cross-posted from: https://piefed.ca/c/games@lemmy.world/p/1004331/ai-driving-game-players-are-burning-through-so-many-tokens-its-developer-had-to-take-out-a
The developer behind Teach My Little Sister How to Drive, a driving instruction sim where you instruct a generative-AI-powered, dynamic NPC, has been spending $1,000 dollars a day to keep the demo working.
Teach My Little Sister How to Drive relies on Google Gemini and ChatGPT to power its dynamic NPC, which follows your instructions, reacts, and disobeys, but the developers are looking into ways of allowing local AI models to step in for players “with sufficiently capable PCs.”
They’re using two cloud-based models for a task that is usually handled by if-then-else statements? I think I know who programmed this NPC…
Why use an if statement that compiles down to a conditional branch instruction and takes a nanosecond or two to execute, when you can outsource the decision making to a paid cloud service with expensive hardware that multiplies matrices with billions of elements to get your answer?
NPCs in games may be one of the very few actual good uses for AI. But not using the cloud obviously.
NPCs in games may be one of the very few actual good uses for AI
No. No, they’re not.
Hey, you. You’re finally awake. You were trying to cross the border, right? Walked right into that Imperial ambush, same as us, and that thief over there.
Yes, exactly. You know, I really wanted to cross that border to reach my family. My mother is very sick and needs my help. I brought some things along to help her, too… Some Trama Root and a Thistle Branch. The only thing left I need for her is a python script that reads a six column csv file that contains the start and end dates of our business quarters, the locations, the spending and income of those branches and their name and builds a nice graph to visualise the development each of those branches went through over the last ten years.
I thought we all learned this with the Batman Arkham games. “Real” AI would have made those games unplayable Souls-like nightmares as the enemies learn every single trick or something. We only got the dark knight power fantasy because of the very basic state machines they used. Like I teach them being praised at the time.
I think that it would be highly dependant on how the AI model is trained and what genre of game it is implemented into. For example, games that more heavily rely on dialogue or social interaction.
Take Danganronpa, which is a series if linear narrative games about students trapped in a school forced to kill each other (and get way with it) to escape. You as the player have to investigate each murder and arrive at who the culprit was to win the game. They are fun on your first playthrough, but on any subsequent playthrough you already know the solutions. Like playing Clue but the game only ever has one outcome: Mr. Green, in the Library, with the Lead Pipe. You wouldn’t even have to open the game box and you already know. Absolutely zero replayability.
With an AI in such a game, you could have a new gamemode, like a New Game+, which players can play after the hand-crafted story. This is where I think something like a very carefully trained LLM could be useful, because it could create these kinds of situations at random, making them unpredictable and therefore adding replay value. Now, I don’t think AI is currently sufficiently advanced for this use, but if it continues to develop I could see that niche making good use of it.
A locally run model with quest components and npc dialog as its training data could be tuned in such a way to make radiant quests more unique and engaging. The scenario you’re putting forward assumes a frame around a general purpose LLM, which would be a very bad idea (as the OP article shows.)
