I see a lot of people bashing the use of AI in games, and I understand where they are coming from. DLSS 5 and AI generated visuals are really strange so far, and I don't know if it will ever be something more acceptable.

However, there's one aspect about AI that really excites me and I can't wait to see where this will take us. Since my childhood I always dreamed about a game where you can be free to interact with characters and create your own story. Until some years ago, that was looking like a distant dream, but after trying some AI games on Steam, I see that it may be closer than I thought.

Of course, some of those games are really boring and have no goal other than "talk whatever comes to your mind". The first game I played was "Whispers from the Star", and while it was an interesting experience, I feel like most of the game was just about chatting and watching a linear plot. However, after trying "AI2U: With you till the end", my opinion changed.

While the game is still in Early Access, I saw a huge potential for the use of this kind of AI in gaming. You are free to talk whatever comes to your mind with the characters, and their reactions are sometimes unpredictable. They even react to the environment, interacting with objects you show them, going to places, and making comments on things you do on screen.

Of course, this tech is still at their first steps, but I already like where this is going.

Thinking about an open world RPG where you are totally free to interact with the characters, environment, and a world that notices what you're doing is just like a dream to me, and I feel like AI can do something about that.

So, yeah, I'm Ok with games like AI2U, and I'm excited for what it can bring to gaming in the future.

I know, you can trash me now, but that won't change my idea that, when doing the right thing, some AI can create promising stuff.

No thanks. I like my experience to be curated and high quality.

AI usage is completely fine to things like coding and bug fixing

In my experience Claude is able to produce much higher quality code than most (if not almost all) developers, because the model is trained with the best coding standards from public repositories, standards close to impossible to be religiously applied by all members of a team for production-level coding

Being against AI in software development is like being against using machines in agriculture or in manufacturing

It's nothing new either, see Spookitalk in Starship Titanic (1998)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960974

All it needs now is speech to text added on, which is already everywhere, and you can have conversations with characters. FS2020 already used Text to Speech for ATC interactions but you couldn't talk back, select responses instead.

Anyway do you really want to talk to game characters? I usually skip through dialog as fast as I can, subtitles on, read ahead, skip to next line, select response. So much more efficient and faster than talking!

I never skip dialogs myself. But it doesn't matter if it's text or voice in my opinion.

I play AI2U with my keyboard in fact.

Fuck all Gen AI.

Ah, so it really is back to 1998! Actually spookitalk was all prerecorded responses and the 'AI' part was the natural language parser to select the right response (or nothing).

Anyway these talk engines go back to Eliza in the 60s

The issue with complex games is keeping the complexity manageable. But I would love to see someone try. Many times I have wished I could have simply asked an NPC for directions, advice or simply tell them what I already did / found.

But then this wouldn't happen anymore :p

People aren't opposed to gen ai because it looks strange. I get you're excited for it, but this isn't even the core criticism of the tech.

Using gen AI to simulate voices, art, narrative responses etc., actively harms the industries of people that would be involved in those aspects, without even taking the environmental cost into account.

There's definitely some interesting ideas at play with, such as the ever-evolving dialogue/ narrative. But, there aren't the results of some kind of human ingenuity. Like some other responses, I personally would also prefer my games to remain curated by human creativity. 

I support AI in gaming too, without any limitations set in stone either - in theory. In practice, my main concern is how the training material for AI has been picked with little regard for ownership/copyrigh, and last I heard, that was still legally a grey area at best. As for quality, the end result will speak for itself (for better or worse). I suspect for many aspects, AI is perfectly adequate - like do I really care if some of the most widely used textures in a game, e.g. many ground textures, are created by humans? No, I don't think I do. I do think quality is still often an issue with AI, but in many (not all!) cases, it's also probably good enough that most of us will never pay attention to it unless going out of our way just to look for it.

As for jobs or art, I don't think AI is the issue. For all I care, AI can replace all the jobs, and it's up to the society to figure out how people are going to make a living and how they can be happy. If we think some kind of an AI tax is a good solution, I'm all for it. If it's something else, that's fine too. The same goes for art: the society should support the creation of art to the extend it's deemed valuable (and to be clear, I think it is valuable). If AI disrupts the society, the society should adapt. Regardless, if AI brings efficiency benefits (which is probably questionable in many fields), AI will come, or we will fall behind the likes of China, because the likes of China will adapt AI and they will find ways to keep the population happy enough. Adapt or survive is what we have to do, assuming AI doesn't turn out to be a bubble (which it still might).

This... doesn't match my experience at all. AI is definitely useful for programming but it's because of everything else it can do besides actual coding that it's useful for: figuring things out, explaining them, test automation... But for actual coding, it still does really stupid mistakes and tends to ignore existing coding conventions from the project. For things like games, stupid mistakes in particular might be something that are acceptable, but where I work, that's simply not acceptable. The code AI produces is also often overly verbose, which actually makes it harder to understand.

Also, as far as I know, AI has generally been trained with most code that's available, not just best, so it kind of tends to produce 'average' code. Of course that's still better than most developers seem to be capable of doing (at least based on my limited experience).

Regarding the training using all code (including shit code), that are metrics applied during the training phase to qualify what is the output of the model. Even if there is lots of trash code in training phase the learning algorithm will strongly punish low quality answers (in this case, shit code) and give good scores to high quality answers (high quality code)

I strongly recommend using the Premium version of Claude. It has ability to understand contextual project patterns and generate new code following the same principles, even if you need to explicitly tells it to follow the coding standards already present in the source code. The level of actual coding erros is minimal for almost everything outside front-end development strongly related to HTML rendering and user interaction (among other more niche and esoteric applications)

For automation, backend development, machine learning and anything strongly logic-based it's much more efficient, fast and produces much less bugs than humans 

I'm using Gemini 3 in my current project (mostly data engineering code) and it's absurd how you can quickly write shit code to teach Gemini what bussines logic you actually want and it will change your slop to bug-free production-ready code instantly. Team has being using it 5 months and the number of bugs related to actual coding were reduced to literal zero. Unit testing has been rendered completely useless, because the AI already cover edge cases and side effects

All bugs now are related to badly defined (or badly understood) bussines logic, or problems on input data. Really game changer