AI-generated content. When?

[WowIsDead64]

You know. I constantly think about it now. Blizzards' excuse to justify such manipulative mechanics, as grind, RNG and time-gating, has always been "We just can't produce content quicker, than you consume it, so it's better to have bad content, than nothing to do at all". But since we live in 21th century and we have AI now, can this excuse be still justified and how long will it take to invalidate it? What would make old outdated manipulative mechanics unacceptable for you? May be first AI-generated game should be released to show you full power of this tech? I just don't see any mentions, that devs use AI directly. For now they use AI to cut development costs via replacing artists with AI, not to develop better games. I.e. may be they use AI, but they make games with the same quality, i.e. for players everything stays the same. What do you think?

[Makorus]

Hopefully never

[SilverLion]

You know. I constantly think about it now. Blizzards' excuse to justify such manipulative mechanics, as grind, RNG and time-gating, has always been "We just can't produce content quicker, than you consume it, so it's better to have bad content, than nothing to do at all". But since we live in 21th century and we have AI now, can this excuse be still justified and how long will it take to invalidate it? What would make old outdated manipulative mechanics unacceptable for you? May be first AI-generated game should be released to show you full power of this tech? I just don't see any mentions, that devs use AI directly. For now they use AI to cut development costs via replacing artists with AI, not to develop better games. I.e. may be they use AI, but they make games with the same quality, i.e. for players everything stays the same. What do you think?

A studio literally tried this already and it failed miserably. We don't have true AI. We have a glorified copy machine. That's it. There's nothing intelligent about this tech. And if it ever becomes truly intelligent you're going to have way more to worry about than video games.

The best we'll be able to do is use current generative models to help humans make things faster. It will solve none of the problems you're referring to. Also it's a poisoned well of an argument because the assumption is Blizzard released bad content. They haven't. If you think WoW has had bad content this year, I challenge you to play literally any other MMO. ESO had a literally unplayable expansion, SWTOR drip feeds its updates. FF14 has probably the most consistent patch cycle and even that got slammed recently. WoW's content hasn't been bad for a while now. You might not like the content but saying it's bad doesn't mean anything.

[kranur]

AI generated content will not be any better than the repeated stuff. AI is not capable of imagination ... It will just re-use parts.

[thurizas]

AI, particularly GPT's don't work this way. They do not innovate but rather are more like search engines on steroids. They consume a large amount of data, typically from the web and build a model of what they ingest. As the model builds it's answer it is constantly calculating the next most probable word, however to avoid repetition of answers in reality the determine say the next most ten probable words and then pick one of these. Thus all the GPT's are doing are rearranging and repeating answers already in their training set.

But wait, certainly you have heard about the lawyers that filed briefs that had references to non-existent cases? This is in part due to how the input stream is tokenized, for example 'running' might be tokenized to 'run' an 'ing' (a root word and a suffix). So, if an answer requires an present tense action - like running - it may take and root work and apply the appropriate suffix to it. And in this case it might created a new word. For example if there was case law from "Texas versus Stone", the GPT might generate something like "Florida versus Pebble" as a new case. (see the pattern...'State' versus 'Rock name').

Generating content, especially stuff that has never been seen before, is currently beyond the scope of AI.

[Soeroah]

Hopefully never.

If they wanna use it to fix hair and helmets without wasting dev time, that's one thing. Creating zones and mechanics? Lol, no.

[WowIsDead64]

A studio literally tried this already and it failed miserably. We don't have true AI. We have a glorified copy machine. That's it. There's nothing intelligent about this tech. And if it ever becomes truly intelligent you're going to have way more to worry about than video games.

The best we'll be able to do is use current generative models to help humans make things faster. It will solve none of the problems you're referring to. Also it's a poisoned well of an argument because the assumption is Blizzard released bad content. They haven't. If you think WoW has had bad content this year, I challenge you to play literally any other MMO. ESO had a literally unplayable expansion, SWTOR drip feeds its updates. FF14 has probably the most consistent patch cycle and even that got slammed recently. WoW's content hasn't been bad for a while now. You might not like the content but saying it's bad doesn't mean anything.

I just think, that the biggest problem with content development - is artwork. And that's exactly, what can be automated via AI. Do you really think, that AI wouldn't be able to make locations with generic green grass and generic green trees?

[Lazy Gecko]

I just think, that the biggest problem with content development - is artwork. And that's exactly, what can be automated via AI. Do you really think, that AI wouldn't be able to make locations with generic green grass and generic green trees?

I think the crux here is that people generally expect something with more substance than "generic green grass and generic green trees". And these models can't really conjure worlds and stories from the ground up that are anywhere near as entertaining and fulfilling as the average professional creative can. The best you can hope for is that some degree of machine learning is integrated into the larger workflows of various disciplines like level design, which I believe is something they're already experimenting with.

[Biomega]

It'll be a while.

It's coming for sure, but fully AI-generated content will take time to catch on with Blizzard.

They're notoriously slow with everything. Right now their pace is such that they're being lapped by particularly tardy glaciers.

Fortnite and PUBG came out in 2017. WoW released a Battle Royale mode today.

I'm sure they'll use AI assistance on a lot of their designs more quickly, if they aren't already. Mostly because individual artists would be idiots not to, since that kind of tools saves tons of work on sketching, concepts, etc. as you can effectively see how an idea could look within seconds rather than spending minutes or hours putting it down yourself. But actual AI generation of assets? That'll take a while to catch on with all the corpo structures, red tape, and so on. Let alone on-the-fly AI content which I'm sure will show up in games eventually but will take years to make it to mainstream and likely will not be in WoW at all for technical reasons.

You'd have to be incredibly naive to think it'll never happen. It will, for sure. No squeezing that toothpaste back into the tube. But Blizzard will drag their feet with it forever, as they always do with everything.

[Myradin]

I don't think wow's playerbase actually wants endless content. They just want a well paced released schedule.

People already complain when there is too much to do. Even if every expac launched with 100 zones and 10000000 quests people would complain there is too much to be done to be relevant and that getting anywhere takes too long.

As for other games procedural generation isn't new, its just not heavily used in RPG's due to it often kind of leading to lifeless stuff. Just look at Starfield. But other games, usually crafting based ones like Minecraft, make it work fairy well.

[SilverLion]

I just think, that the biggest problem with content development - is artwork. And that's exactly, what can be automated via AI. Do you really think, that AI wouldn't be able to make locations with generic green grass and generic green trees?

That's not what I said. I said that making it look good isn't within the scope of AI as it stands. You go ahead and try a copypasted asset from Unity as a baseline for your game and tell me how well that goes. If you think game dev is just grabbing random assets and slapping them together, you might be misinformed. Good games have good art, from grass to trees to character models. AI as it stands can only copypaste existing art fed to it together. It cannot create it's own art style, it cannot create it's own assets. What it can do, is make the process of coding the grass into the game itself easier. Besides which, art is by no means the biggest problem with content development. I recommend go watching Pirate Software's videos on game dev. He'll make it very obvious how very wrong 99% of people are about the process.

[schmonz]

AI generated content will not be any better than the repeated stuff. AI is not capable of imagination ... It will just re-use parts.

This is wrong. Hallucinations in AI lead to creativity.

[Twdft]

What do you think?

You'd be the first to complain about it, so why bother implementing it...

[SilverLion]

This is wrong. Hallucinations in AI lead to creativity.

Only if you boil down creativity to "spits out something weird and random". It's not doing it with intent, or purpose. It's "creative" only if you want to be dishonest about what creativity is, from a human, metaphysical perspective, which when people are referring to creativity, they are.

[Berndorf]

Only if you boil down creativity to "spits out something weird and random". It's not doing it with intent, or purpose. It's "creative" only if you want to be dishonest about what creativity is, from a human, metaphysical perspective, which when people are referring to creativity, they are.

I agree overall but I also think you're sort of fooling your self with what 90% of video games are or have become in the last 10-20 years. The level of creativity is mostly not there at all and could just as easily be done by an ai much cheaper and fast faster without most people being able to tell the difference.

[SilverLion]

I agree overall but I also think you're sort of fooling your self with what 90% of video games are or have become in the last 10-20 years. The level of creativity is mostly not there at all and could just as easily be done by an ai much cheaper and fast faster without most people being able to tell the difference.

I'm not "fooling myself" I just have an art background and don't have a nostalgia boner. I was there 20 years ago. Games weren't more creative, that's factually untrue. We were just younger and easier to impress. I guarantee you, people could tell. If games like The Day Before bomb because it's basically an asset flip, a crappy same-face, intellectually bankrupt AI generated mess would crater.

For example, Resident Evil 4 was a complete accident. That's why it basically uses the same art assets and sound design as Devil May Cry 3. Because it was supposed to be. It's not entirely the same obviously, it turned into it's own thing, but if you look close, those two games share the same DNA in a way games today don't.

[schmonz]

Only if you boil down creativity to "spits out something weird and random". It's not doing it with intent, or purpose. It's "creative" only if you want to be dishonest about what creativity is, from a human, metaphysical perspective, which when people are referring to creativity, they are.

No, it is not, it simply confabulates results, as humans do. Some of them are bad, as like the results humans bring. Some of them are good, as like the results humans bring. Creativity is nothing that is exclusively human. It simply results from combination and confabulation. Combining your knowledge with confabulating what you do not know.

[Mendzia]

Sooner than most of the people on this forum think.

[Berndorf]

I'm not "fooling myself" I just have an art background and don't have a nostalgia boner. I was there 20 years ago. Games weren't more creative, that's factually untrue. We were just younger and easier to impress. I guarantee you, people could tell. If games like The Day Before bomb because it's basically an asset flip, a crappy same-face, intellectually bankrupt AI generated mess would crater.

For example, Resident Evil 4 was a complete accident. That's why it basically uses the same art assets and sound design as Devil May Cry 3. Because it was supposed to be. It's not entirely the same obviously, it turned into it's own thing, but if you look close, those two games share the same DNA in a way games today don't.

Well I've seen most of the games/trends of the last 30-40 years. So we can disagree to whatever degree about the level of creativity that's been shown over the last 40 years but regardless of that my larger point has to do with the level of creativity in games more recently and ai's ability to meet those standards which I think it probably could.

[XDurionX]

It's just procedural content on steroids. Which is bad enough as it is.