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Well shit…
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Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content.
I mean, this is better than most places.
I wouldn’t be surprised if, in just a few years time, pre-AI-era content of all kinds, not just games, ends up becoming cherished by people, to the point that entire fandoms and subcultures develop around preserving and promoting it.
This is no different than anything else, we naturally appreciate the skill it takes to create something entirely by hand, even if mass production is available.
I feel like this is different. Even something mass produced using machinery used to be always designed by a human in the end.
The games will still be designed by humans. Generative AI will only be used as a tool in the workflow for creating certain assets faster, or for creating certain kinds of interactivity on the fly. It’s not good enough to wholesale create large sets of matching assets, and despite what folks may think, it won’t be for a long time, if ever. Not to mention, people just don’t want that. People want art to have intentional meaning, not computer generated slop.
Reminds me of how many early indie games relied on procedural generation but people got tired of it over time.
Plenty of games still rely on procedural generation to different degrees. It’s a huge selling point in many cases, and in others, it’s a pillar of their genre.
You mean like how people cherish hand drawn animation over digital? Cause except for some niche projects, the majority don’t.
People shit on the Hobbit trilogy for the CGI compared to the live action of the LOTR trilogy. This stuff does happen.
It’s not like they can really avoid it. AI assisted tools will become a standard in the future (“productivity has to go up” after all) and there’s a good chance Valve already received some feedback from AAA publishers on that matter, since they’ll be the main players utilizing such tech.
The good thing here is the exsitance of a disclaimer on store pages, as it will allow people to decide for themselves, and the ability to report content straight from in-game overlay.
Full on ban was never a realistic option.
I’ll add that a blanket ban isn’t necessarily a positive thing, either. AI could be a component of developing unique NPCs, evolving bosses, changing economies, missions/quests, or procedurally generated levels (for example).
Obviously, at least some of that content would still need to pass human play testing, so it’s not like humans would be completely removed, but imagine if players had gameplay experiences that were entirely unique to them or changed based on non-RNG factors.
I agree, though, that reporting the use of AI and how it’s utilized is important for people to make informed decisions about how they spend their money.
Oh, totally. I didn’t mean to imply otherwise.
Personally I’d love to see a new take on Daggerfall using AI for features you mentioned (though it would have to be an “all in” affair as Bethesda’s approach to randomly generated content these days is… not particularly impressive).
I was imagining Oblivion with AI elements, but yeah! Open world RPGs seem particularly suited to this kind of thing.
You could probably make a case that Oblivion already has AI elements. It just wasn’t advertised as the type of “AI” available now.
I mean it doesn’t matter how a game gets made to me if it’s great. If there are a huge pile of shitty games, I just won’t engage. Same as it ever was.
As much as I don’t like it (I think art should be something hand crafted by humans) nothing Valve can do. It would take an insane amount of resources to vet all these AI games coming.
I would love to have NPCs have conversational AI.
@PerogiBoi @jherazob it would be interesting but require a lot of development to make sure the NPCs either didn’t know about spoiler information which may break the plot or don’t just hallucinate answers, which may mislead the player.
“How do you get through the haunted forest?” “You need x item to get through the haunted forest” “are you sure?” “Yes thats how heros get through the forest” the item in question doesn’t even exist in the game or has no bearing on the quest.
You might be interested in https://inworld.ai/origins , a detective game where all the characters can be interviewed in natural language and respond with AI. They seem to be doing a pretty good job so far
yes this! i’ve seen a number of AI npc skyrim mod videos… I … I need this.
Even if they did hallucinate answers, it wouldn’t be the first game that relies on the “unreliable narrator” trope.
@Ferk @jherazob @PerogiBoi good point, unreliable narrator is one thing, but could harm game enjoyment especially if it’s unintended or harmful. It’s one thing to retell the history of a region with a bias or mis-remembering events, or characters lying because it’s their nature to lie “evil character” but it would get annoying if every character could convincingly just make up unhelpful rubbish, or spoil a plot twist in the game.
@Ferk @jherazob @PerogiBoi I’m not arguing against LLM or conversational AI in games, it could really breathe life into a game if your choices really could have organic responses, but these tools have a lot of pitfalls that scripted responses don’t have, and the dev team will need to be aware of it to not have unintended consequences.
That isn’t the same as “made with AI tools”
Such AI integration will be separated into categories of “pre-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools during development” (e.g., using DALL-E for in-game images) and “live-generated” content that is “created with the help of AI tools while the game is running” (e.g., using Nvidia’s AI-powered NPC technology).
Both are covered by the policies the article talks about, and both were arguably against the rules previously
Reading the entire article, it seems that they still want to tread very carefully with this whole AI ordeal. Valve isn’t just opening the floodgates, as the title would make it seem.
While yes, a healthy dose of skepticism is good to have, I think if I had to trust someone to navigate AI in gaming in the gamers’ favour, I would pick Valve. Or maybe I’m overestimating Gabe’s involvement in the happenings of the legal department’s section that is currently responsible for AI stuff.
EDIT: Shame on me, @[email protected] , I think I had already seen the PMG video about the Steam Marketplace and its lootboxes and the gambling sites. But because I neither play these titles nor participate in the marketplace, I forgot that these serious issues exist. And the documentary concerning actually working at Valve rocked my stance back and forth. On one hand, I love the concept, but there are big problems here as well.
Once more, a genuine thank you for pointing me at these two video documentaries, even if I had already seen one of them.
I seriously don’t understand how people can still hold Valve up as this paragon of virtue, defender of gamers everywhere.
Oh, People Make Games have not one but two vids on Valve? I never noticed that, thanks. I’ll watch them after work and possibly (because PMG really are good at the whole journalising stuff) change my stance on it.
Well, you know, holders of virtual monopolies are well known for being benficient paragons of prosocial goodness. At least, whenever their owners are known by their screen names and they produced a beloved product once, a quarter century ago.
That last half-sentence really isn’t in good faith. Just in the past couple years Valve made three “beloved products” that come to my mind immediately. Valve Index (the VR set), SteamDeck (the handheld PC) and the Steam Controller (although that one could be a bit older than “just in the past couple years”).
I understand the statement is about in-game stuff, but I’m guessing a lot of game developers have been using GitHub Copilot and this kind of “AI tools” for months.
Given how many companies have been embracing AI tools it was really only a matter of time until they were allowed on Steam. At least you’ll know before hand if you’re going into a game with AI-generated content.
So we are moving from shovelware to excavatorware?
No, we are just moving with the times.
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Those disclosures will be shared on the Steam store pages for these games, which should help players who want to avoid certain types of AI content.
But disclosure will not be sufficient for games that use live-generated AI for “Adult Only Sexual Content,” which Valve says it is “unable to release… right now.”
The status of those training models was a primary concern for Valve last summer when the company cited the “legal uncertainty relating to data used to train AI models,” but such concerns don’t even merit a mention in today’s new policies.
Over the last year or so, many game developers have started to embrace a variety of AI tools in the creation of everything from background art and NPC dialogue to motion capture and voice generation.
But some developers have taken a hardline stance against anything that could supplant the role of humans in game making.
“We don’t ban games for using new technologies,” Sweeney wrote on social media.
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