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The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LL

by daemin 15d ago

The one that sticks out to me is the last quote lamenting the fact that you can't talk about AI in games any more since the term AI has been hijacked to mean LLM instead. I wonder how long it will take for job ads in the game industry to bifurcate into AI (LLM) developer and Behaviour (game AI) developer.

ThrowawayTestr 15d ago
Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.
- hackable_sand 15d ago
  Related, but we've had multiplayer for decades now.
- joegibbs 15d ago
  I did it for story events in my grand strategy game (Fall of an Empire) with a set of finetuned local models. It doesn't affect performance (for most people) since the game is bottlenecked on other things. Players seem to like it, there are some issues since the models are so small they are more prone to hallucination, and you also have to give them preset topics or they go on the same track again and again. I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events. I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
- AshamedCaptain 15d ago
  Right until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.
- daemin 15d ago
  I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs. Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer. There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
  - drugstorecowboy 15d ago
    In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable. The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
    - luke5441 15d ago
- addandsubtract 15d ago
  I've only seen proof-of-concepts, like Vaudeville[1]. I think more work is currently done in the modding scene, for example with Mantella[2] which, "brings every NPC in Skyrim and Fallout 4 to life with AI." [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ [2] https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/ https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
- polytely 15d ago
  I think there is a skyrim mod that lets hook up an LLM to the NPCs so you can talk to them, the problem is that the rest of the game design doesn't really support that. So the novelty wears off quite quick. There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players. I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust. I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.
- nitwit005 15d ago
  Excepting strategy games, the industry's experience has been that most players won't notice clever AI. There have been a number of games that have tried AI conversations, but you're basically trying to sell a Chat GPT prompt, and many players are aware they don't have to pay you to get a similar result on their own.
asdff 15d ago
They already bifurcate in most any tech related job posting. You have the "AI/LLM" jobs that are full on llm koolaid and pretty vague about what your role in the job even entails, and then there's the "AI/ML" jobs that are just how they are calling the same old ML jobs these days. The title could be the same between the two, but its usually obvious from the post description what the job actually is.
wccrawford 15d ago
I'm old enough to remember when AI meant a certain things, and games hijacked that to mean "some routines that make NPCs do things" and it's just gone from there. Gamers at the time were vocal about the "AI" not actually being AI, but they lost that battle. The current use of AI for LLMs is a lot closer to the original intent that the "AI" in games ever was. It wasn't hijacked. It was retaken.

by daemin 15d ago

ThrowawayTestr 15d ago

Unrelated but are there any games using LLMs or ML for the NPCs? I really want enemies that adapt to the player.

hackable_sand 15d ago
Related, but we've had multiplayer for decades now.
joegibbs 15d ago
I did it for story events in my grand strategy game (Fall of an Empire) with a set of finetuned local models. It doesn't affect performance (for most people) since the game is bottlenecked on other things. Players seem to like it, there are some issues since the models are so small they are more prone to hallucination, and you also have to give them preset topics or they go on the same track again and again. I haven't been able to use it for more than events since the tokens per second aren't high enough - I would like to use the models to e.g. generate actions for characters based on their history of interactions with other characters, but that ends up taking so much time that the player never gets any events. I also did a demo of an LLM-powered NPC, I think the issue here is that you need more than just the LLM in e.g. a 3D RPG where you can actually go up and talk to the character. You can generate the text, but from there you also need to generate speech, from that you need to dynamically generate realistic facial and body animations that match up with it - this means you need 3 or 4 models chained together in a pipeline.
AshamedCaptain 15d ago
Right until you release it and a minor gets the NPC to talk about rape or something.
daemin 15d ago
I don't know of any that use LLMs and my educated opinion would be that there won't be any in the next decade or ever. The main reasons are that games already run with tight margins of both frame time and memory consumption, and that designers/game developers want to control the interactions with the player and what the player experiences in the game. So an LLM won't be used for any story relevant NPCs in the game as what they say is tightly curated, and it's never going to be good/fast/slim enough to get used for crowd NPCs. Using machine learning to make enemies smarter has been thought about and talked about for decades, but I don't see it being used either for similar reasons. Training a ML algorithm takes resources which are in short supply and time which could take longer than for the player to finish the game (if you want smarter enemies play against real human players). There's also the fact that the game has to run on the minimum specification computer, which means different players will have differently skilled enemies and their experience of the game will suffer. There have been some games in the past which used some form of machine learning as a core gameplay feature, but they have been pet breeding simulators.
- drugstorecowboy 15d ago
  In my completely unqualified and baseless opinion, I think the reason machine learning in games isn't more popular, is that ruthlessly difficult enemies that learn and adapt to the player just aren't.. fun. Level playing fields between characters and enemies just don't work. For example, the Dark Souls series is generally known for being "difficult but fair", however enemies are not smart by any means, they ultimately have a very limited number of attacks and very basic AI that consists of "Wait until player is in range, Run in a straight line toward the player until in attack range, attack". Even with that simplistic AI its pretty difficult and enjoyable.The player is meant to triumph over hundreds of enemies, its the player that learns and adapts to a static set of obstacles. If enemies in Dark Souls learned and adapted to the player, it would go from difficult to impossible very quickly and would not be enjoyable. The purpose of AI in games isn't making something thats impossible to beat, its making something that is ALWAYS possible to beat while remaining fun and engaging.
  - luke5441 15d ago
addandsubtract 15d ago
I've only seen proof-of-concepts, like Vaudeville[1]. I think more work is currently done in the modding scene, for example with Mantella[2] which, "brings every NPC in Skyrim and Fallout 4 to life with AI." [1] https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville/ [2] https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/ https://art-from-the-machine.github.io/Mantella/
polytely 15d ago
I think there is a skyrim mod that lets hook up an LLM to the NPCs so you can talk to them, the problem is that the rest of the game design doesn't really support that. So the novelty wears off quite quick. There is probably some limited utility for using ML in games, lifelike multiplayer bots trained on behaviour of different types of players. I think in most scenarios good gameplay comes from iteration which comes from tweak-ability, you see players get stuck in area x so you do a minor or major adjustment to area layout, enemy composition, or give the players more tools. If something is controlled by an LLM it becomes unpredictable and hard to reason about for both player and designer, and consequently also hard to adjust. I think it is possible there is some role for LLM's in games, like how Left 4 Dead had an AI (this is classic AI not ML) director who would decide how to structure enemy waves and for example send a boss after a player who strays too far from the rest. But even there rules based AI is probably easier to adjust for the designer.
nitwit005 15d ago
Excepting strategy games, the industry's experience has been that most players won't notice clever AI. There have been a number of games that have tried AI conversations, but you're basically trying to sell a Chat GPT prompt, and many players are aware they don't have to pay you to get a similar result on their own.

asdff 15d ago

They already bifurcate in most any tech related job posting. You have the "AI/LLM" jobs that are full on llm koolaid and pretty vague about what your role in the job even entails, and then there's the "AI/ML" jobs that are just how they are calling the same old ML jobs these days. The title could be the same between the two, but its usually obvious from the post description what the job actually is.

wccrawford 15d ago

I'm old enough to remember when AI meant a certain things, and games hijacked that to mean "some routines that make NPCs do things" and it's just gone from there. Gamers at the time were vocal about the "AI" not actually being AI, but they lost that battle. The current use of AI for LLMs is a lot closer to the original intent that the "AI" in games ever was. It wasn't hijacked. It was retaken.