Nintendo Refuses to Use Generative AI in Their Games｜Game8

Nintendo is probably the most anti emulation company. They tried to make emulation completely illegal, they sued yuzu (the devs did some things that encouraged that) and made the devs pay a couple million and never develop emulators again. They are also the reason why dolphin didn’t come to steam as they wanted to sue valve if they allowed it on their platform. They also took down various tools that allowed one to rip your own switch games. I think they are for the second point

Pretty sure they're on the pro side of the latter

Can you share what specifically you're referring to?

Activision, Ubisoft, and EA, all multibillion game dev company, said they'll be using generative AI to make their game, so no, it's not really obvious. It's also mentioned in the article

Nintendo's stance differs from that of other gaming giants. Earlier this year, Ubisoft introduced Project Neural Nexus NEO NPCs, which uses generative AI to simulate in-game conversations and interactions with NPCs.

Similarly, Square Enix President Takashi Kiryu views generative AI as a business opportunity to create new content using cutting-edge technologies. Electronic Arts (EA) has also embraced generative AI, with CEO Andrew Wilson predicting that over half of EA's development processes will benefit from advancements in generative AI.

The investor probably heard it's a trendy thing that can make better profit, so they asked nintendo about it in the briefing.

We haven't really seen high quality art that uses AI as part of the creative process yet, but this could be similar to the animation studios of the 90s who refused to use computers. They're all out of business now.

The reality is, generative AI is a really powerful tool, so they will be at a disadvantage going forward if they don't use it.

When a bunch of RPGs start doing that, they are all just going to start feeling the same.

Not gonna happen. Not really.

So far research suggests the guardrail and hallucination problems are unsolvable, and we are seeing diminishing returns from increasing the complexity of these systems.

Hence devs will never have the necessary control required to author an actual narrative. NPCs will end up talking about mechanics that don't exist, or saying things that contradict an overrall narrative.

Even with actual people, if you just throw them in a room and have the improv a world into existence, it never ends up quite as good as a properly authored narrative.

And LLMs are nowhere near achieving the level of internal consistency required for something like the worlds of Elden Ring or Mass Effect.

Baldur's Gate 3 contains truly staggering amounts of writing, multiple times that of classical literary works. The hallucination problem means that if all that were AI generated, small parts of it might pass inspection, but trying to immerse yourself in it as a fictional world would have you noticing immersion breaking continuity errors left and right.

I want to see that too. Guaranteed to go off the rails aat the moment. Like what does the NPC reply to "I be fartin' loud as fuck on metal chairs"?

I've seen some cool controlled demos though.

Edit: ugh, I lost myself in this reply. It's just geeking about the future what could be possible, mostly not worth reading if you value your time.

This is one of the most exciting developments to me, the actual AI of bots or NPCs. Not only for RPG games, I can also envision multiplayer games to be more fun playing offline with bots. Imagine they act like humans, with their hearings and trying to trick you out in Mario Kart, Street Fighter and Counter Strike. Obviously we are long way from this, but this is very exciting to me.

Also GTA where people act normal and do stuff humans would probably try too is exciting as well. In RPGs imagine you hear about a hero in a village who defends its town and you recruit him, finding out its just a normal NPC for other players, but got strong because it found a holy weapon you dropped near to him in the beginning of the game. Just totally wild idea I know, but what if the future of games (probably 50 years from now... sheesh) is extremely rich and dynamic? I have no idea how this vision could be accomplished without AI and always server connection to power servers...

They mentioned IP right, and since Japanese police do arrest and charge people for infringing copyright, and since some artist do recognize their work being smashed together to create something else, they might skip this thing for the foreseeable future just to be on the safe side. They know because they're the one that send police to arrest people.

Animal Crossing could benefit from it, but not in its current form tho

The article talks about how they are ok with using AI for things outside generating images, texts and so. For example, they are fine using the rudimentary AI of any typical enemy in one of their games. So I expect procedural generation that does not rely on trained bayesian network models is ok for them.

It looks like they just seem to be concerned about the legality of it... so they might just start using it as soon as the legal situation for AI models is made safe.

I think they do, even if they don't say it publicly. They recognize that they have very talented artists and don't need AI for anything really