MudMan

Alright, but you do realize that specific examples of NPC chatter being poorly implemented doesn’t immediately lead to “AI writing and performing NPC chatter”, right?

Those examples stand out because they’re bad. The arrow to the knee was a tuning issue, not a lack of assets. Getting excessively noticeable repeated chatter in a frequent revisit location is a design issue.

The idea that the, frankly atrocious, example in the video is the solution to that, instead of the tons of examples of actually good NPC chatter that you near all the time and don’t notice is a bit of a leap.

It absolutely does, although it’s fine to have different expectations for what we want, I guess. Cyberpunk’s open world design in general has issues that aren’t down to modern AAA studios’ capabilities to generate assets, so I don’t know that it’d be my gold standard, but you’re getting 200+ hr games these days where pretty much every NPC is voiced, which is absurd.

Now, in terms of priorities, would I download a 300GB game for the sake of a bunch of AI-generated sound files to ensure every incidental conversation is unique at the additional cost of having the filler chatter sound worse than fully voice acted lines? Eh… probably not. But I’d love it if the devs were able to have more variety without being soul crushed by having to do repetitive work around it. And I’d certainly love to see a higher percentage of the same 100-150GB game brought up to “hero” quality instead. Your mileage may vary.

There is an absolutely ludicrous amount of NPC chatter in many games out there today. And specifically the writing of it is definitely not the problem. Any competent game writer can deploy reams of the stuff at the drop of a hat, way more consistently and effectively than ML generation.

Plus you still need to edit it, plug it in the right places and make sure it’s driven by the right logic. Any asset in a game requires work, regardless of what parts are automated. It’s not like your average GTA city feels empty and silent. If anything there’s too much of the stuff sometimes.

But if the time and effort of doing all that work can be cut in half, or by 90%, then you can have the best of both worlds: the hand-crafted, edited, art-directed stuff that fits where it needs to fit and reinforces the artistry of the game and the breadth of content from being able to plug it into the right places without a whole lot of manual labor.

Procedurally generated content, particularly in filler areas, is nothing new in games. Since you bring up Skyrim, Daggerfall had tons of procedurally generated assets, dialogue, dungeons and areas all the way back in 1992 already. It’s about making those better by either allowing for humans to supervise a larger percentage of the filler or by making the filler of slightly higher quality. If I’m excited about generative AI applications for creativity at all, I’m excited about those things.

Been saying it since way before chatbots sent everybody off the deep end, it’s not about the holodeck model where generative AI makes things for you out of whole cloth, it’s about letting the same artists that are already doing this well do it faster.

A lot of the hostility comes from being misinformed about the tech, but the advocates aren’t doing any favors by also completely misunderstanding the tech.

Wait, who says it is the dominant branch of “AI development”? What does that mean, in fact? Who says it was telephone and radio that led to English hegemony? Who said thoughts and beliefs follow language? Most of the people I know in related fields seem to think that’s widely disproved. I mean, no bad questions, but there’s a TON of built-in assumptions in the OP and not all of them check out.

FWIW, I don’t know that generated language gets to change much if it’s generated by inferring likely language from human sources. At most there may be a newfound premium on using original, spontaneous sounding language in writing just to prove one’s humanity by distinguishing from bland, generated language, but I suppose even that depends on how the tech moves forward.

Just for the record, he was not actually outed by a pizza box. Romanian police already knew where he lived and that he was in the country.

This one seems real, though, so still funny.