askgaming

What do you think about using generative AI in game development?

As long as there's a clear label indicating that AI was used, so I can avoid spending my money on it.

Beyond just the art and music, I'm talking about stuff like prototyping, writing dialogue, coding, and even personalised content for pl

The spoken and written dialog in games is absolutely under the heading of art, as is the voice acting.

But again, as long as it's labeled as slop assisted so I can deny them my money, I'm good.

TL;DR don't use AI. Or do, but I won't play it.

I played a game, Crust, I'll name and shame, don't give a shit. Right up my alley, make a moon base, dig in the ground and deform terrain for resources, get it all automated, great stuff..

I'm playing the tutorial and I realize, there a shit ton of banter and dialogue in this tutorial for my factory game, can I please play the game? I do not care what these coworkers are up to.

Then I listened to what they were saying. First, the dialogue was extremely flat. No affectation. Strange emphasis on the words. Oh, it's AI text to speech. Okay. It's a small studio, it's early access, I could forgive that. Then I realized the actual dialogue made no sense. There was some weird logic to the flow of the conversation. Ah, okay, the dialogue is AI. Okay... i mean, it's early access, and a factory game, and I'm listening to two AI's talk to eachother and do some weird puppet show of character develolment. Even the portraits are AI generated, none of this is real.

Then they told a joke. I have no memeory of what it was, but one character said something in the pattern of a joke, the other laughed, and I still can't even play the game. I am a captive audience of an AI telling an AI joke to an AI who made an AI laugh.

I think anyone considering using AI should take a long hard look at what they want to make and their goals. No moon base factory game needs fake ass banter with no bearing on the plot to drive a tutorial. I uninstalled that shit so fast and am now and active enemy of that game. Why? Because someone thought generated content was more important than the gameplay. I don't care about what happened later on I know everything I need to know about the dev and I hate it with an unexpected passion.

So yeah, no, if a game uses AI content it's not a game, it's the weird hollow perception of what someone thinks a game should be, which is an easy flag for me to pin something as inescapably ass.

Some life advice: You can judge a cafe by its toilet paper. Good toilet paper means the cafe will put effort into the customer experience, even if you won't notice it most of the time. Cheap toilet paper means the cafe will cut corners and costs if it thinks it can get away with it.

AI is cheap toilet paper. If you cut corners out on (music/art/writing/coding), then why should I trust you to put effort into anything else? And why would I buy a game nobody put effort into?

If I'm aware that AI is used in a single game made by a studio, I will not purchase any future titles from that studio. I don't care where in the process it's used, or how temporary it's use is. There's enough games already out for me to never run out of games I haven't played yet.

I've got no interest in playing something made by people who have such little interest in what they're doing that they get a chatbot to do it for them. If they don't care, why would anybody else?

don't

Music? Absolutely not.

Artwork? Like splash screens, matte paintings, that sort of thing? Absolutely not.

Other visual assets, like a 3D character model? Overall no - However in very small doses to add variety so long as the base is human crafted, ok. (Like classic palette swaps, but letting an AI create “variations” of an asset Id be ok with in reasonable amounts.

Code? Fine, so long as someone is how knows how to read it was involved and it is fully vetted for security and performance impacts.

Story writing? Absolutely not.

“Filler” content kind of like the visual assets I might accept so long as it’s vetted. For example letting an LLM come up with 100 additional ways for an NPC to greet me or say goodbye etc. But that becomes the sort of thing that takes just as much time to review the output as it would have done to just do it anyway.

Placeholder/prototyping is tricky. I’d consider this an acceptable use, but only if I never knew about it (meaning nothing gets “forgotten” and makes it to final).

As part of the experience, maybe, if done well. But at this point we’re not really talking about “AI” in the current zeitgeist sense, more of the traditional meaning in game design.

I will evaluate each thing on its merits. I don't see a specific issue with it.

Not a dealbreaker on its own, but extremely problematic.

The tech itself would be fine if it wasn't built on the unpaid labour of countless artists, by megacorporations who'll then taunt those very same artists that they've become "replaceable".

And there's a reason why people associate it with slop - often the output is shitty. If you're just adding the output of the generators "as is" to the game, I'll probably not want it.

That said I think it's acceptable in a few situations, as long as fully disclosed to the public:

• Temp assets, that are going to be replaced with human-made assets later on. Better than programmer art.
• It's something like an unimportant NPC talking with you, on things that won't matter gameplay-wise. Just for immersion.

Goretantath also mentioned price - that's a great point. I'm more OK with it being used in free (as "costless") games than in things people expect me to pay for.

Unless it is being used by the NPCs themselves, as an actual chatbot to let you communicate with the characters naturally and without selecting pre-written choices, it can fuck all the way off.

And since LLMs can't even do that properly, any use of it can fuck all the way off.

Not buying the game until all the people whose works we're used are compensated and all training data using illegally-used material is destroyed. Once that is done, anyone who wants to can opt-in and license their works with consent to be used for training.

/ Or the whole world goes to properly sharing the fruits of our collective labors, but that seems even more fantastical

Man, I'm already dodging roguelikes because I can't stand honest-to-god procedural generation, let alone AI generated content. I just can't even bother with anything that isn't a handcrafted experience.

Make it short but so fun it's replayable is what I need. I have no use for infinite vritual worlds.

I'm not a fan of using gen ai in prototyping because even if you eventually replace the all the ai assets, the initial designs will inevitably seed and steer the artistic process, degrading the quality of the end result. A lot of the time when generating ai images or music, the prompter ends up having to settle for whatever the model decides to spit out, and their own artistic input gets lost along the way.

Also making placeholder assets for a game isn't even that hard? Even if it's something you scribble out in ms paint for 30 seconds, you're planning to fix it later. Plus creating your assets from scratch makes it much easier to iterate on the design yourself.

If it's being used for some sort of interactable gimmick, that's neat I suppose, but then you'll have the issue of requiring an internet connection and API access, meaning the game will stop functioning in the future.

And all of this is ignoring the ethical and environmental concerns of gen AI.

As long as the end result is something worth poking at and not just another generic gacha rpg or generic fps or another generic puzzle game, I'm fine with it. It's a lack of polish and brokenness that will turn me away, not the theoretical possibility someone used grammarly's autocomplete to finish a line of dialogue.

I think for me, it depends on the size of the studio that's doing it.

If you are a single person or a two or three person group, putting a game together out of passion and releasing it for an inexpensive price and clearly marking that AI was used in it so that the people who get up tight about that can harumph away, then sure, no problem.

I would say, for anything that's actually important, a human being should be behind it.

AI art is entirely too fickle to be used for most things and should be considered inspiration and actually be redone by a human being.

You should definitely playtest the finished product as rigorously as possible, because AI coding is, you know, decent, but, if you don't understand what the AI has written, then you have no idea what the outcome will be.

And you should disclose that AI was used in the making of this product because some people will feel personally offended that you spent your own time and your own effort and your own money making something using AI even if it's free, and even if it wouldn't exist if it weren't for the AI.

It is my opinion, and slightly controversial, sure, but there is a significant portion of the people that harumph AI do so specifically because it gives them the freedom to condescend on something and not because they actually have a legitimate grievance against that use of AI.

So you should definitely give the pooh-poohers something to poo poo on for the same reason why public buildings have toilets, but at the same time, should people list legitimate grievances or issues with the final product, you should take those valuable criticisms into consideration and make changes accordingly and be prepared for that.

If its all that, so long as the game is free go for it! If there's micro transactions or a price tag then go to hell.

I'd like to see it put in personalized ads in my games so I don't have to see ads that don't interest me.