Generative AI (GenAI) In Games

[Breadbassket]

What do you think of it? Is it a good idea or bad idea? Will people continue to reject it or come around to liking it?

It definitely seems like the next big thing publishers and developers will throw money at though, considering this statement from the CEO of EA who describes it as a "billion dollar opportunity":

EA CEO Andrew Wilson believes generative AI could offer ‘deeper, more immersive experiences’ within the company and the wider industry in the next five years.

In a speech at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference on Wednesday, March 6, Mr Wilson touched on the potential impact of generative AI in game
development. The EA boss highlighted that advancements in such technology are allowing his company to create personalized content faster and more efficiently.

As a result, this rapid development paired with “deeper, more immersive experiences” will, according to the CEO, lead to significant audience expansion in the next five years, reports Techraptor.

Generative AI in gaming​

At EA, Mr Wilson said that the teams are embracing the growth of generative AI, in an industry where many fear their jobs will be replaced with AI.

“Part of the process is how do we get our people to embrace [generative AI] and for creators of games, this is incredibly exciting,” he continued. “The ability to get to the fun faster and get to market faster is the Holy Grail for them.”

The gaming CEO used the example of building an in-game sports stadium to illustrate the point. Something that used to take six months now can be achieved in just six weeks. Down the line, this could even be reduced to six days.

Looking at specific games, FIFA23 has 12 run cycles for how players can move. Already, EA Sports FC 24 has 1,200 options, created by generative AI.

“What we’ve seen every time there’s been a meaningful technological advancement in media and in technology, where you can democratize an industry and hand it over to the population at large, incredible things happen,” Mr Wilson said.

“Once you give that to the world where you have three billion players around the world creating personal content and expanding and enhancing the universes that we create, and building and creating their own universe on our technology platform, all of a sudden we are the beneficiaries of platform economics.

“For me, that’s a multi-billion dollar opportunity for us in addition to what we would otherwise get from our regular growth.”

On the other hand, Palworld which released earlier in 2024 was controversially accused of using GenAI despite there being no hard evidence for that claim. This shows at this time not everyone has such a positive view of GenAI like the current CEO of EA does.

 

[Justtocheck]

It will be the norm. Behind closed doors, many talks have happened of within a 5-8 year timespan, how much human capital will generative AI be replacing. I know company planning timelines and pipelines. I'm %99 sure it's all already planned, plus potential legal costs and liabilities calculated into the overall bottom line. Especially in media that is labor and skill intensive like vidya.

 

[Anon88]

I think it's a good thing for people like us. It's going to make games come out quicker so we'll probably get more releases once they fully start using it. Sure a bunch of people might lose their jobs in the process but I could really care less about that to be honest.
When it comes to people rejecting or excepting it I don't think it really matters. People hated the Oblivion horse armor at one point and now stuff like it is common place in games. Same with microtransactions. So regardless of what people say about AI it's here to stay.

 

[9gfuwegw9j9]

Do you mean ASSETS being made with it or the game including a generative AI of sorts? The former is already happening, but I don't see the latter happening for a while (in a non-gimmick fashion)

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

It's going to be an inevitable change, barring some kind of sweeping legislation preventing the use of AI assets due to copyright kerfuffles.
It can be good or bad. Bad would be things like Stray Souls, which used AI to generate artwork (complete with fucked up hands) and even lore documents (presumably. You find a random document in a police station that reads like a ChatGPT output describing the entire plot from an omniscient third person perspective.) So it can absolutely make the garbage level of games, churned out as asset flips, even worse. But it could also be used for good, letting people without the resources to make music or portraits or voice acting actually include those things and improve the quality of their game.

 

[30+GameOvers]

You know, there was this whole Elsagate like controversy of supposedly AI made flash games aimed at children. They were all using some sort of popular kids shows and cartoon characters, but without understanding of the characters and situations they were in, almost like they were plopped out by a machine. There was a theme of them being very gross, with rotting teeth needing removing and zits/cuts on the bodies, things like that. There were dozens, if not over a hundred of these games, and the running theory is that they were made by some military AI that was sold to the civilian market to make some easy money.

Now, this was years ago, before the AI revolution we have now. Back then I found these claims ridiculous and just thought of it as some pajeets or chinks making shitty, creepy games for kicks or easy money. Now? Well, we know it could have definitely been possible, AI is doing much more impressive things today and that's just what we civilians have access to. Military and feds likely have shit that would blow out minds.
Anybody here know what I am talking about?

Edit: Found it, the site involved was called girlgames and strangely enough, they had plenty of proxy sites for this shit

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/AI%20games%20dora/

https://arch.b4k.co/v/search/text/girlgames/page/1/

Here is an example of some of their games. Keep in mind, this was aimed at children, and there were way too many games there to be feasibly made by just people. Especially with this kind of, well, content.

 

[The Cheese Aisle]

strangely enough, they had plenty of proxy sites for this shit

This is the type of weird repetitive content that I see that makes me think it’s 100% a niche fetish

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

Do you mean ASSETS being made with it or the game including a generative AI of sorts? The former is already happening, but I don't see the latter happening for a while (in a non-gimmick fashion)

https://www.playsuckup.com/

Do you think this is a "gimmick" insofar as indie standards for very small team projects? I, for one, am looking forward to RPGs with more reactive dialogue to at least simple things like what you're wearing, whether or not you're pointing weapons at characters, etc.

 

[N Space]

I guess it kind of depends, I don't see any problem with using gen AI to generate foliage or terrain topography as was done in a demo for UE 5.2:

 

[Foxxo]

My source is YouTube, but studies found that generative AI only provides the average of all results on the Internet, and is thus wrong or dogshit at least 60% of the time.

Since it's already over fifty, that percent is liable to get worse and worse, as more dumb effers use generative AI without curation and upload their results to the Internet.

 

[9gfuwegw9j9]

https://www.playsuckup.com/

Do you think this is a "gimmick" insofar as indie standards for very small team projects? I, for one, am looking forward to RPGs with more reactive dialogue to at least simple things like what you're wearing, whether or not you're pointing weapons at characters, etc.

yes it's a gimmick (bad game) AND it's not local ai. you have to pay to play a singleplayer game which is the biggest blocker. either you have insane GPU requirements and a low graphics intensity game or you need a subscription/tokens.

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

yes it's a gimmick (bad game) AND it's not local ai. you have to pay to play a singleplayer game which is the biggest blocker. either you have insane GPU requirements and a low graphics intensity game or you need a subscription/tokens.

it's a remote service, for now... AI you can run locally on conventional 8GB gaming gpus is getting better day by day. If you think generative text will never be a part of local single player video games you're delusional.

 

[9gfuwegw9j9]

it's a remote service, for now... AI you can run locally on conventional 8GB gaming gpus is getting better day by day. If you think generative text will never be a part of local single player video games you're delusional.

imagine having to put 12 gb of vram in your shitty 2d visual novel game as a requirement. if you were smart you would have mentioned CPU inference but you're not

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

imagine having to put 12 gb of vram in your shitty 2d visual novel game as a requirement. if you were smart you would have mentioned CPU inference but you're not

You can literally run coherent AI on 8GB GPUs for your shitty 2d visual novel *right now*. I'm not talking about the future, chuddy bud.

 

[9gfuwegw9j9]

You can literally run coherent AI on 8GB GPUs for your shitty 2d visual novel *right now*. I'm not talking about the future, chuddy bud.

not everyone has an 8GB gpu. not everyone has an nvidia gpu. not everyone has a gpu. people playing visual novels are among the demographic who are likely to NOT have a gpu. nobody buys an rtx 3090 to play visual novels. you cannot make a characters text have impact on gameplay in a dynamic manner.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Nobody really cares about AI used in games. It's like how no one notices or cares about stock assets unless it's an asset flip.

However, AI will be the call of the cancel pigs who want to tear down a game they don't like. They tried it with Palworld, and they tried it with that horror game the Silent Hill guy made music for.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

AI is just a tool, so if it's used right it'll be fine. I doubt it'll ever be good enough to replace top talent, but it'll open up development to people who otherwise wouldn't get their ideas out of the concept phase.

Edit: Found it, the site involved was called girlgames and strangely enough, they had plenty of proxy sites for this shit

https://archive.4plebs.org/pol/search/text/AI%20games%20dora/

https://arch.b4k.co/v/search/text/girlgames/page/1/

Here is an example of some of their games. Keep in mind, this was aimed at children, and there were way too many games there to be feasibly made by just people. Especially with this kind of, well, content.
View attachment 5794905View attachment 5794922View attachment 5794934

That shit looks creepy.

 

[Jeff Q. Anime]

not everyone has an 8GB gpu. not everyone has an nvidia gpu. not everyone has a gpu. people playing visual novels are among the demographic who are likely to NOT have a gpu. nobody buys an rtx 3090 to play visual novels. you cannot make a characters text have impact on gameplay in a dynamic manner.

I didn't even mention visual novels in the first place! I specifically mentioned ADDITIONAL REACTIVITY FOR ROLE PLAYING GAMES! VNS AIN'T IT CHIEF!

 

[Mr.Miyagi]

ADDITIONAL REACTIVITY FOR ROLE PLAYING GAMES!

Speaking of, I haven't been keeping my ear to the ground too closely on the scene, but for those interested in what sort of things are currently possible with AI systems like LLMs, image recognition, and TTS, you may want to check out the Skyrim mods Herika and Mantella. I haven't had a chance to mess around with them myself (lest I spend another week trying to assemble a mod list before even touching the game for real), but the things I've seen and heard have been interesting. I don't doubt that evolutions of these kinds of systems will be developed for future games, ES or no, and that it's entirely possible we'll have integration of these kinds of systems into games fully... once a lot of the current issues are ironed out (which may take quite a few years.)

 

[p1138]

AI is just a tool, so if it's used right it'll be fine. I doubt it'll ever be good enough to replace top talent, but it'll open up development to people who otherwise wouldn't get their ideas out of the concept phase.

Also, the larger publishers and dev studios will have enough of their own assets from over the years to use to train their AI models as well, avoiding problems of public AI models pulling random shit from other people's content. And of course as someone else mentioned, terrain assets.

imagine having to put 12 gb of vram in your shitty 2d visual novel game as a requirement. if you were smart you would have mentioned CPU inference but you're not

Why the hell are you talking about visual novels? The usage would be something like the "radiant AI, offering infinite quests" tried(and failed) to do in Skyrim, or more dynamic dialogue options in something like baldur's gate or rogue trader.