Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI
“In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity”…
Welp, it's officially a hype bubble like cryptocurrency/NFTs.
Which is also what the last CEO of Square Enix rode on. This is either investor appeasement or indeed improvement of quality with these tools or, and far more likely both buzzwords and producing crap to cut costs.
Unfortunately AI's impact is real. This isn't a hype thing; this is a people losing their jobs thing
I mean, it is and it isn't. On one hand, yes people will probably lose their jobs with these tools supposed to filled the gaps.
But that doesn't mean the AI tools are actually anywhere near as competent as a human, and it will result in watered-down, anodyne, and to be more blunt, just boring art and writing.
Corporate will use the tools because they're "good enough," but we all know they're really not good enough. They're just one more way to cut costs at the expense of user experience and employee workload (the employees that are left being expected to do more work).
For every job that AI kills, you need at least 2 techs to train the AI. This isn't meant to say "go get a job as an AI tech if you're worried about job security" it's more of a "businesses will see the obvious lack of ROI and vision and refuse to implement it".
It absolutely is. Although, putting aside the obvious ethical debates, I will say that least AI has some practical uses. Crypto-currency and NFTs felt a lot like a solution looking for a problem, and while that can be true of some implementations of AI, there are a lot of valid uses for it.
But yeah, companies rushing to use AI like this, and making statements like this, just screams that they're trying to persuade investors they're "ahead of the curve", and is absolutely indicative of a hype bubble. If it wasn't a hype bubble, they'd either be quietly exploring it externally and not putting out statements like this, or they're be putting out statements excitedly talking specifics about their novel and clever implementations of AI.
I know the Square from my childhood is long dead, but it would be nice if they could stop desecrating it's corpse.
The 5 downvotes are from crypto holders or Sam Bankman-Fried's alt accounts.
I wish they'd aggressively apply it to replacing middle-top management. The jobs that don't add anything except a lot of money being siphoned off, anyways.
I welcome our robot middle-lords.
AI is such an annoying buzzword at this point. "oh have you heard of AI? We need AI!" Say every industry, and probably even the dairy industry.
We have had costumers REQUIRING that we have AI in our projects in order to sign... With no additional explanation. Sure, here you have a irrelevant kmeans clustering of your SKUs, 100K please.
In all fairness, those customers that knew what they were taking about were great. We did really cool stuff, they just need to understand what they want to answer and be able to provide the data.
Yes, my boss came to me and said exactly this "we need AI in our product" and I asked "what do we want to do with AI?" I'm still waiting for a definitive answer, in the meantime I'm supposed to do the technical concept without even knowing what our goal is lol.
But why not? If an industry isn't already fully automated, AI can be considered no?
The 'why not' is not from the perspective of the industry - it's from the perspective of the customer. Can you automate several tasks by using AI during game development? Sure. Will it translate into a better price or a better experience for the end-user? Let's see.
Let's say you give AI the unimportant tasks. You manage to reduce a lot of waste and maybe optimize your workflows. You improve efficiency. Maybe you can make more games in a shorter time span. Will you be willing to sell the games for less than the standard $60? I find this unlikely. This impacts me as a consumer - why don't I see a reduction in cost, if it now costs less? Why am I still paying the same price for something that your improved tools can make at a fraction of the cost? Didn't my previous purchases already give you enough money to invest in AI? Where is my benefit?
Let's say you give AI the big tasks - you make it write story, generate graphics or code. But AI's current level doesn't allow for originality, or even cohesive thought. You'll be churning out garbage until your AI is actual intelligence. This again impacts me as a consumer - why am I sponsoring your experiments with my money? Why am I paying the same for garbage as I would for quality content? Will you share your end-game profit with me? If I buy your first games to support your endeavor, do I get the next versions for free? No. I don't. I'm just wasting money on inferior products, and when they become superior - I will reap no benefits.
So - sure, let the companies throw themselves at this. But I'm not investing my own cash in their research.
No. Hence why it's a buzzword. The CEOs don't know how it works, just that it somehow reduces payroll. For AI to do what you want it to do, you have to train it on hundreds of thousands of relevant data points over many weeks/months/years. That takes manpower, and consequently, payroll.
Also, games are supposed to be art. An expression of the humans creating it. Automating the games industry would make any MBA grad jizz in their pants, but it's antithetical to the survival of the medium and, consequently, the industry. You want nothing but freemium games meant to milk kids of their parents money? Nothing but shitty mobile games and live services from now on then.
Just like companies aggressively used NFTs and we know how well that worked out.
This smells like investor-baiting. Studios don't really need to announce that they're going "aggressive" in using a certain tool.
Cool. I'll continue to aggressively avoid Square Enix games like I have since 2017.
I’ve had zero interest in anything Square Enix makes except the new Super Mario RPG, because otherwise it’s all weird ass weeb shit with the most convoluted storylines that need an undergraduate degree in the lore to understand it. I doubt AI will make that less of a problem.
This is actually what I look forward to most in gaming in the next decade or two. The implementation of AI that can be assigned goals and motivations instead of scripted to every detail. Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn't have to think of beforehand. If they can integrate LLM type AI into games successfully, it'll be a total game changer in terms of being able to accommodate player choice and freedom.
This is something I used to be excited for but I only have been losing interest the more I hear about AI. What are the chances this will lead to moving character arcs or profound messages? The way LLMs are today, the best we can hope for is Radiant Quests Plus. Not sure a game driven by AIs rambling semi-coherently forever will be more entertaining than something written by humans with a clear vision.
I wonder if they'll spend as much time defining what an LLM shouldn't be talking about/doing as they would defining what a non-LLM should be talking about/doing.
Characters in games with whom we as players can have believable conversations that the devs didn’t have to think of beforehand.
Correction: characters in games will have soulless cookie cutter paint by numbers responses that sound hollow and lifeless. AI doesn't generate, it only remixes.
Also, have you interacted with a LLM? They're full of restrictions and they're not very good at finding recent data. How would that implement in a video game? Devs would have to train the LLM to basically annihilate their own job as writers. Which still wouldn't really save the dev company/publisher any money or time.
i dont quite think that that is what they meant here.
the article was talking about productivity a lot,
and the current ai hype is centered arround generative ai.
i think what they where talking about here,
is using ai to speed up stuff like moddeding and terrain generation.
stuff similar to the second half of this presentation ( starting arround 3:30)
Unfortunately Ubisoft is ahead of the curve and is using AI to handle "barks" in its writing process to accomplish this. It's not going very well.
Honestly for open world RPGs I can see AI used for making the world feel more alive and creating side quests on the fly. But it really needs to be done right.
That's still not really AI, it's just procedural generation wrapped in a new buzz word.
Side quests on the fly? That already exists. Oblivion, Fallout 3, Skyrim, and Fallout 4 had radiant AI quests. I would much rather have a game that was hand made by humans where the quests that exist are the quests that were designed. Or, in the case of radiant AI, heavily guardrailed randomness.
The only radiant quests I can think of in Oblivion were after you had finished the Dark Brotherhood or Arena quest lines. I don't remember any other random quests from that one.
Didnt he also say square was going to aggressively get into NFTs until the overwhelming negative response cockslapped the fuck out of him?
I swear, Its getting to the point where I miss SquareSoft and Enix as individual companies, and the SNES as an era for RPGs.
Hmm do y’all still believe the video game industry needed to make cuts and fire workers to the degree they did this year because of overshooting growth with covid? Yes I am sure it is part of it but why is nobody talking about the AI elephant in the room. The video game industry is in the midst of trying to strong arm workers into accepting a fundamental reduction in their quality of life because they can use the threat of replacing workers with AI. It doesn’t matter if it actually works to replace workers with AI, it only matters that it appears fairly plausible for it to pay off for massive companies trying to extract every bit of profit from video games they can.
I rwas this as them saying they'll be cutting jobs left and right using an AI based solution to keep more profits for the top instead of making game characters smarter
Where did you get the sense SE is like that? Or their new CEO operates that way?
"In the short term, our goal will be to enhance our development productivity"
Translation: We are gonna fire so many expensive developers, designers and artists!
Ha ha ha this dumb chord.
“We are going so hard into the AI synergies. It is going to blow away your quarterly projections about our growth centers and user engagements.” Continued rambling about things for another 20 minutes.
End result will be NPC’s with sometimes better conversation tree’s and micro transactions that are randomized based on the whims of same vague bot no one can articulate the functional details of.
I'd say the end result will be a broken mess delivered behind schedule by a team of juniors.
Just when I thought their games couldn't be any worse