And I started thinking that it would be cool to put the magic system of a game in the control of an LLM. Pivotal decisions of what's going to happen at some given point get passed to the LLM in a particular type of markup, with the answer of what happens in the world coming back in the same markup. You can give it guidelines, but skilled players can get around the guidelines or learn how to trick the system, and also, there is inherent fuzziness to the edges of how things happen, and inherent jank and risk to the system because you can never completely sure what is going to happen based on what you thought would happen.
All the things that make modern AI not a good thing to put into your systems suddenly become advantages from the perspective of immersing the player into the magic system without it being completely systematized. The magic goes back to being magical. You can literally have someone type something for what the incantation they're using is, and it may get more powerful if they put a lot of emoting into the box, or they can literally try something that isn't anywhere in the system and just "see if it works"... but also, you can't quite be sure even what common stuff is going to do, 100% of the time.
I never got serious enough about the idea to try it out but I thought it had the potential to be super-cool.
We knew this was coming, but I wonder at what point it will be practical. Yes, image generation is a fascinating approach. We can see super realistic scenes generated by A.I.—with no traditional 3-D rendering necessary. It just generates what it thinks it’s supposed to. What your human eye should see.
I do think this is likely the near-future of basically anything artificial. But…
Compare to a team of developers who design a game, its characters, its story, and its environment. The money, time, and effort. Compare that to what it would cost to develop a game with A.I., the overall processing power and cost.
At this very moment in time, of course, whatever comes out of it will be crappy and weird. It would be more expensive overall. However, we can’t really expect it would stay that way.
A.I. will absolutely be the future of gaming and virtual reality. There is no stopping it or beating it that I can see. I don’t yet know how to feel about that.