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Procedural generation = Good but AI = Bad?
- Thread starter DR3AM
- Start date
Gamer_By_Proxy
Member
AI is keeping weebs from being able to make a career of doodling jigglypuffs though
Kenneth Haight
Gold Member
They’re both shite
Edit: in the context of games obviously, AI will undoubtedly revolutionise the way we live and has benefits. But in terms of games as “art” or how we as enthusiasts enjoy them. I want AI to be involved as little as possible apart from time saving exercises. No doubt in the not so distant future, AI will be able to create some fanstastic games. But I’ll go back to what’s the point, if it’s not coming from someone’s soul or passion. It’s soulless just like AI art.
Edit: in the context of games obviously, AI will undoubtedly revolutionise the way we live and has benefits. But in terms of games as “art” or how we as enthusiasts enjoy them. I want AI to be involved as little as possible apart from time saving exercises. No doubt in the not so distant future, AI will be able to create some fanstastic games. But I’ll go back to what’s the point, if it’s not coming from someone’s soul or passion. It’s soulless just like AI art.
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tommycronin
Member
The more instances where less humans touch on part of a game the worse it becomes how do you not recognise that.
mitch1971
Member
One of the many criticism of Starfield was it's barren procedurally generated planets, so I'm not sure where you got 'no one cares' from?
theStartupSound
Member
The rules for both are equal: It can create the base, but after that a human with a creative vision needs to put time in the details.
Griffon
Member
Because mediocre artists feel threatened by generic AI art.
If we listened to people like them we would still be manually plowing the fields for food, or we would still be hiring hundreds of accountants to manually calculate simple balance sheets.
I say let the automation revolution happen.
If we listened to people like them we would still be manually plowing the fields for food, or we would still be hiring hundreds of accountants to manually calculate simple balance sheets.
I say let the automation revolution happen.
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Freelance Yakuza
Member
IA became the buzz word for those who like to get angry at things they don't understand
ReBurn
Gold Member
People are angry about it because they thought that a robot couldn't do what they do, but they found out that it can do it nearly as well and much faster. So they're feeling threatened and lashing out.
Freelance Yakuza
Member
I agree
But I'm talking about the use of the word "AI". I've seen people complaining as if any sort of IA was bad
Like LoL
systemr123
Banned
And it will only get worse for those people as AI will be able to do everything sooner than we think, much sooner. And also if you look at Tesla bot 2, we can see that not only AI can do the work we think it can do later now, but also replace our jobs in literally anything, whether it’s mental or physical jobs.
I welcome the change, if managed well. It would mean we as humanity can pursue our hopes and dreams, while automation takes care of us. Yes a little bit scary maybe, but the only way to go.
Magic Carpet
Member
Waiting for the AI generated Myst like game with unlimited world manipulation puzzles.
New Islands with new stuff going on.
New Islands with new stuff going on.
ReBurn
Gold Member
The fear around the term AI is sci-fi fueled hysteria. What we have now isn't really AI as much as it is predictive machine learning models with high-powered compute behind it. But calling it AI sounds really cool and gets companies to invest billions of dollars into it.
killatopak
Gold Member
Previous procedurally created content of games were using assets that they themselves made. The issue are assets pulled outside.
ReBurn
Gold Member
The main fly in the ointment will be people wanting to generate and control wealth produced by the technology. I have no doubt that technology will be able to make it possible to produce enough to go around, but people are still going to want to control it so they have more than everyone else.
Sentenza
Member
A multitude of different shit, actually.
And while I've always been a big proponent of "handcrafted content first and foremost", procedurally-generated content undoubtedly has its place in game design.
People who refuse to recognize it are just being myopic.
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hyperbertha
Member
You understand absolutely nothing then. Right now we don't have the tech to do most tasks better than humans. Only pattern recognition will be better. Everything else will be mediocre, because these ai can't generalize.
The future you are looking at is one filled with mediocre everything, and only the rich producing that mediocre content while everyone else are unemployed. You are rather naive.
FoxMcChief
Gold Member
I’m good with both.
Guilty_AI
Member
i'm not against its use either, but AI and procedural generation are different things. Procedural generation can make use of AI but doesn't necessarely needs it, similarly AI has a multitude of other applications that don't involve procedural generation.
Overall feels like OP is drunk.
systemr123
Banned
Yes endless greed is humanities biggest flaw
NuclearDiarrhea
Member
I got no problem with AI or Procedural Generation being used as long as it makes a game better. Unfortunately, that's a rarity.
systemr123
Banned
Maybe you don’t understand it instead. Right now it’s not good enough to take over anything really, but the speed in which ai is learning together with possessing virtually all knowledge in the world and ever stronger chips, and virtual learning that teaches much quicker than actual people, make it so that ai learning is accelerating into a singularity speed. Before what cost 10 years, take 1 month now. One or 2 years from now what would take 1 month now takes only 1 day then, and things accelerate more and more from there.
It’s like compound interest when comparing it to money, except it keeps accelerating spectacularly all the time.
Also the future I describe is the one I would like, but to be honest, humanity will probably fuck it up spectacularly
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Meicyn
Gold Member
I do. If used right.
Procedural generation is entirely how games like Stellaris, Civilization, and various other 4X games are infinitely replayable. The reason why it works in these games and not well for a game like Starfield is due to game design.
Procedural generation is used to some degree in just about every game. Speedtree is middleware used to produce vegetation without having to manually place everything piece by piece, you simply set parameters. And it’s fine, used in Horizon, Elder Scrolls, Witcher 3, and so on. Even the movie Avatar uses Speedtree.
Procedural generation, like any tool, must be used correctly.
ReBurn
Gold Member
The tech isn't there to do most tasks better than humans, but the tech is there to do many of the basic things well enough to benefit nearly everyone.
Your take on mediocrity is an interesting one. For something to be mediocre there must be something better to compare it to. For automation to make things better for everyone then the paradigm of some people living in exorbitant luxury compared to others has to end. That doesn't mean that everyone must settle for mediocre. Technology could make everything relatively luxurious for everyone. But some people just don't want others to have as much as they have. Human greed is the problem, not technology.
Kssio_Aug
Member
The ideal would be a game made entirely by good human artists, with everything cautiously crafted. But we know that it's becoming impossible to that, since the indsutry keeps asking for more and more ambitious games, that are extremely expensive to produce, and that can't take forever to be made.
So yeah, to be honest I don't mind the use of AI at all, as long as it's used with awareness and caution. It's better that than completely shit art.
So yeah, to be honest I don't mind the use of AI at all, as long as it's used with awareness and caution. It's better that than completely shit art.
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You're just doing the thread title in reverse here. Neither is really true.
ReBurn
Gold Member
Considering what it's used for, the inclusion of procedural generation in Starfield is mostly fine. The main content that people interact with to drive the storylines forward is all hand crafted. The problem with Starfield is that exploration outside of the main storylines is undercooked. The limits on exploration would have been criticized just as harshly even if all 1000 planets had been hand-crafted instead of most of them being procedurally generated.
Creating terrain for secondary planet exploration, mining and base building is a reasonable use of procedural generation. It probably wouldn't even be a point of discussion had Bethesda allowed for mounts or vehicles and hadn't limited exploration to a small sandbox on each planet. Nobody is going to land on a random, uninhabited planet and just walk everywhere.
Games are becoming too expensive, and the development cycles are too long. In the past, companies would release 2-3 AAA games from the same franchise within the same generation. Today, a AAA game like GTA takes two generations to be completed, often filled with bugs and with only half the content of previous releases at launch – it's insane. There is a ceiling on how many people and how much money you need to make a AAA game in a reasonable time, a cost that only a couple of companies can afford for now. Soon, it will become humanly impossible to develop bigger and more immersive games.
The use of AI is inevitable
The use of AI is inevitable
Tal Shiar Agent
Member
I don't understand why this is so hard for people to wrap their minds around.
CeeJay
Member
Surely the end should be judged rather than the means?
If something generated by a CPU is superior to something hand crafted then I have no problem with it. At the moment its easy to tell but that will become harder and harder to distinguish as the number of cycles iterates on what they have already done. I get that artists are up in arms because at the heart of it its is their handcrafted work that is being used to train these programs and they deserve some kind of royalties from it. AI isn't just for art though and I'm sure that if AI begins to write game code that is completely bug free and 100% optimised then i'm sure there won't be many people who would prefer some glitchy hand crafted messes like we currently get in games.
If something generated by a CPU is superior to something hand crafted then I have no problem with it. At the moment its easy to tell but that will become harder and harder to distinguish as the number of cycles iterates on what they have already done. I get that artists are up in arms because at the heart of it its is their handcrafted work that is being used to train these programs and they deserve some kind of royalties from it. AI isn't just for art though and I'm sure that if AI begins to write game code that is completely bug free and 100% optimised then i'm sure there won't be many people who would prefer some glitchy hand crafted messes like we currently get in games.
Del_X
Member
A lot of static (doesn't change between instances) open world environments are created with procedural generation. I get OP's sentiment. I think both are fine but a lot of art assets created by AI will still need curation. AI is a force multiplier to the degree that we need maybe 20-30% of the artists we currently have. Now a lot of mid-tier artists will need to go get a fake email job (and we'll soon need half those going forward).
hyperbertha
Member
Except it's not a matter of scaling gpus. We need a different paradigm altogether than gradient descent machine learning. Researchers have been failing for decades at this.
An ai written story will never compare to something written by even above average writers. Ai produced products won't touch human produced ones, no matter what it is. It is the McDonalds of everything, and we will need to create a new technology that can extrapolate, rather than interpolate to break through that barrier. The current tech will allow the rich to get even richer and consume high high quality products, while the masses will be relegated to cheap ai sloop.
systemr123
Banned
You should do some more research. They did solve a lot of these issues already and they’re going analog cpus now, because they’re exponentially faster for ai purposes.
hyperbertha
Member
They haven't solved the intelligence problem. If they do it will be a discovery as profound as a room temp superconductor. Scaling up compute won't help at all.
ReBurn
Gold Member
I don't know that "never" is a word we should be using just yet. A few years ago people assumed that software algorithms would never be good enough to threaten the jobs of news journalists or video game musicians and asset artists, but here we are. I don't think that AI will replace humans and write all fiction, but AI doesn't need to do that. AI could probably do an adequate job of producing most JRPG storylines, though.
The rich getting richer is a completely separate matter from the capability of machines to improve overall quality of life and to provide more for people who need it. I don't think AI is going to make that worse, but it stands a decent shot at making it better.
SF Kosmo
Al Jazeera Special Reporter
AI is a form of procedural generation, the problem is that it relies on large data sets that are usually furnished by using others' work without permission.
Legally it's a bit gray, as humans also draw from influences without the need to license them, and the results it produces are novel enough to pass the threshold for infringement. But ethically it's problematic.
It's also worth noting that AI-generates elements can't be copyrighted because human authorship is a requirement of copyright.
Legally it's a bit gray, as humans also draw from influences without the need to license them, and the results it produces are novel enough to pass the threshold for infringement. But ethically it's problematic.
It's also worth noting that AI-generates elements can't be copyrighted because human authorship is a requirement of copyright.
RainblowDash
Gold Member
I feel like I'm one of the few people that doesn't give a shit about the AI drama.
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hyperbertha
Member
By ai I mean current form of ai that is actually just a predictive algorithm incapable of extrapolation or understanding. Of course it's not impossible a breakthrough will be achieved and an actual ai will emerge ala sci fi, but right now we are stuck with glorified token predictors.