I mean, do you watch those videos and think to yourself “this is it – this is the destination – we’ve done it”?

Look, it’s an objective fact that people have a hard time distinguishing AI generated video from real video. So your whole argument that “this looks horrendous and nobody could ever like it” is just incorrect. Pointing to technical problems doesn’t change the fact that this could move video games towards photorealism especially while animated. It might not work out, but you’re saying nothing that precludes it.

You clearly hate AI and hate anyone who likes anything about it. But that blinds you to reality.

That’s exactly the problem. It’s all empty promises of something “just around the corner”. And that’s all that’s driving the bubble. Fantasies about a super-unrealistic futures in which some completely vague and hypothetical advancement makes it actually work for something useful.

No, it’s completely different. Video games have always been driven by technical progress where some nerd invented a new rendering technique, implemented it and then convinced some artists and studio to use it and build a content pipeline. Or some new gameplay idea. There is always risk. It’s a highly technical “hit business” where 1 hit pays for the development of 10 misses. It’s technical nerds or artists driving the risk and businessmen managing it.

What we’re seeing with too early AI adoption is just nonsense rot economy. It’s business people driving the risk to reduce costs and get bonuses for short term profit. And they are following the business speak of the AI gurus because they invested billions into marketing for business dumbos. They are not testing if any of this works to in real business use, they are just firing people out of blind faith. They are not waiting and testing what comes around the corner like I’m suggesting, they are already firing people and investing without testing.

And you can test it to see if it works. See Skyrim NPCs with AI and Skyrim remastered by AI.

So no it’s not the same as what is driving the current bubble lol.

Anyway, that’s my opinion on the potential for AI in games. I don’t think there is any need to talk any further if you don’t believe that understanding and responding to complex text requires some basic level of reasoning and intelligence. If that were so there would be no problem with dead internet or AI bot comments. It’s doublethink.

Well that is the neat part, at least for in-game dialogue, hallucinations wouldn’t be a problem at all lol.

Your fetch quest example is neat, but what an LLM could provide on top of that is “understanding” and reasoning based on the specific quest. And then commenting if you bring the wrong thing or making jokes. Or even adjusting the quest based on reasoning.

Not sure if you mean the actual uncanny valley, but image / video generating AI definitely can clear it. See this… well it’s really badly edited and it’s pretty lackluster, but it looks and sounds quite good. Better than 99% of all in-game cutscenes. Just imagine some random quest giver with that kind of animation and voice acting. In a video game this “slop” would be entirely appropriate and a huge improvement.

I’m honestly a bit flabbergasted that people do not see potential in this. Obviously it would still need hardware advances / performance improvements, but it’s clear what could be possible.

For rendering, I’m mostly interesting in that “photorealistic look” for characters that AI can do, and there are ways to create a hybrid 3D mesh rendering / generation system. Instead of just generative AI, you render a skeleton animated character but it uses the last step of the AI output and skins that, and it looks as good as AI generated. And that would also improve performance drastically compared to pure generation. I’m not 100% sure this is possible though, but pretty sure. Skeleton animated meshes are a form of compression after all.

On AGI I make no predictions. The big finding from LLMs is that they show that you DON’T need sentience to create intelligence. Which is huge. We can make literal slaves that can intelligently do what we want, can even be creative and are not self aware and do not “suffer” from slavery. Which is perfect for video games. Maybe we should never go further than this until we create something like artificial ethics.

I do have to wonder, though, if there isn’t a minority of gamers who are completely taken by the hype of AI in gaming.

Sure, I’ll bite. Obviously nobody wants AI slop and the AI bubble killing hardware prices sucks. But I really do hope to one day see something like the holodeck.

Smaller LLM models could be great for expanding dialog options in game. Like tweaked versions of deepseek or others. Or to improve procedural generation and fill a generated place with life and characters. Or some kind of game master, when you do something unexpected that can alter the storyline to fit the new input. A “yes and” improv AI game master. Or maybe ingame crafting of items and armor (all I want is simple elegant armor lol).

I do think if you have concept artists who defines an art style and palettes and creates the characters for a game, using generative tools to “fill out” assets in that art style is also perfectly fine. Generative models that can directly generate AND render 3D models photorealistically plus 3D animations are very interesting too.

Video games are still very “limited” because costs to produce assets are incredibly high and that limits player freedom.

Lower costs to produce games will also increase diversity at least at the high end, and allows for smaller teams to make more creative games - in terms of gameplay at least. A game with new interesting gameplay and generic but aesthetically pleasing assets is win for me.