20 year game industry coder here. I keep seeing posts like this and I keep being surprised at just how naive people are being about the potential for pure generative AI to somehow be the way way game are made. These tech demos are neat, but this is never going to happen 🧵 - ThreadSky

aaronflippo.bsky.social • 82 days ago

20 year game industry coder here.
I keep seeing posts like this and I keep being surprised at just how naive people are being about the potential for pure generative AI to somehow be the way way game are made.

These tech demos are neat, but this is never going to happen 🧵

Comments

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

These demos are all built by training generative AI by showing it hundreds or thousands of hours of video of real videogames. with brute force, they've managed to get to the point where a genAI can sort of predict what one frame might look like, given inputs and a previous frame.

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

But underlying all of this, there is no real game world. If you point the camera at the sky for a few seconds, the algorithm "forgets" what was there before. This is a fundamental problem with the whole scheme that won't be overcome by throwing more data and training at it.

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

Real games work because there is an underlying simulation running on real, persistent data that reliably exists, usually across multiple game systems.
You leave a level 2 sword with a custom inscription in a chest and come back to it 50 hours later, and it's still there.

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

generative AI, on the other hand, just sorta guesses at what might be in that chest because it's been shown 10 hours of video of people opening a chest. It can sort of recreate that interaction, and might remember for a bit what was there given enough memory and training.

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

But there's no underlying simulation.

Can you imagine if your favorite game just forgot about items you were carrying, and randomly deleted or rearranged the world? Generative algorithms will NEVER achieve the solidity of a real simulation.

aaronflippo.bsky.social•82 days ago

What's worse - these demos only exist because someone burned a shit ton of computing resources training it on actual real videogames.

These demos are basically just burning up computing resources in order to make a shitty copy of a real videogame, and nothing more.

ayotocorp.bsky.social•82 days ago

There is ONE potential use to these, and it's that it'd be really funny to trick someone who's super high into playing an AI reconstruction of a game they know without telling them it's an AI reconstruction and watching them flip tf out when things start going wacko.

quibsy.bsky.social•82 days ago

“The quality is poor and it only lasts for a few seconds” is also what she said and she also wasn’t happy with the result

ravinmaddhatter.bsky.social•82 days ago

There are a few things that make gen ai not ideal for games.

1: the computational power for use in game for a character is unreasonable. It needs to be massively simpler..

2: ip status is unproven

3: it is buggy as hell

coil.bsky.social•82 days ago

4. It has no authorial intent

5. It has no persistence

6. It can't DO MATH

7. It can only remix. It will never create something new.

grrrz.bsky.social•78 days ago

« this will keep getting better » these wackos believe in magic basically, besides the tech has hit a brick wall and will barely get better, while big tech companies who went all in on llms and generative AIs will count their losses.

cloacadentata.bsky.social•78 days ago

It'll never make a game someone actually wants to play. I do worry it's going to lower the effort threshold even further for asset flip slop, however.

jaderegina.bsky.social•78 days ago

I can see its potential for procedural generation if it is reigned in and leashed properly. In its current state it is worthless. Just a blobby mess pissing itself to death as soon as you look away...

aaronflippo.bsky.social•78 days ago

That's a good summary hah

grrrz.bsky.social•78 days ago

Maybe if it's used as a creative tool for very specific applications it will be somewhat useful, but right now it's being sold as this magical tech that will do everything and this needs to stop.

chol.ch•79 days ago

This is utter nonsense. As a nose-haver I'm at a loss for words. My grandfather is able to simulate taking my nose off of my face with just his bare hands. The quality is poor and I can clearly see it's just his thumb, but there is no wall. Soon all noses will be removable with the flick of a wrist.

Comments

Posting Rules

Reply