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Square Enix’s president says it will be ‘aggressive in applying’ AI
(www.videogameschronicle.com)
this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2024
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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.
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).
Bingo. AI is shockingly good at building simple things, helping with direct questions about items. It cannot replace humans in its current state.
At this point it's CEO bluster just like the blockchain, where the suits are talking about technology like they personally handcrafted it while the actual engineers are sitting in the back of the room thinking "uh, there's no way it can do that".
I think we're going to see a couple hilarious cycles of some shit thinks they can replace humans with AI, fail spectacularly, and then quietly go back.
I honestly don't think they'll even quietly go back. It's clear "customer service" is becoming something that isn't considered a return on value, so they're shutting them down all over. Customer service will be the number one thing replaced with AI and they won't go back on that.
Customer service for the last 20-30 years has absolutely been nothing but a shield for corporations to hide behind while screwing their customers. Low paid phone jockeys have to deal with people furious at being fucked over by conglomerates like Comcast. There is no way to contact anyone further up the chain, and that is deeply purposeful.
They record all the phone calls, but they refuse to learn anything that benefits the customer from them. All they do is deploy psychological tricks to try to get the customer to be happy while not actually rectifying the problem. It's always a purposeful half-measure that has been deeply researched to calm people down and accept the big unlubed dildo in their ass like they should.
So yeah, the "customer service voice" will be long gone to be replaced with increasing shitty "customer service AI" with no human to talk to, and if you get lost in the shuffle and put in a digital black hole, well, "go fuck yourself" is clearly what they'll be telling you. They already pretty much do this (especially Google) but it will become increasingly pronounced and difficult.
Clawing back anything that corporations have stolen from you will increasingly become an exercise in total futility as you're stuck in an endless AI loop that refuses to give you options that actually address your issue.
You do realize it isn't staying the same, right?
There is no status quo with AI.
It's within literal months that leaps are occurring that defy most expert expectations and predictions.
While yes, creative writing is not part of the target of where models are improving right now (and there are IMO clear mistakes being made with foundational models contributing to that poor performance), we're probably less than one dev cycle from the best AI outperforming an above average video game writer with institutional integration of the models.
And really, people thinking this is going to put writers out of business are missing the true value add for publishers.
You'll see the same amount of writers as before. What will change is the amount of writing.
Being able to have a core writing team do the normal work they do of writing out main and side quests and then feeding all that writing into a model spitting out side NPC dialogue fitting in with the events taking place allows developers to make their world come alive in ways previously only accessible to the largest budgets in the industry like RDR2.
This also allows games that are successful to transition into more of a live service product without needing to have a massive audience.
For most live service games, you need as many people as possible playing to justify dedicating resources to continued development, or you need a subscription fee. But niche products with a dedicated fan base which aren't overly popular are too small to justify continuous content development.
With AI that equation changes. More games have the opportunity to keep players engaged longer for continuing adventures when a smaller team can use generative systems to flesh out the product.
Everyone praises No Man's Sky for their continued development with a team of about a dozen putting more and more content out, but the other side of the coin is that they can only successfully deliver updates that feel weighty because they are leveraging procgen to extend their efforts.
Imagine the next version of FF online where not only is there a core main story everyone experiences, but there are also individualized stories woven into it that are shaped around your interactions. Where every NPC can be spoken to and any one of them might lead to your next individualized adventure. A world that feels at once epic and shared with millions of other players while also personal and unique just for you.
Even if the individual writing wasn't as planned out as world event scenario writing from lead writers, I'd sure as hell prefer to spend $16/mo on a world with little repetition and endless adventures than a world that only has a hundred hours of story every year and is mostly running the same things over and over in between waiting for small bursts of content updates.
AI makes perfect sense for any live service provider, and Square Enix has one of the most successful live service products to date. Of course they are going to be investing into it as it rapidly improves.
Live service games are shite and you shouldn't be looking for excuses to play them.
Lol. "MMOs are trash and you shouldn't play them."
I think sometimes people arguing on the Internet don't even know the definitions of the things they are arguing about.
Few people consider FFXIV trash.
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.