[jetrink]

Those don't have to be mutually exclusive though. To take AI out of it, think of those murder mystery parties where actors interact with attendees. Actors have roles to play and things they must do to move the story forward, but they improvise their dialog when talking with the players and sometimes each other. Or if you've ever played D&D, you have experienced talking with NPCs that are controlled by your DM. I think video game AI could be a lot like that, where NPCs use natural language instead of rigid dialog trees, but otherwise, they behave a lot like they do today.

[swatcoder]

Yes, that's the intuition for where the technology might go. Someday.

But actors and DM's are much more disciplined than LLM's, partly because they have careers and friendships on the line for misbehavior. For what amazing things they can do in good weather, LLM's are not really reliable when you want them to consistently deliver something very specific, very secure, or very artfully crafted. They may get there, but their design makes it a very hard problem that we're still a long way from seeing commercialized.

[jononor]

Agreed that "live" in-game LLMs for NPCs is probably a little while away. Need better tools than now that allows to strike a balance between constrained/directed output and variation. I suspect that LLMs are already used by (some) game developers to aided dialogue creation tools for game developers, where they curate and select more or less a fixed vocabulary. I do think that there are many viable steps to "generic". For example, if the game developer could specify possible dialog trees (as in the possible branches and outcomes), then an LLM could ideally fill in the concrete text when reaching the different paths. Or an LLM could add in "small talk" - meaning things that reflect the world state, recent events, but still have the quest type dialog be practically hardcoded (so there is no risk of unreachable states etc).

[thatguymike]

Ah, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kw51fkRiKZU