Microsoft is the real offender here, but anyone who writes even a news post about the copilot "AI" Quake 'tech demo' without describing how it actually functions (or fails to) it is is doing unpaid PR work.
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I'm not trying to be contrarian here but what, exactly, is it "failing" to do?
It's not really a game. It's a tech demo. And what it does is simulate a sheisty walking sim that resembles the look of Q2, runs for about 2 minutes, and then it's over. It's meant to show working tech, nothing more.
That's just PR trash, they don't give a shit about preserving art. Nobody at the corpo level does, so this demo is not at all about preserving anything. This is meant for something else, which is what anybody with anybody with serious opinion oughta be focusing on.
I feel someone about to say this would make a good horror/nightmare game, etc, without understanding that these non-euclidian "dreamlike" environments have been made by actual people for decades, and they managed to remain coherent
I'm sure that there's a lot of messaging about how "if it can already do this imagine how good it will be in 6 months" and nobody will notice that it has been a lot of 6 months now and this stuff is all exactly as bad as it has always been at the same exact stuff
I'm constantly being yelled at for my "impatience" when Muse is barely even a lateral move from the DoomNGen from Google 6 months ago. and I have a finite number of years in me, I'm not waiting forever for AI to be able to do what fucking Doom could make right now
Is it tho? Minecraft AI literally changed the whole world the instant you moved the camera. This one has the whole map structure and has lots of consistency all around. It's a massive step when compared to Google's Doom and Minecraft AI. Not emphasizing that is naive and mindless hate.
It's not that, as keeping the whole map structure 'in your mind' isn't as easy. The goal is for these AI models - gaming or just simulation - to be able to hold the visual state for an indefinite amount of time, and that will happen in the next few years.
wowee the things you can achieve with a billion dollars of hardware and a citys worth of electricity. crazy how theres no existing technology that can remember a videogame level for an indefinite amount of time, thought they would have figured that out by now
the original post features a moment where austin walks into a shaded corner and the entire game goes dark and he has to shoot so the game interprets the muzzle flash as a light in a tunnel for him to go through, it just kicked the "makes a whole new map" problem down a little further on the line
brother the entire world changed the instant he moved the camera. it's not consistent. use the two eyeballs you were born with and maybe 5% of your brain.
Play for yourself, you can actual traverse the whole map structure, go back etc, and the world is all right there. It can hallucinate when you get too close to a wall or object tho, but it's really something.
I also very much appreciate Microsoft's hard spent time and money on recreating a game I can already buy and play for like, twelve bucks
However good (or in this case, wank) the tech is, they might've wanted to try a game that isn't *already readily available to pretty much everyone*, ffs
I’m not certain an audience exists to be impressed or excited by this, and that’s a pretty wild thing to write about a technology we’re all expected to clap for each time it doesn’t fall completely apart.
I'm really wondering where they want to go with this. It clearly needs to rely on a game already existing and being playable to get training data for. It's not like it'd make the game more accessible, the "AI" runs on much much more demanding hardware...
Trying to wrap my head around the game which on CD was like what 300-400mb? Maybe a little more likely requires like a single digit percentage of the power and memory needed to construct this barely alive demo.
Quake II actually only needed about 25 MB of disc space, and it's hard to compare, but I'd be surprised if it needed a hundredth of the CPU power that this thing does.
The point hammered home is it’s a waste of resources almost beyond measure. In purely the context of Quake 2 alone they could’ve hammered out like a million new episodes for it with the capital needed to fund this.
This has to be a case of creating the solution first before finding a problem, because no one believes that the best way to remastering games is to use a million times more power to run a less functional version.
I hope they never become actual products. but there is a fascination here to see what speedrunners would do with a game like this. Like what's the half a jump tech here, and how does the ai react to it.
Oh this is literally just the fake minecraft tech demo but they thought that Quake being more a constrained game would mask some of the obvious glaring issues and it... doesn't
Reading Phil Spencer talking about how maybe "AI" can help with ports and preservation and feeling my blood boil. What a fundamental misunderstanding of not only this tech but how games WORK.
I kinda came to the conclusion that Phil has no idea what's going on when he let Arkane Austin run itself into the ground for a live service game that drove key staff away and only existed to look good as a line item to sell to Microsoft, even after it should have been clear it was fucked.
It such is a willful neglection of what a game and what the act of preservation even is, that is just so on brand. It is so thoroughly unengaged with the work itself that anything beyond meeting at-a-glance aesthetics wasn't even a thought to them.
I'd appreciate if these fucking studio heads would give concrete examples of how they'd like to use AI to "help with ports" because showing an AI a game then hoping it doesn't trap your character in a black box because you spent too long in the menu seems to *not be it*
The internal workings of games like Quake--code, design, 3d art, audio--produce specific cases of play, including surprising edge cases. That is a big part of what makes games good. If you aren't actually able to rebuild the key inner workings, then you lose access to those unpredictable edge cases
I think it's specifically egregious given Quake's history with speedrunning. The techniques that early Quake Done Quick runners were using rely on knowledge of the Deep Weirdness of the actual game. Any copy of the game that can't reproduce those strange interactions isn't a copy of the game at all.
when i saw the video the first time (but much more yesterday) i thought the same things. but also that the AI can only do quake bc there's thousands of hours of quake being played, so it can generate an almost interactive video instead of a game. the gen AI won't materialize a game in real time.
I think we don't talk enough about code being art. It's not just the means of producing the art object that is the video game. The act of creating working instructions for a machine is a form of creative expression in itself. And stuff like this only obfuscates and alienates us from that reality.
People unfamiliar with programming often think that all code is equal—i.e. there is "right code" to perform a task. They are unaware of the infinite complexity & variety that code embodies. Of course, much AI-generated code will be trash, even if it works—but no-one will be around to explain it.
Everyone talks about the incredible contempt execs have for creatives, but this sort of plainly demonstrates that they have just as much contempt for the player too.
I feel like theres a through line that can be drawn here from the ever ramping desire to remove friction in games to the high end rendering of slop like this. Its all focused no flash at the expense of anything interesting. Stuff made for children and business execs
There might actually be some sort of anti-formal mode that could be productive with a fully… I guess you could call it a “phonetic” (in the Lambert-in-Highlander sense of repeating a language without understanding) process. But an FPS? Let alone a classic boomer shooter?? The form IS the juice
Quake set in an empty nightmare space? Makes no sense, is not interesting. Populations dying out in old Dwarf Fortress bc rampant tooth growth simulation prevented dwarves from being able to feed themselves? Made no sense, but it owned bones. Was the whole point of playing the game, really
all of which is to say that if you're going to sell "AIgen" you'd better be prepared to sell it in terms of new and novel expressions of collapse, because that's what it'll give you.
the assumption from these people that players would be happy to just engage with something that has no logic, flow or artistry to it but vaguely resembles interactive fiction really shows what they think of consumers lol
like none of these are even interesting or worthwhile experiments because i just simply don't think there is any way machine learning could make a cohesive, solid video game that is playable by anyone from start to finish with any coherency
I think the most generous interpretation is that they're taking a kind of "line goes up" position where they assume that nebulous improvements in AI models will somehow overcome all of these fundamental issues. That would still be woefully naïve, but at least not quite so contemptuous.
Like, I try to be careful not to mindlessly dismiss any projected improvement in these models – I'm sure some of them still have a lot of improvement available to them – but the idea that literally any desired output is simply the function of shoveling in sufficient input seems entirely misguided.
I do have some idea! I was trying to make a game during the years this shit was bubbling up, and I was in meetings with people from our publisher saying "how could we use AI to make this better?" And it took everything I had not to scream IT CANNOT
Also, since there's no comprehension or "state", there's no ability to have multiplayer - there's no way to guarantee sync between player clients, it's all mush.
You can see that demonstrated by watching the health and armor numbers. The "player" never takes any damage, but at a few points the numbers just change. Some of the early health changes might be generously attributed to "pickups", but really, it's just randomly choosing a likely digit to render.
It's all bs to woo investors, I don't think it will move far from that apart from maybe some AI-generated loading-screens. Noone is asking for more generic AI-generated shit, there is no problem being solved with this.
All this AI stuff is the apotheosis of treating everything as "content"
Who cares about artistry or themes or connections or anything, just make a machine that can put together pretty glowing lights in the right order, that's basically the same thing
Not even content. It's like potemkin content. Not meant to be played or engaged with, or in any way consumed except at the most superficial level. It's meant to get put in a slide deck, juice investors, and be forgotten.
This is exactly what the speed running community was essentially built on! The emergence of finding consistant, predicatable reproducable, "bugs" in a game created a competitive and complex communities.
I firmly believe that any AI hypemen who say this shit is a game in any meaningful way, should lose their access to computers because they clearly dont know anything and are tricked easily
I straight-out don't understand anybody who still accepts 'well in the future maybe this will be able to (x)!'-type talk on AI products after all these years of empty promises. it evidently still flies with investors, but all this kind of tech has on its side is the novelty
It's the same insanity as the techbros and celebrities that insisted blockchain and NFTs would magically make us use and move game items across multiple games seamlessly.
There's also just the gall of like, the largest barrier to preservation of games are companies like Microsoft, and the insatiable need to aggressively use copyright/ip law to squash many potential attempts to preserve them.
Dude for real. Preservation as broken down copies of a thing we could actually preserve--or even allow fans to do the preservation work on for free--isn't preservaton at all
I'll leave it to the museum folks and academic researchers to comment on how Microsoft supports them but as far as preservation, Microsoft has reference copies of just about everything, usually including source code.
To me it's all indicative of the greater issues at hand here: none of these people or companies (whether or it's Altman or Spencer here) have no idea how anything actually works. They're given a list of marketing terms and things they want it to do, even though it can't and never will.
I agree, but I'm certifiably certain that Phil's words are being molded by his bosses. Microslut is hellbent on AI and they want that in every bit of their products.
Right? this is not preservation THIS IS DESTRUCTION! You're erased the original human made labour that made these games what they are, even a full remake that completely reimagines the game is a more legit form of preservantion than AI ever will be.
I think it's worse, they don't misunderstand it. They're just being forced by the money people to try and desperately find any possible way that "AI" could be used in gaming. They know it's bullshit.
It's especially baffling since it seems to me that AI actually could help with game preservation, if, say, you were talking about AI that could take the original source code and port it to different systems. But this? I don't even know what this is.
What's so darkly funny about this is like, we're always hearing about how people are working to port Doom and Quake into smaller and lighter computer systems, and now MSFT is going to pump them into a stochastic parrot which will use more power than they've ever needed to fail to generate one level.
Seeing random shit appear and disappear is literally a phobia of mine. The idea that I would ever be okay with this kind of AI shit in a game is so offensive.
also fucking lol at him going into the dark hall, you can just hear the nepo baby techbros who wrote this shit screaming "NO! NOW THE MODEL IS STUCK IN A LOCAL MINIMA"
I agree that it’s preposterous to pitch this as having anything to do with game preservation, but I think it’s kinda cool anyway. Even though it loses coherency pretty quickly, it’s pretty impressive compared to previous demos.
There are fucking morons in the tech industry who treat ai like its adding butter to something. I'm so mad I cant even make a proper analogy. Spencer can get fucked
“AI Brain” is a terminal disease that the management class is particularly susceptible to. Given enough time, all of these people who are this removed from actual human work will suggest AI as a vague answer to problems nobody has.
Given a few are still stuck in "NFT Brain" I think it'll be a while before we see the end of this. I think it has something to do with "investors" not actually being invested in anything anymore and just blindly following buzzwords.
The most annoying thing is this could maybe (biiig maybe) be used within a bigger game to generate some dreamlike sequence with the shifting paths, but no they just try to recreate things that already exist with it, because anyone using "AI" is fundamentally uncreative and uncurious.
An actually *designed* dreamlike sequence with non euclidean geometry and paths that disappear behind you would still be better obviously, but at least it would make sense why you would try to use it for that.
We already got that. Without AI thievery. Developed and programmed by real people with real brains and actual human creativity and without stealing other people's work or burning down an entire rainforest to run.
Pretty distinctly different though as it is a puzzler first and foremost - and no way you can ever trust "AI" with that - I was more thinking of lore dump sections that are just walking like the Outsider in Dishonored.
Tbc I think even there it doesn't make too much sense - an actually designed section is just going to be better - but at least I could understand why someone would think it might work.
They are choosing to make the least interesting thing possible with a tool that is already bad instead of.
This whole project is abstractly interesting in a “can what this AI produces be considered a game?” sense, but tech media’s total reluctance to actually explain what the technology is doing is infuriating
Estimates were that we would have had fusion in the 90s had they kept funding at the lowest projected levels from where they were in the 60s. Unfortunately those lowest projected levels were not nearly as severe as the real cuts. Thankfully China is actually pumping tons of cash into fusion research
I really don't understand how they constantly ignore the fact these things have no capacity to remember stuff it's already done which seems like a huge flaw and one of the first things you'd want to do.
AI Dementia Gaming presents.. a world of confusion! Were you playing single player or multiplayer? Who tf knows! Are you a knight slaying unicorns or a bebop boobidyboo boo boo? Who tf knows!
We were like the only family I knew that had an Amiga. We upgraded from a C64. No consoles ever, dad hated a computer that couldn't be multi-function. Whenever I'd describe what I was playing to my friends it sounded like a fever dream.
I've seen several demos like this in the past year+ and I don't understand what they're aiming at. I thought they were trying to deconstruct the mechanics, so people could prompt new game mechanics. But this feels very pointless.
I totally want games with dated horror tropes like "ghosts" and "the door you came in disappears when you turn away" that have been around for decades
not because of any artistic or narrative need but unintentionally because it was made by the digital equivalent of the mcnugget pink slurry machine
this is not quake 2, this is a flesh homonculus wearing something else's skin to try to bring in prey. this is against both the natural and technological order. death to the abominable intelligence
You know what's wild? If you put this narration up against the plot of the langliers, it's a one for one. There's a monster, now it's gone, where am I, etc
I might be slightly impressed if they were able to create this without using anything from Quake as an initial input. At this point they need someone to create Quake so they can create Quake again.
"It's really Quake," I said, "but without weapons fire or enemies!"
John Romero bursts through a wall like Lou Ferrigno, shirtless, buff, and gamma-ray green. He grabs me by the throat and throws me through the nearest window. "ROMERO SMASH," he shouts, then jumps through the window after me.
like a lot of ai stuff this is so fundementally bad on every level that even engaging with it as if it exists and can be taken seriously feels like falsely legitimising it. with a few more decades and billions of dollars our supercomputer might one day make quake, a 50MB game that already exists!!!
it's almost like spending more money than anyone has ever spent while also stealing everyone's everything all so we can build a computer that needs to evaporate a lake's worth of water every minute is a fucking idiotic idea
they can't hire enough people to make master chief be 50 quadrillion polygons and have a million pixel textures, so something that requires 16 terabytes of ram to inconsistently guess what 5+7 is a great excuse to claim necessity for ever more powerful computer parts
Generative A.I. is further proof that there's nothing cognitively elite about the 1%. The tech company CEOs pour all this money into training A.I. when they could be putting those resources towards something meaningful.
you simply are not understanding what you are looking at, i think. the interesting thing is that a ML model can perform interactively like a game and have temporal and spatial consistency and coherent mechanics, even if they degrade after a while. it’s a tech demo!!
yeah man that’s what’s interesting about it. obviously you can get those the normal way too but the interesting part is you can do it in this alternative way
It's like someone bet Microsoft they couldn't invent are more inefficient way to play games than the Anstream service that streams you HD video gameplay of 8KB roms that could be emulated in a browser.
Big shame on the Verge for peddling this so blatantly. It was nothing but praises for the technology trying to undercut and replace hard working game devs. And for what? Some fuzzy, generated video of gameplay trying to pass off as creativity?
I can't wait to see triple A adopting this, I love to see modern games being released in an even more unimpressive and unplayable state than they already are, I can't wait to see games become even more of a cash grab slop than they already are, I love this so much I can't FUCKING CONTAIN MYSELF!
We don't even need AI specifically for creating a game where the environment around you changes Everytime you turn around. There are levels in Control that accomplished that years ago. Silent Hill PT did that forever ago. What possible use case does this have?
the "game time limit reached!" popup is a hilarious punchline to this. their context window is literally two minutes how on earth do they plan to scale this to an actual gameplay session without building a dyson sphere
This looks like when I’m trying to play a video game in a dream and the dream is actively working against progressing, which usually ends with reality shifting to put me in the game as I lose all sense of context.
this is a cool tech demo that shows an interesting application of ai/ml. it’s obviously not how you would program a game today or restore old games. there is no reason to be upset by it.
it's really not cool or interesting, and if it's "obviously" not how you would restore old games then why are the people behind it trying to sell it as a way to do that? i think there's every reason to be upset by the insult to my intelligence
maybe actually read the statements that are being put out with this stuff before you start waggling your fingers at people for "not understanding"? it's absolutely being sold that away
i understand you believe people are trying to sell this Muse thing as being for game preservation, but i am saying i don't think that's actually happening. i think phil spencer just offhand listed a bunch of things ai in general could potentially be used for and everyone is getting bent out of shape
Is there not a point where MS overtly and publicly become bad actors? They're openly working against the best interests of the IPs they themselves own to prop up a grift. They must understand the actual truth here even if the public don't.
is this the one that runs at a "playable" framerate? Ie, more than 10fps?
they pitch this for "prototyping" but i can't see this thing actually letting u test mechanics beyond movement and maybe collisions. didn't even fire a single shot!
Wow so AI is once again garbage and not useful at all? What a shock, truly. This isn’t even occasionally funny like the inaccurate Apple message summaries, just sad.
People mistake the paint getting a little nicer for actual hard technical changes for the ai models. Like yeah it looks prettier but in function it is barely different from the cloud of meat photo era
i mentally wrote a thesis about LLMs working on the worst aspects of dream logic (mechanically analysing and regurgitating signifiers without context) but what i meant to say is they made the outer wilds quantum puzzles but if they sucked real bad. and they didn't even do it on purpose.
This is truly irritating to me. They're trying to pretend the AI can do anything more than generate a next probable frame based on video content and user input. It's not a magic reverse engineering machine
"AI Games" like this are just a really weird way to navigate a huge number of badly compressed videos more than "games" in any sense, and I feel like I'm losing my mind when anyone says they have potential
imagine writing a guide for an AI-generated video game
"alrighty so just go down this hallway that may or may not exist by time you reach it and turn to your right where you will see an enemy/a pool/a powerup/a boss/a cutscene and just uh... just... shoot at it or something, I dunno"
Every single thing I see about each latest and greatest AI advancement is like "look how much worse this does something we can already do" and then they get handed twelve billion dollars to not make it any better.
This is so stupid. This isn't a game. This is a twitch stream fever dream created by feeding their AI millions of hours of gameplay and having it poop out some nonsense.
I can absolutely see neural networks being used to generate, idk, trees and shit in the future. To produce really organic procedural generation... But only within a properly designed framework that is not just being run by an AI model.
Already quite good at that, was one of the first big uses for AI models in the creative world. Magic erasers and 3D forest generators. The problem is that's a limited (but lucrative!) market segment, and the leading luminaries saw the opportunity to instead replace creatives entirely with machines.
Who cares if you’re a god gamer. Just pay some ai slot machine to boost your char like a pro. Spend 10 minutes slashing on stream. Then talk about gear like it’s your first time.
This isn't a quake simulator, this is a fever dream simulator. And I don't mean in a general, "this is weird and disturbing" way, I mean specifically when I have a fever I dream about walking down corridors that endlessly repeat or disappear when I'm not looking because I have no object permanence.
If anything, these "ports" show the maximum potential of this kind of AI: an infinitely less interesting, less human copy of a thing that already exists
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Sorry, this is the first I hear about it and something cracked in my brain and I don't like it
It's not really a game. It's a tech demo. And what it does is simulate a sheisty walking sim that resembles the look of Q2, runs for about 2 minutes, and then it's over. It's meant to show working tech, nothing more.
1) Every product is a proof-of-concept which requires exponential improvement, several times over, to be actually viable.
2) Every single product is trapped in the 80/20 rule. There are no exponents.
3) Everything is being sold and adopted as if #1 is guaranteed.
Okay. To what end? What does that give us? How does that improve anything exterior to the AI model?
However good (or in this case, wank) the tech is, they might've wanted to try a game that isn't *already readily available to pretty much everyone*, ffs
these people read Frankenstein and thought it was an instruction manual for the next round of funding
But the video looks like one of those generated games made from quake ?
Here you go"
("it" being a datacenter with an annual energy consumption of 10+ TWh)
Maybe rebasing code.
This isn't an AI written copy of quake.
Video games are -inter-active, not reactive.
“they’ll buy it because we assume those details are too minor to count” works until they dive below the trust thermocline and into the abyss
Who cares about artistry or themes or connections or anything, just make a machine that can put together pretty glowing lights in the right order, that's basically the same thing
After that it's that sweet, sweet sunk cost fallacy. It won't matter how many delivery dates get blown past - they already spent that money.
Imagine... Using a Fortnite gun in a Mario Game!
-Heavy Weapons Guy
the zoom call is saved from its tailspin
everyone claps
Seems like a worthwhile use of resources
It's called Antichamber.
Pretty distinctly different though as it is a puzzler first and foremost - and no way you can ever trust "AI" with that - I was more thinking of lore dump sections that are just walking like the Outsider in Dishonored.
They are choosing to make the least interesting thing possible with a tool that is already bad instead of.
(btw an even quicker way to break it, just look straight down and then up again for a very funny surprise)
not because of any artistic or narrative need but unintentionally because it was made by the digital equivalent of the mcnugget pink slurry machine
John Romero bursts through a wall like Lou Ferrigno, shirtless, buff, and gamma-ray green. He grabs me by the throat and throws me through the nearest window. "ROMERO SMASH," he shouts, then jumps through the window after me.
And by that I mean that my CompSci dissertation was an AI boy to control Quake. That was back in 2008, though.
I'd blame that typo on the autocucumber, but it was definitely on me.
- Every left leaning Democratic Party world wide
They ARE technically allowed to do this, but they, like all companies dabbling in AI, never questioned whether or not they SHOULD.
This is just a bad port of Quake 2. It literally brings you nothing.
they pitch this for "prototyping" but i can't see this thing actually letting u test mechanics beyond movement and maybe collisions. didn't even fire a single shot!
(fr though this looks like such ass and watching it is giving me motion sickness lol)
I'm sure a lot of them are being compensated very healthily for sucking microsoft off.
I would sum up my feelings as "I strongly feel that this is an insult to life itself"
"alrighty so just go down this hallway that may or may not exist by time you reach it and turn to your right where you will see an enemy/a pool/a powerup/a boss/a cutscene and just uh... just... shoot at it or something, I dunno"
Pretty sure they'd shut it down then if THEY lose money.