1d ago

Leaked video shows PlayStation toying with Aloy from Horizon as an AI chatbot

www.rockpapershotgun.com Leaked video shows PlayStation toying with Aloy from Horizon as an AI chatbot

Sony are experimenting with AI characters who'll speak to the player using OpenAI and Chat-GPT, according to leaked footage of Aloy from Horizon Forbidden West.

18 comments

The irony of Aloy being the voice of a machine is completely lost on those clowns.
- The guys in business suits consider a "win" just sales and not really public sentiment or anything else that also matters as much (if not more).
  This is why business people and actual devs/artists/etc that work on the product should generally run things separately.
- Yeah that’s really crazy

I feel so bad for anybody creative in that industry :/ imagine being a writer for the Horizon series and seeing some fucking suit plugging AI into a character you've put months of work into and going "look what ChatGPT can do!"
I get it bad enough at work but fuck, that's heartbreaking.

This trend of every company trying to push AI into every product they have needs to end

Does anybody actually want that, ever?
- I imagine game studios are out of ideas so they are pitching, “AI NPC’s” to investors. This would also save money on voice acting and writing. If Rockstar’s GTA VI does bad then I’m counting that as the final nail in the AAA coffin.
  
  Interesting point, although I don't see how you'd manage to run modern TTS (the models can get very large, and that's per voice; as an example Parler-TTS's mini model is 800Mb, the HQ model is 2.3Gb - for one voice) + a LLM for content synthesis on any personal hardware, console or not. The storage requirements alone would make that grossly infeasible.
- crickets
- It was kinda neat when they did it with Cortana. But then they removed all the Halo references and swapped the original voice actress with a generic voice synth, but kept the name for some reason. So what was once a charming little digital toy turned into a half-baked AI assistant that doesn't do what you want half the time.
- I could see AI interactions being interesting in some types of proceduraly generated games but I think the novelty would wear off pretty quick
  
  Thing is, I really don't see how that'd work for any useful scenario. Even in this very limited case, natural language processing and response generation is definitely off-loaded to a remote server farm. It certainly isn't running on the console. TTS for a single characters voice could - but likely isn't - be done on the hardware, but as I mentioned elsewhere, the voice models for modern text-to-speech synthesis are very, very large. Typically gigabytes of data - per voice. Completely unrealistic for any meaningful game.
  Even if all those trained models existed (they don't - and making one is considerably more work and expense than having a voice actor just deliver a fixed set of lines), I doubt any consumer would be amused by a multi-terabyte download.
  Even as it is, the response latency is hilariously bad. I imagine players having to wait seconds for each NPC response would fly as well as a lead brick.