When Naughty Dog was promoting the remake of The Last of Us Part 1 last year, one of the main elements the company emphasized was improved AI. It’s a phrase that might sound alarm bells now, but at the time nobody paid attention to it. What Naughty Dog meant, and we all understood what it meant, was to give each character powers and control when they move, when they look for Joel, when they get violent, etc. It is an AI that AI has long been part of the game and should continue to be. That line should be ‘no creative AI’, not ‘no AI’.
Whenever you play a game “against the computer” you are playing against an AI. In any game, every character you meet is under AI. This is not an interactive theater where actors stand around doing nothing until you arrive and speak. Actors react in a certain bespoke way. No one cares about this kind of AI in games, nor should we. The game wouldn’t exist without this kind of AI.
The problem is that it crossed the line of creativity. All of the above examples are AI that responds in a customized way based on the developer’s work, and the developer sets behavioral parameters that change with each interaction. It’s harder to just miss enemy bosses than it is to hit them every time, and it’s the human hand behind his AI that makes it most effective.
But now there is a creeping desire to reverse that polarity and let AI become a guide to humans. A forced reliance on AI-generated ideas, a restructuring of creative work that tweaks AI-generated rather than just coming from your own brain, or a complete transformation of creative work into computer ideas. AI is trying to make something happen, like replacing it. Games are worse.
Techies have been looking for an opportunity to get into the game, and this just might be the chance. NFTs and the metaverse were not cohesive, and it was difficult to visualize how they worked. For an idea to work, he must pitch it to two groups: the rich and the crowd. Moneyman would have supported NFTs outright, but the crowd didn’t get the point of NFTs (largely because they didn’t exist). However, it is even more important to remain vigilant when it comes to AI, as it is easily captured.
Moneyman liked NFTs. make Money – The idea is to overcharge suckers to “own” the guns you use in the game. But no one is that bad, and the idea of relying on moving guns from one game to another entirely wasn’t a starter. But the AI sticks around. The current trend is to use his AI to enhance paintings, movie frames, or memes, regardless of the original creation’s intentions. “The rest of the Mona Lisa” does not exist. Rich people like this idea not because it makes them money, to save We can pay artists less and hopefully players won’t notice.
Some say the game itself caused this problem and lowered the writing standards for the game to a level where the computer could take the lead. I agree with this more than probably safely or wisely admit. Much of the game-related writing is clichéd, hasty, and inadequate. But this is because lighting is not yet respected enough in games and is therefore a low priority in terms of both time and resources. Using an AI to “replace” the writer, whether it’s his Ubisoft plan to use his AI for barking, is a fully realized dialogue written by an AI on the fly. Any ideas for a bigger pie will only make things worse.
“No NFTs in games” is an easy slogan, so it’s harder to stay vigilant when it comes to AI. “Games don’t need AI” doesn’t make sense. In order to ensure that artists continue to be relied upon to build these worlds exactly as they envisioned them, rather than as simple programs crafted by plagiarizing other sources, the ‘he doesn’t use AI’ boundaries should be set.
AI will continue to be an integral part of games, which is why it is so difficult to protect against this new intrusion. But the best way to protect games from the predictable, oversaturated inspiration that AI steals is to pay more respect, not less, to the artists who create these games.
