole other can of worms.
The general jankiness and hardware requirements make that very tricky. And I would never ship anything that touches APIs of Big Tech.
I feel like more advanced systems that could learn new tactics or say more context appropriate things would be cool, but that’s about as far as I would go for wanting it in the game. It’s not taking work from people or stealing assets.
Never in any capacity should AI even be in the same room as video game development
Haven’t played any games that really feature it. Not against it, but I have no experience with the results.
May everyone who uses it in any capacity go bankrupt.
I hate AI and anyone or anything that uses or promotes it.
Not a good sign of longevity of a game if AI is used in its development. AI code is known to be overly complex and what may be a simple bug fix turns into a patch that touches half the codebase causing more issues. Assuming the dev knows where the bug is occurring.
AI systems are built on theft.
If you’d prefer people pirate your game instead of buy it, then go ahead and use AI. 👍
Just like everything else AI touches I’ll avoid it like the plague. Even if it didn’t produce watered down garbage there’s so many ethical and environmental reasons to avoid AI. It’s just not worth it.
AI code is an unsustainable bloated mess that if you pile it on top of an unoptimized engine you’re just asking for a game as buggy as Cyberpunk 2077 at launch. The art is so generic and boring and not even worth the time to generate it to use as a prototype.
Just look at how much fans have loved the jank scribbles as prototype art in Slay the Spire II for a good example of what you’ll lose using AI.
Since everything about AI is awful and disgusting (stealing from artists, making rich fucks richer, energy-consumption, using poor people for data entry, used for fascist propaganda, AI datacenters wreaking havoc on local populations, computer parts crisis etc etc) it’s shite in games as well of course.
AI “art” is not your art, it’s an orange blob that will look like Ghibli and every other art on the planet merged together. I’m not buying this.
For Art:
Perfectly fine for placeholders for mock ups and helping convey what you want to an artist, acting as a form of interop between non-artist and artist. IE “Id like something like this”, but final art assets should be real ones made by real artists.
For UI, layout, UX:
Completely fine for mocking up, much the same as art. You can rapid prototype placeholder layouts to get passed blockers and start developing, and the actual artist can catch up after.
Coding:
I work as a software dev, AI given proper tooling and setup codes perfectly fine now, but still needs human review and guidance to keep it on the rails. You still end up with human developers steering the AI, they just do their job faster
It heavily benefits from “momentum”, the more good approved code in the system, the better the AI is at staying on the rails.
Theres a faction of devs that think even that can be automated away. I consider people who have gone that far to have drunken the kool-aid. I trust AI output as far as I can throw it.
Audio:
I have like zero experience on this, but every sample Ive seen comes across as very poor quality, its barely even good enough for placeholder mocks but maybe there are bespoke tools out there? I haven’t seen any though yet. IE SFX and etc.
Writing: Honestly perfectly fine like coding, given once again a human is still steering it heavily and you have proper tooling to control it. However since this is “user facing” Id consider it a liability.
Also afaik AI writing is very prone to issues and being very bland, so I would not use it heavily.
Editting: However for editting I can already confirm it’s splendid. Its good at sanity checking your work and catching stuff like plot holes, inconsistencies, etc that normal grammar tools don’t cover.
Its also good at helping catch stuff like using terms/words/phrases too much in ways normal tools wont.
You still want a real human editor, but the AI can help with initial sanity passes to cover a bunch of the “easy” stuff.
And its very good at applying the edits. Batch fixing mistakes, etc.
DevOps: Its splendid. It can pretty quickly do things like convert requirements into technical requirements, rapidly discover negative tests cases, call out edge cases, manage tickets…
Greatly helps with keeping that stuff organized in teams.
I disagree that AI “art” is good to use for mockup assets. For mockups and placeholders, you want something that is obviously not complete, so you can tell at a glance what needs to be replaced. Think about how many studios put out complete games with AI crap and then claim “oh that was a placeholder we forgot to change”.
Meanwhile, FFXIV’s placeholder assets look like this:
You literally don’t need AI, you can make something in MS Paint.
(I’m 100% sure Square Enix is using AI in other places, but this proves you don’t need it.)
So, I 100% agree.
The key here is there are many assets, like textures, etc, where you want to better convey intent from the design team to the art team.
And, if you aren’t trying to actually sneak in AI assets and “cheat”, you can actually very easy make the AI assets visually obvious.
Like just slap a bright purple watermark on them that says “PLACEHOLDER” or etc
Thats very normal.
The companies claiming “oh whoopsie that asset accidently made it in” are just blatantly lying.
If they really wanted to ensure the assets didnt make it into the final build, its very easy to tag files, name them a certain way, watermark them, have a build pipeline that checks, etc to make it super obvious if you accidently included them.
You should just assume companies pretending this wasn’t possible are just lying. They thought theyd get away with it and got caught and hoped ppl would buy their excuse.
Not a popular opinion, everyone wants the answer to be “never, it’s terrible and useless”, but I’m inclined to agree with you on almost every point. AI is a powerful tool with guidelines and testing to constrain it, and smart human review. My only real point of contention is writing.
I find writing is like coding, in that a good story needs structure, pacing, a lot of elements to work on a macro scale, although with virtually no ability to bake that into the “good approved code” that the AI can work off. Perceiving that structure and pacing requires more context than any AI can handle. Honestly I think writing is probably the #1 area AI should be kept out of. I’d be pretty concerned that AI output feels good enough, but really poisons any story you let it influence you on. And a bland story is a pretty cardinal sin for a good game. I also find AI writing and patterns are much more obvious than a lot of people think, I’ve certainly seen coworkers wield it with undue confidence enough times.
I agree for the most part, but keep in mind theres decent chunks of “writing” in video games that are mostly filler and probably no one would notice or can tell if the line is AI vs an intern who wrote it.
Like… npc one-liners and stuff like that, item descriptions, etc. Stuff where its probably not even gonna be looked at by 99.9% of ppl anyways and the bar for quality is very low.
Whats critical here us understanding that you dont replace your writers here.
You just took a boring/monotonous task off their plate so that they can focus time/energy on more important parts of the game
Fair enough, constrained to trite variations of basic dialogue, I could see it being a pretty reasonable use case in a big game with lots of NPCs, especially if you’ve got a good corpus of examples to give it a baseline.
Has some uses.
Coding is a given, I don’t think any dev is doing without AI by now.
I have some older games with the old textures AI-upscaled. Great use of AI to make the Games playable by modern audiences again.
I am also somewhat excited of one day being able to play RPGs with believable realtime-voice communication with NPCs.
Apart from that, I hate the idea of AI taking over the in-game art.
I fear this might lead to uninspired, all-the-same-looking games over time.Coding is a given, I don’t think any dev is doing without AI by now.
Plenty of devs are coding without AI. Get out of your echo chamber.
Get out of your echo chamber.
The only echo chamber I’m in is Lemmy, and playing the devil’s advocate for certain topics (e.g. AI) I feel is my personal obligation to widen it up a bit to better represent the real world, despite the floods of instant downvotes.
But that’s just part of the self-reinforcing process by which echo chambers manifest and stabilize themselves, so I don’t care.The people here are well aware that AI slop has flooded the wider world, you’re not informing anyone of that fact. You, however, seem oblivious to the fact that there are plenty of people rejecting it.
The people here are well aware that AI slop has flooded the wider world, you’re not informing anyone of that fact.
… but that’s exactly my point!
Stressing the negative aspects would be pointless in here, as these are basically the only ones present here anyway.
So I focus more on the other side of the picture, to bring some balance back to the discussion.You, however, seem oblivious to the fact that there are plenty of people rejecting it.
I think you have it backwards. When you look at recent studies, about 60% of people overall think the benefits of AI outweigh the drawbacks.
While here on Lemmy you could get the impression, that 99% of people completely and vehemently reject it.
That’s not a good representation of the “real” world outside, and not a valid base for meaningful discussions that could provide actual insight.
Coding is a given, I don’t think any dev is doing without AI by now.
Senior Software Engineer here. Neither I nor most of my friends use it. I’m full stack C#, Alpine.js, and CSS most days. Claiming no dev is going without AI shows a very limited exposure.
Claiming no dev is going without AI shows a very limited exposure.
On the contrary, I think it is the opposite.
I could well imagine still happily hacking away AI-less on my internal C-projects in my previous tiny 15-people company, with the only connection to the outside being mandatory functional specifications and clear interfaces.
But today, working at a 60k+ SW developer company serving hundreds of different kind of customers, from deep historic brownfield custom device to cutting edge virtualized manufacturing cloud solutions, the gain of using AI is so substantial, you would be totally left behind if you didn’t use it.
Integrating your stuff with dozens of existing and upcoming products, written using a plethora of different tools an languages (some even based on Windows ;-) ), especially for rapid prototyping, debugging and system integration testing, the gain is substantial.
And by now the recent tools are even already at a point, where they start to know the fringe stuff in my own Company’s extended portfolio better than I myself, despite working 10 years within the company.
Had that exact case just last week:
“Based on the outputs you supplied, it seems you are working on a Docker based realtime xxx image by company yyy. They use tool zzz on the lowest layer to set up containers. The zzz tool’s use of SSL can be configured by setting the environment variable GnarglfarzActive=true. You might try it.”
What should I say - not only was that correct, I now also knew who to connect to in the company for further support (the developers of mentioned zzz tool, which I had never heard of before).Insanely impressive in complex environments involving many different projects and people.
Oof, hit a sore spot with truth it seems.
Please name your company so I can avoid anything actually containing their code if you’re even remotely representative of the other devs.
Also, assuming I’m working on a small team or at a small company is just showing your biases and ignorance more.
It’s okay to put down the AI. It’s not too late.
Oof, hit a sore spot with truth it seems.
Funny, after reading your recent comment I felt the same.
assuming I’m working on a small team or at a small company
I totally did not do that.
Only thing I did was making the point that I am currently working with many different devs and customers to make clear that your own “limited exposure” remark from before was an unfounded assumption.It’s okay to put down the AI. It’s not too late.
Only way I see that being possible would be going into personnel or project management, but people-work just doesn’t match with my talents…
And even there AI is starting to creep in and expected to be used, e.g. I increasingly see the expectation to distribute AI generated summaries after Teams meetings…
I am also somewhat excited of one day being able to play RPGs with believable realtime-voice communication with NPCs. Apart from that, I hate the idea of AI taking over the in-game art. I fear this might lead to uninspired, all-the-same-looking games over time.
So you’re not keen on uninspired, all-the-same-looking 2D/3D art, but uninspired, all-the-same-sounding writing and VO is fine?
Not trying to do a ‘gotcha’, it just annoys me how so many people say they hate the idea of AI in game development, but then start carving out exceptions like ‘oh but it’s fine for coding, and texture artists aren’t needed any more, and obviously NPCs can be AI now…’
So you’re not keen on uninspired, all-the-same-looking 2D/3D art, but uninspired, all-the-same-sounding writing and VO is fine?
First, doesn’t have to be if done right.
VO issue can be solved by training with the speech of different professional speakers (controversial topic, I know…) And when feeding the base LLM generating the dialog with a suitable amount of hand-written, high-quality NPC-specific examples, the same sounding writing issue can also be tackled.
But secondly, and most importantly, the choice is not between fully interactive realtime conversation using Ai or the same but human generated,
but rather between fully interactive realtime conversation using AI or non of that at all.That’s the main difference between this specific use and, say, the graphics art example.
There the alternative to AI never is “no graphics at all”…That’s the reason why I would accept AI use for this specific purpose, as it delivers something completely new and unachievable by other means, and is not only used to substitute existing human labor.
Do you use genAI for writing your posts?
Do you use genAI for writing your posts?
Curious: Does it sound like I was?
Because I am not even a native English speaker.
But I have heard before that this often gives a strange impression, as we tend to use an overly formal Oxford-style (as that is the one we learned at school) and also because the more complicated, presumptuous-sounding words are often actually easier for us and thus preferred by us, as we already know the Latin or Germanic base words they are derived from…
I don’t think any dev is doing without AI by now
That’s pretty specific. I know a lot of companies working on niche C++ projects that would never use AI.
I know a lot of companies working on niche C++ projects that would never use AI.
Are the companies claiming that, or the devs?
Because I would have a hard time believing the second.
AI in SW-Dev is just too powerful and convenient a tool to resist. Honestly can’t think of any dev I know not using it to some degree.
And especially in obscure, long-running niche projects I imagine it an invaluable asset to be able to just throw a code snippet at the Chatbot and ask it what the heck is supposed to happen in the unstructured legacy mess (eye opening moment for me back in ChatGPT4 days).Are the companies claiming that, or the devs?
Both. If you’re working on modern C++ projects, most devs around me shun AI because it’s not up to date with the evolution of the language. Even more in niche stuff that is evolving every month (like C++ or other languages hard to learn).
AI because it’s not up to date with the evolution of the language.
😯
May I ask, what kind of niches that are?Admittedly, I work in industrial automation, where tool changes happen rather on a scale of multiple years rather than months, but I find it hard to imagine projects in which the whole C++ development base changes in less than half year intervals (as that is a typical knowledge-cut-off period for frontline models).
But even than the models will know the working state of the C++ standard proposals, which typically don’t change that much any more during the last few months before official release.Have they considered supplying updated specs and guidelines via RAG? Or just preloading it into the context?
If you work for startups that deals with any kind of robot, you have at most 10 developers and you cannot waste your time dealing with MCPs, agents, RAGs, or the brand new stuff that changes every week in the AI world. Also they are very reluctant to send their source code to american companies.
