randomuser.833: I recently heard a good take away from somebody who was digging a bit deeper, speaking with Devs.
Basically, with using AI they can now include things they would not have included at all or in much less detail. Even more when it comes to the Art department.
I mean, they got Artists who do rework what the AI does spit out. I don't think those artists would have been able to do the same amount of work without AI support, neither do I think the dev team could pay more artists.
So yeah, welcome to the world where we might have full lip sync audio translation for each and every game into next to every language available on this planet, while only for big markets this would not be AI generated.
dnovraD: Oooooor, perhaps cynically of me, this could be used as the very means to make the artists "redundant" once enough of their data has been harvested.
Plus I can't imagine they're saving much money with the involvement of
two goddamn services over just hiring another artist or giving them better tools.
There are incredible means to be cheap as free, including switching to free/open source programs, or better yet, scope reduction. Do they really
need to include a portrait for every single little event card the game has to offer?
Perhaps they could even use a programmatic system to pragmatically generate an unlimited depth of NPCs like the Mii based NPCs of Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom, where a simplified template is used to generate a more complicated structure in a stylized system.
https://old.reddit.com/r/botw/comments/kq0p6f/hi_mii_expert_here_turns_out_the_npcs_in_tlozbotw/
Of course, Nintendo had the avatar maker system in mind since at least the Famicom, so they only had somewhere along 20 years to figure it out.
LLM based "AI" will never be free of fails.
They will always need people to rework it.
They will always need people to create the idea in the first place.
LLM based "AI" is not creative on its own. You will be able to shovelcreate shovelware mobile crap games with it. But thats about it.
LLM based "AI" can only remix or retell its own training data. And all games that stay out, tried something on their own.
Random NPCs can be created "randomly" already without AI. This has been done for decades now. Mix them together like some Lego figure from different parts.
While at the same time, nobody with a sane mind will leave their NPCs to an LLM "AI", because the first thing people will try is to break it.
And they will be successful. For sure.
And now imagine your LLM "AI" barkeeper, that was planed to be understanding and sympathic, turns out to be an rasistic, misogynistic asshole, that will explain how to kill yourself and tell you to do it now.
Have fun with that.
And everybody who understands the slightest about our LLM "AI"s knows, this is not something you can avoid. This is not something you can get out of them with enough training data or guard rails.
This is something baked into those LLMs by their baseline design.
And it is one reason MS is now writing into the terms of their Copilot, that it is basically only for entertainment.
Will less people be needed for games.
Possible.
But to be honest, we got games with thousands of people working on them, that do cost several hundreds of millions to produce.
And because creating games is so expensive, we got very few AAA titles (compare the amount of high grade games in the past and now), an AA production in a very rough state, basically fighting for survival, and Indies.
The current state of affairs on the upper part of the gaming industry does need something to break up structures, that won't be able to survive for much longer.