I'm sure some of these things are not answers in search of a question, but as a broad sweep I'm not sure I see the excitement in most of the contexts. Interesting ideas, but a bit like saying that something "now has Blockchain", perhaps. Specific examples might shine through, of course, and populating a simulation with (learnable?) AI agents and seeing how far it goes does intrigue me. We shall see.
Nah, blockchain is, and has always been completely useless except in a small array of real world circumstances notably when there is no central repository you can trust to hold your data faithfully and when you can't just hold the data on your PC instead. Since in games you can just store all the data on either your PC or the game companies servers its completely useless for any game ever made.
Its more like say; graphics. Does shoving them into a game make it inherently better then a text game? No, especially at the start before the technology had time to text (and ASCII) games were many times better then ones with graphics.
But as graphics got better and better they become more important to implement to some degree because yeah, in the end it kinda does make it better.
I agree that there will be a ton of meaningless hype/flat out lies around its implementation, but that has been true for gaming "AI" for decades anyways.
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The first excitement of AI is the same as all other automation humans have made; which is more results from less inputs.
So instead of getting a thousand lines of text from a writer you get ten thousand. Instead of having fifty voiced NPCs you have five hundred. Even if you have everything you want in the game it could mean that instead of having a week at the end to polish up the game you finish a month earlier and have the extra time to fix everything up.
Now a lot of that is going to be trash; including AI won't inherently make a game better, especially at the start. What it does do however is raise the ceiling on what is possible with the same budget which will in any cases where money is a concern (see: basically every game ever).
Imagine Elden Ring, but they had the budget for ten times the NPCs.
If implemented well (and for the first few years in many cases it won't be) the ability to get more stuff in the game will just make the game better.
This isn't particularly exciting, but being able to do the work of fifty people with twenty is going to be a pretty huge shift in how many games end up getting developed and how good those games end up being.
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The second excitement of AI is the same as the same as tools in general; you can do stuff that is flat out impossible to implement without said tools.
Some of it is boring issues that AI can obviously fix.
For instance without AI you flat out can't ever have NPCs that can respond to any question you ask.
You can't have NPCs that would dynamically change their daily routine based on what is happening in the world.
You can't just grab a NPC off the street to be your companion and learn their hopes and dreams and watch as they change based on the choices you make in the world and get stronger as they level with you (and said NPCs wouldn't repeat "I'm sworn to carry your burdens" over and over).
But the truly interesting pie in the sky stuff is merely hypothetical, because this technology is barely developed in the real world, and certainly doesn't have decades of development time behind it that other gaming tech does and we have no clue of the potential of the technology.
For instance it could allow the player to develop custom factions and have them dynamically impact the world based on their precepts. You could say, make an evil faction that summons demons and it would fight the good factions and develop settlements and create bound demons. Or (depending on how mean the game is and how hard you set the difficulty) you try to make a demon summoning faction and the good guys and evil guys team up and come out to slap you around because everyone hates demon summoners.
Or proper branching questline where if you decide to team up with the bad guy in some random quest there are actual consequences in the world; some minor and irrelevant (grain costs go up because he made a plague in the farmlands) and some major (refugees fleeing said plague, a lockdown in a city once plague monsters start coming out and you have to bunker down and kill them and outlast them or break through the guards and escape the city).
Or how about if you're playing a medieval fantasy stealth game, and you go "I want this game to have guns" and "I want there to be blood magic in this game" and the AI DM goes "Cool dawg, I made you some guns and gave you a Blood stat and put some blood spells in the next few levels for you to find".
Obviously offline (especially large-map sandboxy) games lack anyone real, so the plan is to replace current NPCs (perhaps a little predictable/unhelpful) with AINPC variations? Still basically scripted, just far more loosely. More unpredictable, possibly far more unhelpful (or not as valid in thebofficial role of an adversary) at the same time as a consequence, but that depends on the pre-training and QC.
Obviously multiplayer games will benefit less then single player games to what is quite possibly a staggering degree, and even within SP games some genres will benefit more then others.
AI as a tool should still be a great help to multiplayer devs though, so even if you don't see AI acting directly it will still improve the game in the background.
I would like to know what they mean when they say agents are informed of their circumstances. Is there like a layer that describes every scene in english so the LM gets to answer? What's funny to me is how it basically a village of superficial liers, but they are allways nice to eachother. I doubt little Eddy has commited a single note to memory by now
John Lin is a pharmacy shopkeeper at the Willow Market and Pharmacy who loves to help people. He is always looking for ways to make the process of getting medication easier for his customers; John Lin is living with his wife, Mei Lin, who is a college professor, and son, Eddy Lin, who is a student studying music theory; John Lin loves his family very much; John Lin has known the old couple next-door, Sam Moore and Jennifer Moore, for a few years; John Lin thinks Sam Moore is a kind and nice man; John Lin knows his neighbor, Yuriko Yamamoto, well; John Lin knows of his neighbors, Tamara Taylor and Carmen Ortiz, but has not met them before; John Lin and Tom Moreno are colleagues at The Willows Market and Pharmacy; John Lin and Tom Moreno are friends and like to discuss local politics together; John Lin knows the Moreno family somewhat well — the husband Tom Moreno and the wife Jane Moreno.
Its just a few lines of text with each persons circumstances and their relationships with others.
For instance, after the agent is told about a situation in the park, where someone is sitting on a bench and having a conversation with another agent, but there is also grass and context and one empty seat at the bench… none of which are important. What is important? From all those observations, which may make up pages of text for the agent, you might get the “reflection” that “Eddie and Fran are friends because I saw them together at the park.” That gets entered in the agent’s long-term “memory” — a bunch of stuff stored outside the ChatGPT conversation — and the rest can be forgotten.
So ha, Eddie totally does have his own memories.
Which raises an interesting point I've been considering. People have been saying that GPT isn't sentient because it doesn't form long term memories and doesn't know math, ect.
But GPT is just a language system, and the language part of humans brain doesn't store long term memories or know math either.
And thats because Humans aren't just any single specific intelligence system, we are the combination of a dozen systems all with their own specific intelligence stapled together with duct tape that thinks its one system.
So sure GPT doesn't know math and can't draw and doesn't have long term memory, but once you hook it up to Wolfram Alpha and Stable Diffusion and something to store its memories in that will all change awfully fast.