1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's.

2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it.

I really want these two things to be compatible, but I'm not convinced they are. #1 is a gamer's dream, but it's a nightmare for our humanity if it comes at the cost of #2. That's why I'm highly ambivalent about this contest and its results.

> 1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's.

Have you ever gone exploring in Minecraft, or No Man's Sky? Those games are effectively infinite, but I find they run out of interesting generated content after maybe 10 or 20 hours.

The problem is, once you see the outlines of the world generation, your brain kind of fills in the space between. I've seen blue grass, and I've seen purple oceans, so blue grass next to a purple ocean isn't uniquely interesting.

Or another example would be the radiant AI from Skyrim that could automatically generate quests for the players.

I think that using an LLM to model NPCs runs into the same problem(s). In the end, there are two cases: either the behavior is constrained enough to keep the game on the rails, and thus the randomness in the dialogue only ads some flavor but there isn't enough freedom to generate new quests and directions for the story. In that case, the added space to explore really doesn't change the nature of the game or add much.

In the second case, you let the model go off the rails and have a harness around it that generates a world matching the hallucinated responses, which would allow an LLM to dynamically generate quests and such, but then the design of your game is subject to being compromised by the randomness of an LLM. E.g. it's not just Red Dead Redemption 3.0 with some funny characters, sometimes it's a historical game and other times aliens show up.

Maybe that's compelling to some people but I've done acid before and really don't need all my media to recreate that sensation of reality drifting.

Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games.

Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending?

I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a story that somebody else wrote. This is maybe why I don't like multiplayer games as much a single player experiences. I want another human to tell me a story, and I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is. If an LLM is just randomly making it up as it goes, I'm not discovering anything. I'm not hearing a story. Instead, I'm just having a transient conversation with myself.

I guess it's equivalent to the difference between visiting an art gallery, versus watching a computer generate fake paintings. One has human intent behind it and that makes it compelling, the other is soulless and empty

When I know that #1 has been generated by an AI tool, I really lose interest in whatever backstory the character is supposed to have.

Writing in video games is often pretty bad, but at least we used to know / sometimes can know it was done by a guy/gal in an office somewhere, trying to create something interesting. Now it’s just an algorithm.

1. Is not a gamer's dream. It's terrible and you'll find out quite fast you're not interested in everyone's background and scream to most NPC's to shut the fuck up and get to the point.

It's just as terrible as injecting 'realism' in games for the sake of 'realism'.

#2 has been fiction for all but 0.1% or less of authors for many years.

As of a few years ago - before AI writing was an issue - the average full time author in the UK would have earned more flipping burgers (but their household incomes are above average - it's a middle class hobby for most).

And only a miniscule proportion of authors are full time.

I wrote a text-based adventure game engine that implemented quite a detailed world model. The results were very engaging indeed, but after a time I realised that while its game world was hugely detailed to the point of individual characters having their own simulated thoughts, feelings and world view, the game was quite shallow in terms of conceptual depth - it very successfully rehashed genre cliches, but nothing about it felt new or fresh.

#1 is a marketer at AAA studio's dream, not a gamer's dream. People consuming works of art appreciate quality of storytelling and immersiveness.

I’m a gamer, #1 is not my dream. Games, as with any other work of art, are also an exercise in curation on the part of the developers. Without that filter, and that common experience with other players, I might as well scroll reels and get an equivalent experience.

#1 is rather what unexperienced game developers think what is a gamer's dream. It isn't---in fact, unlimited freedom is a recipe for confusion.

> each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion

This is no longer fiction - see the latest AI update of PUBG.

#1 is Dungeons and Dragons, except for the word 'video' game.

I don’t get your ambivalence, when you seem to understand that the negatives of #2 far outweigh the positives[1] of #1. That’s something that has always been really weird in these LLM discussions, it’s like that Tom Toro cartoon:

https://www.newyorker.com/cartoon/a16995

[1]: And even those are subjective. I wouldn’t want that, and the other replies so far agree that would be bad.