By now, genAI is synonymous with making cheap crap and selling it at full price.
Because that’s exactly what it’s used for. The kinds of AI uses where it’s actually useful “as a tool” either literally don’t exist or are nearly impossible to find.
AI uses where it’s actually useful “as a tool”
It’s used extensively for generating spam and scam material. That’s even worse than cheap crap for the average person.
Apex Engine will offer optional AI tools for developers, including game developers. It’s under very heavy development so won’t really be available for a few years or so.
If these “tools” equate to “vibe coding” then Apex Engine will be useless.
Much more tightly controlled than that, given the audience. It’s early days, though, so time will tell.
It’s know for two things: letting tech obsessed people with no skill LARP as artists (poorly, due to the lack of actual soul) and tricking old people
Men are more pro ai
Not surprised
Men are more pro Elon Musk
Not surprised
Remember this is about gen AI, the kind whose only purpose is to replace artists, modelers, voice actors, etc. with slop that the AI stole from other sources and melted into a low quality souless art without paying. In no way could this ever be considered a good thing.
The most positive response listed was for “Dynamic difficulty adjustment” (but still, only 25% has any positive response). On one hand, that sounds okay because it’s a mostly invisible change that could smooth out a single player experience. But the more I thought about, I wondered what generative AI would be doing that isn’t already possible with normal programming logic.
Even assuming it did work, and was able to turn the balance knobs to make things easier or harder, it would destroy our common understanding of challenges in games. Being skilled enough to defeat Malenia would have no meaning if the fight was constantly rebalancing itself. People already brag about how they defeated Radhan before he was nerfed, now imagine that for every boss, oh, and there’s no objective way to know which version of the fight is the “real” one. As with everything genAI related, it turns real expressions of our humanity and turns it into meaningless mush.
Final fantasy 8 did this on the original playstation in 1990-something. No LLM required.
Mikami pioneered this in action games (God Hand and RE4) like 20 years ago. I can’t speak for RE4, but it works great in God Hand. AI not really needed there.
Digital voice is pretty bad. I figured I’d give it shot on something nonfiction but ended up returning the book. Initially it seemed ok. But every sentence had the same exact cadence, inflections, so it resonated more like a repetitive noise or jingle that needed to stop.
I’m trying to conceive of Commander Shepard or Varric from DA2 with digital voice instead of actors at the helm. The Outsider or Dowd. Minsc even, that’s a different type of repetition.
I gave up on a DuoLingo course because they started using AI voices. I was doing the course during the switch and it was jarring. Even I could tell the accents and pronunciation were just wrong half the time.
I had taken like a month long break when it happened and the decline in quality was blatant.
This is why I can’t listen to computer generated voices for more than a few seconds, the cadence just isn’t right, and there’s no variation in the voice.
You haven’t heard Google NotebookLM, then; run any article through that to summarize it podcast-style with a male and female voice and be amazed. I had to ask if they were real myself; voices have come so far.
I’m not supporting AI but just saying that it has vastly improved cadence, inflection, tone, etc.
I’m just starting to dig through all this, but the eye-catching stats right off the bat are not only illuminating, they’re in line with a lot of other stats as well as anecdata I’ve been collecting.
Some dude just the other day was trying to claim there’s a “silent majority” of people who are cool with genAI being used in game development, and…well, sorry bro but the facts don’t back you up. (Unless you’re an old man apparently, the most favorable cohort lol. Even then it’s not a majority!)
Honestly I think the “silent majority” people are literally always the opposite.
I’ve only ever heard that shit used before from anti vaxxers.
Wouldn’t the "silent majority’ also not be taking surveys?
Perhaps, but that means there’s no way to gather the evidence! 😂
In other news, the silent majority thinks my blog is the best in the whole world; is also in love with my cat.
I think it’s such a good case of “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail”.
I personally don’t mind AI for filler stuff like book titles that you just see the spine of on a shelf. Those kinds of things that just make the world seem more lived in but are very time consuming to put in place. Especially for smaller teams.
But do i trust developers to restrict themselves? No. Not at all. I think it’s a can of worms. Better left unopened.
As someone who reads those book spines, I don’t even want it there.
Yeah, I love these little ambient texts in games. I don’t think they would be too time-consuming to come up with for a game that already has written story content. Use them to contribute to the worldbuilding!
I just started Doom Eternal and the book spines there are hilarious! I don’t want that to be generative AI
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Yeah, they could have phrased it better, but there is significant variation based on e.g. age groups, with older people being 7 times as likely to feel positive about GenAI in games, than younger ones. (With the caveat that the “7 times” is still only 22%.)
Why are they grouping women and non-binary together?
The two genders: male and political
There’s two types of people in this world: straight, white men and all the others.
There is still no gender or age that supports AI
The only somewhat understandable thing I can think of GenAI could have a use for in games is shoving an LLM into one to get more dynamic-ish dialogue. Everything else just sounds terrible on paper and IS terrible when executed. I saw a trailer for a fully AI-generated game and it looked like the most shovelware garbage ever.
Even then, it will take minutes for each individual dialogue.
Also npcs will randomly start reciting porn and break all immersion at some point.
LLMs are just truly unreliable ngl.
If they just shoved ChatGPT or some other big LLM into it, probably yeah. For actual good results you’d need to make your own LLM trained specifically to do dialog and not much else. Even then it’d be SLOW AS HELL even with powerful PCs.
Of course the majority who do see it positively are around my age.
Half my generation are basically Boomer Lite.
Would be helpful if you said what your age group was.
Of course the majority who do see it positively are around my age.
This is a context clue that can help you find the answer within the article.
Gen z
the ai aspect needs to be for a reason
like the ai generation of No Man’s Sky is great! there’s like 8 types of things continually mixed around to create a universe that’s always different even when all the structures and stations are basically the same
but in Starborn it’s fucked and dumber than shit. the ai generation is pointless for creating empty planets that are full of the same stuff over and over
if Starborn would have directed the AI to create millions of different food wrappers and other trivial items, the game would have been more interesting. but Skyrim in space was a weak idea from the beginning
That’s not AI, that’s procedural generation.
you are splitting hairs
it’s a computer algorithm running some logic that combined elements and produced a result that is not created by the human programers
I am definitely not splitting hairs. The difference is massive.
procedural generation must be totally deterministic and repeatable. So the opposite of ai as it’s known nowadays
Video games have had AI for years. It’s just that AI has meant something different back then. Nowadays, AI most of the time means LLM.
