New research shows over 90% of gamers find playing with AI-powered NPCs to be "enjoyable and rewarding"

This is what I've been saying ever since I first played around with GPT-2 for a while (I found GPT-3 and later versions actually rather boring in comparison, and they don't even write any better meaningless Dada poetry than ancient GPT-2): #transformer type #LLM powered NPCs can make gaming so much more fun. Just use rather small LLMs that have been trained on all the lore and run locally on the GPU, and you get NPCs to whom you can actually talk. Also, if they hallucinate non-existing lore, real humans often do things like that as well. Give every inportant NPC a couple of scripted lines which contain the important information, and use an LLM so the player can (through their character) talk to the NPCs about topics that aren't in the script.

If you write such an NPC you put a list of things that character happens to know or believe in the NPC prompt, just after the general character description part of the prompt, and as soon as the player deviates from the scripted parts, the LLM drives the conversation. You will most likely have a UI that gives you screen mask with separate text boxes: Character description, description of the character's knowledge and beliefs, description of the character's situation, and a box filled with all conversations with any player character so far. If you as a player character talk to some random stranger from the street, the LLM generates everything. Natural feeling speech synthesis has been a thing for a couple of years now, just like generating a natural sounding human voice from nothing but a prompt describing the speaker (age, gender, accent, personality, current emotional state). It is therefore possible to give each randomly generated NPC their own voice, their own personality, each of them completely unique yet completely generic. A mesh #diffusion type 3D model generator can be used to automatically generate variations of original 3D models from a prompt, generating slightly changed hairstyles, clothes, jewelry, tools, etc. on the fly when needed, using the GPU.

All the AI models needed for this can be made small enough to run on the GPU, although you'll probably need a computer in the >900€ range to run it, or maybe more like >1200€ now that #BigAI are buying all the hardware. If people can't get any decent gaming hardware, computer games will become either much simpler than today or very much dependent on external computing centres to do much of the compute, even if they don't much AI. We don't even need humongous AI models to make gaming better, only small ones that do one thing good enough for the game. Of course NVdia will do everything they can to monopolise the gaming AI by putting their own models in their GPU firmware, with game developers having to pay fees in order to be able to train their own LoRAs so they can actually use the NVidia AI for their own games. However, open source machine learning models aren't restricted in that way, and they can also be used in games.

Oh, by the way, many games already use latent diffusion type models for graphics. This is how you get realtime raytracing with lots of detail in 2k or even 4k and things like that: Part of the GPU is rendering the scene with accurate lighting in low resolution, then the AI is used for upscaling and adding/reconstructing the finer details. The AI in question has been trained on high quality renderings of the same scenes. You need to make a couple of seconds of Pixar quality animation from each scene in the game, train a LoRA for each scene for a video upscaler/filter, and then run the low resolution, low detail raytraced video stream through the upscaler, that's basically how they do it. The actual workflow is much more complicated, but it's not really important if you just want to understand the basic idea. The trick is just to render accurately what needs to be accurate, like lighting, and then use AI to generate a good enough approximation of everything else.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/new-research-shows-over-90-of-gamers-find-playing-with-ai-powered-npcs-to-be-enjoyable-and-rewarding

After scraping all that #copyright, #bigai deserves this #karma. And We The People get all the open weight models. Hey, publishers are not your friends either, remember the #mpaa trying to send Moms to prison? #distillation is all kinds of comeuppance. #AI #LLM It all is leaking into the #publicdomain !!!

https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/14/ai_risk_distillation_attacks/

#BigAI is #climate poison. It steals from the future of all life.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/jan/29/gas-power-ai-climate

An enviro defense group reached out asking for my security take on using BigAI in activism work. After giving them the take (basically "don't"), I took liberty to talk about the ethics of using it in the first instance, especially in the context of human rights and climate activism.

Sharing here in case useful on the same grounds elsewhere.

#bigai #bigtech #climate #humanrights

I have posted about how #AI, well #bigai, has been won by #Google. Not only #gemini, it is their infrastructure. But forget that. Here is a beautiful video about how #openai MUST become #Facebook, well #meta, well, #rayban, err, point is, #Zuckerberg, a guy who once lucked into the future is no visionary, and not even a good fraud. All while serial #fraud #samaltman is aimed straight at Mark's empire. Watch out Zuck, #chatgpt is coming for you, buddy.

https://youtu.be/C7Z11ghwevQ?si=Qb3qK9fGhAfN96wA

Heed:
The best way to stay on top of the resistance is to join/lead the resistance.

#anthropic #openai #metaai #bigai #superpac

Generative AI is not necessarily emancipatory or liberating. It has a significant environmental impact, violates copyrights, destroys jobs, and in fact increases job insecurity, is neo-colonial, feeds pigs of #BigTech and #BigAI, and even the definition of open source AI with OSAID is too flexible. There are much better and more useful things to do with AI and Generative AI than to maintain a productivist logic.

Tools are meant to help, not replace nor destroy.

#AI #GenAI #opensource #VieDeDev