I think it can - procedural generation consist of procedures, that is elements designed by humans, which are just connected into a bigger structure. Every single template, rule and atomic object (e.g. a single room in a generated house) is hand-designed, and as such no matter what comes out the elements and connections were considered by a real human. On the other hand, generative AI is almost always some sort of machine learning, that is an approximation of what a good structure of something should be, but it is only a very poor, randomised approximation. You have absolutely no guarantees nor constraints on what might pop out of the model - that is my main concern with genAI, though the whole outputted thing looks reasonable, upon closer inspection it has a lot of inconsistenties.

Nonsense. Procedural generation is a rule-based deterministic system while generative AI is probabilistic and data driven. It’s fundamentally different.

As an amateur game dev, I believe AI will crash out for the public before it becomes truly useful for programming. I’ve heard colleagues try to use AI , but it often just creates more work. When the AI doesn’t know the answer, which is often. it makes something up, leading to errors, crashes, or hidden issues like memory leaks. I’d rather write the code correctly from the start and understand how it works, than spend hours hunting down problems in AI-generated code, only to never find the issue. Full disclosure I use Chatgpt to edit my dialogue as my English is not great.

Okay, but (ignoring that procedural generation can also be probabilistic) what is the functional difference? The point I’m getting at is that you cannot banish the one without necessarily limiting the other.

“We might deal in derivative IP, but it’s our derivative IP!”

Nonsense. Procedural generation is a rule-based deterministic system while generative AI is probabilistic and data driven. It’s fundamentally different.

It’s less of a functional different and more of a moral one.

We don’t believe in AI, says the developer of AI Art Impostor

The difference between “generative AI” and “procedural generation” cannot be meaningfully nailed down.

Pocketpair Publishing boss John Buckley

Any relation to loss guy?

You’d think that that’s the one thing LLMs should be good at – have characters respond to arbitrary input in-character according to the game state. Unfortunately, restricting output to match the game state is mathematically impossible with LLMs; hallucinations are inevitable and can cause characters to randomly start lying or talking about things thy can’t know about. Plus, LLMs are very heavy on resources.

There are non-generative AI techniques that could be interesting for games, of course; especially ones that can afford to run at a slower pace like seconds or tens of seconds. For example, something that makes characters dynamically adapt their medium-term action plan to the situation every once in a while could work well. But I don’t think we’re going to see useful AI-driven dialogue anytime soon.

You seem to imply we can only use the raw output of the LLm but that’s not true. We can add some deterministic safeguards afterwards to reduce hallucinations and increase relevancy. For example if you use an LLM to generate SQL, you can verify that the answer respects the data schemas and the relationship graph. That’s a pretty hot subject right now, I don’t see why it couldn’t be done for video game dialogues.
Indeed, I also agree that the consumption of resources it requires may not be worth the output.

Isn’t that Garfield’s owner

Pocketpair Publishing boss John Buckley

Any relation to loss guy?

“We might deal in derivative IP, but it’s our derivative IP!”

To be fair Nintendo was heavily inspired by other artists work when designing Pokemon.

Nintendo wasn’t “inspired” by shit. They made an ice cream cone a Pokémon. Keys on a ring? Pokémon. 8 varieties of elemental flavored dog? Check. Oh hey cool look a 2d image on a computer oh wait it’s actually a Pokémon. Dog? Cat? Snake? Bird? Horse? All Pokémon. IMO nothing in Pokémon is actually “inspired”, only ripped off.