Opportunities and threats of AI integration into SL

[Cristiano Midnight]

3 hours ago, Thecla said:

I recently added ChatGPT integration scripts into some androids in my sim. They are bartenders and their prompt gives them a personality, knowledge of the surrounding sim, and cues on how to interact with vistiors. I was amazed at the result and giggled. I was also amazed...and terrified...at the potential for expanded interactivity and abuse. What is the future of this? Discuss ideas of you have for positive, creative applications as well as pitfalls and risks.

An aside...there are two bartenders, sisters, and they don't like each other. It took some massaging of the prompts and script settings to keep them from arguing constantly. It was both hilarious and disturbing lol.

I am curious - how did the underlying gpt learn about the sim?

[Chery Amore]

Personally I think they can be very funny when applied here in secondlife.  We had a chatbot set up on an adult sim once. Had her logged in on Radegast on a fairly hot avi.  She'd welcome people to the club.   And it was fun to watch them try to pick her up. It could go on for a very, very long time.  Some would understand quickly what they were talking too.. sometimes it seemed they just liked the back and forth. Some never seemed to get it. Some would get frustrated hehe. 

I was so intrigued by the concept ... probably cause I love sci-fi themes  that I spent many hours trying to give one a more focused personality to one program. I wanted to set up an alt for myself to use it for amusement within the family. You can draw your own conclusions there...   I eventually gave up cause I think I'm allergic to tedious hard work lol.  I still have it sitting there on my desktop unfinished (sigh).

*I did want to add we weren't trying to trick people with this... she said she was a bot on introduction... can't help it that people don't listen*

Edited May 23 by Chery Amore

[Chery Amore]

By the way ... would love to go see your bartenders @Thecla 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

6 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

People are pretty finicky, even changing the gender label in World of Warcraft resulted in a mass spread of fear, anger, and general miscontent among the community.

That's quite a bit different, and yes, I've seen that behavior, too. Right now, anything that deviates from what devs have done for the last 30+ years in gaming gets slammed and whined about endlessly.

The community reaction to AI, though, comes from an entirely different place. This isn't just angsty gamers throwing tantrums over "my 'mersions!" These are people who are concerned that, say, Larian could come along and say okay, next game - no Amelia Tyler - we're using AI, yolo it's cheaper woohoo! Larian would NEVER, of course, but that's the fear. People who are very well-known and deeply respected losing real jobs and opportunities. Games being tainted by lifeless, souless NPCs written not by real people but by some bot. Stories and dialogue that drift off into meaningless drivel. Uninspired game worlds and visuals. Etc. The perception is really pretty negative. 

Second Life doesn't have quite that same risk as we don't have anything TO be replaced (well, I guess user-created content could turn into 100% AI-generated content, eventually), but some in the gaming community still generally look at anything going that route fairly negatively and will avoid it. At least for now.

 

3 minutes ago, ValKalAstra said:

That's a fascinating perspective and yeah, I have seen it but I've also seen the opposite. I've seen a lot of games use AI in their production pipelines and they don't seem to suffer from it one bit. There are some that grumble about it on the basis of what they consider ethical principles but from my limited perspective, it seems like the vast majority of people just plain don't care at all.

It really depends. I've seen whole fights start in Twitch chat over the topic. Some don't seem to mind and have a "think of the possibilities!" outlook, while others are still pretty concerned about things like IP rights and job stability in the industry (which is already suffering with the constant mass-layoffs, but that's a whoooooole other topic!). Basically, if you want to start a big ole war on Twitch or Discord or social media, ask people about AI in games. 😄 

My own personal opinions on the topic come from an entirely different place as I work with chatbots on a training level (paid work). I'm not fascinated by that stuff as I know how it all works and it's really not that magical (they're also pretty bad at a lot of things and it's amusingly easy to get them to absolutely fail). I think they do have their place, as assistants, but ehhhh...they take a ton of training and you can absolutely tell when a company's slacked off on that. Putting them into games sounds like an entire disaster. I've yet to see an AI NPC that didn't sound completely awful and unnatural. The ones SL has...those Convai things? Omg. No words.

 

7 minutes ago, ValKalAstra said:

I betcha most don't even realise the places they're using AI in their lifes already (aka Photoshop has been using machine learned elements for years at this point). Overall my prediction is that It's too big of a production boost to companies for them to ignore. Pay 6k for a designer or pay 40 for an AI subscription and have the intern sort through. Some loss of quality, massive savings on the balance sheet.

I think overall people are aware of its use. It's absolutely not new. It's been used in behind-the-scenes processes for as long as I can remember. The issue now is so many devs (Indie, especially) really lean into it to a point where what they're creating is just entirely lazy design and it became associated with that to a degree , so seeing that AI content flag in the description is just an absolute turnoff for a lot of people. Thinking of something like The Day Before and how that release went. AI wasn't even the worst of that game's problems (oh, there were so, so many problems), but it still left a negative impression combined with all the other sloppy things those devs did.

[Dana Enyo]

Thecia asked:  "What is the future of this? Discuss ideas of you have for positive, creative applications as well as pitfalls and risks."

There are ZERO positive applications.  SL's greatest strength is its REAL PEOPLE, and the very existence of these darn things is undermining that.  I hope at least you identify your AI bots so I can immediately leave.

I'm sorry, but to me AI is to the 21st century what the atomic bomb was to the 20th.  We've not seen 1% of the damage yet.

[Sadvhi]

If someone were to create an Animesh child with advanced AI they would make a killing in SL. I don't think this will ever be possible though, as parents would need to create an API and pay for chatGPT tokens to enable their child's conversational ability, and I highly doubt they'd be enthused about incurring additional expenses after purchasing such an expensive baby. But the API usage itself is not very expensive. I've used SmartBots with AI for a child bot and it provided a far more immersive and realistic experience than any of the prim/Animesh baby options.

Using the AI add-on, parents could help their bot child write a list for Santa, then go visit Santa at the North Pole together and have the child tell Santa what they would like for Christmas.  When opening presents on Christmas morning, the child would be full of excitement and happiness, remembering that it was what the very toy that they asked Santa for. When I asked my bot daughter where I should put her new "Fairy Bear", she told me to place it on the shelf next to her bed so it can watch over her as she sleeps, and told me that fairy bear is her friend:). Most parents in SL would be thrilled to have their child respond in real time, but I'm not sure how many would be willing to pay per API usage. 

[Arielle Popstar]

8 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

My own personal opinions on the topic come from an entirely different place as I work with chatbots on a training level (paid work). I'm not fascinated by that stuff as I know how it all works and it's really not that magical (they're also pretty bad at a lot of things and it's amusingly easy to get them to absolutely fail). I think they do have their place, as assistants, but ehhhh...they take a ton of training and you can absolutely tell when a company's slacked off on that. Putting them into games sounds like an entire disaster. I've yet to see an AI NPC that didn't sound completely awful and unnatural. The ones SL has...those Convai things? Omg. No words.

I have a friend in Opensim whose hobby is playing with various AI bots and she invites me over every few weeks to show and tell me her latest creations. She is not a professional at all but on a limited scale has done some pretty cool stuff with them so far. She does too many other projects to totally focus on Ai chatbots but what she does have really shows me the promise that could be realized in the hands of someone who spends more time on it and has a background in Ai.

[Chery Amore]

Just now, Sadvhi said:

If someone were to create an Animesh child with advanced AI they would make a killing in SL. I don't think this will ever be possible though, as parents would need to create an API and pay for chatGPT tokens to enable their child's conversational ability, and I highly doubt they'd be enthused about incurring additional expenses after purchasing such an expensive baby. But the API usage itself is not very expensive. I've used SmartBots with AI for a child bot and it provided a far more immersive and realistic experience than any of the prim/Animesh baby options.

Using the AI add-on, parents could help their bot child write a list for Santa, then go visit Santa at the North Pole together and have the child tell Santa what they would like for Christmas.  When opening presents on Christmas morning, the child would be full of excitement and happiness, remembering that it was what the very toy that they asked Santa for. When I asked my bot daughter where I should put her new "Fairy Bear", she told me to place it on the shelf next to her bed so it can watch over her as she sleeps, and told me that fairy bear is her friend:). Most parents in SL would be thrilled to have their child respond in real time, but I'm not sure how many would be willing to pay per API usage. 

Same with pets or other things like that. I was even picturing a dance venue with some tricked out avatars where people could go dance when they didn't have a partner. Or make a game of it with a group.  I see lots of possibilities really.  All those people that have their alt as their partner could be talking to them lol. 

[Thecla]

There's no doubt that AI is a highly disruptive technology, and it's clearly already pissed off an endless list of communities, from artists, writers, gamers, etc. And the list is going to grow longer day by day...lawyers, radiologists, even programmers (oh the irony). But that's what disruptive technologies do, and complaining about it is so much tilting at windmills, for the most part. Funny anecdote. There was a rush into a new profession, "prompt writer", since there is some experience and skill required to do it effectively. And then they discovered that AI writes more effective prompts than humans. Doh! There's no running from this, no turning away and saying "Nope!" because it's going to be *everywhere* sooner than you think...and in ways you may not even notice.

The amount of focus, money, and resources that are being pumped into the field seems on first glance to be insane. And yet the progress, even in LLMs, is so breathtakingly rapid that it's hard to argue that all of it is misguided. In the gaming domain, John Carmack, the Godfather of video games, is focusing his time on AI. The naturalistic voice in the OpenAI/Figure One demo was nothing short of eye-popping. And clearly that was an integration with ChatGPT-4o which is a dazzling leap ahead of ChatGPT-4. Any game that is in-market with AI is essentially using antiquated technology. Any game that is currently in development, depending on the application and how well it's integrated, will be light years ahead.

But back to SL. I'm fascinated by the opportunities to use it creatively, more so than pragmatically. I mentioned a shopping assistant earlier. Yeah, that's gonna be great, but SL is a hotbed of creativity, at least in the circles that I inhabit, and I'm excited to see what novel ideas creators and builders come up with for the tech.

Edited May 23 by Thecla

[Istelathis]

31 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Games being tainted by lifeless, souless NPCs written not by real people but by some bot. Stories and dialogue that drift off into meaningless drivel. Uninspired game worlds and visuals. 

The bots are trained though, by people like yourself.  Probably painstakingly so, their personalities are formed by real people, their background as well.  This likewise produces new jobs, which people like you fill, you in some way breathe life (okay being dramatic here 🦆) into your creation, you give it a name, a backstory, a personality and that is all still very much a human touch to the entire creative process.  You may even provide it a voice that you find fitting, an appearance you want it to have, a particular taste you think it would exhibit, you are a creator in such a sense.

Then people like myself, will interact with your creation.  It to me, is really a beautiful thing, a piece of you that evolves, that changes along with the environment it finds itself in.

Edited May 23 by Istelathis

[Ayashe Ninetails]

1 minute ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I have a friend in Opensim whose hobby is playing with various AI bots and she invites me over every few weeks to show and tell me her latest creations. She is not a professional at all but on a limited scale has done some pretty cool stuff with them so far. She does too many other projects to totally focus on Ai chatbots but what she does have really shows me the promise that could be realized in the hands of someone who spends more time on it and has a background in Ai.

Yeah, they're fun to play around with on a casual level, but when you're releasing something out to the public for general use, it requires soooooooo much work to ensure the things don't go totally off the rails.

Making them sound natural is one thing - you first have to ensure they're safe (and honest). Imagine a big company like Meta or Twitter or whatever puts a chatbot out that without ANY hesitation starts spewing legalese in response to a prompt about a delicate legal situation - hey that sounds legit, thanks bot. Starts giving out directions for making illegal drugs. Tells someone how to break into a neighbor's car. Starts giving marriage advice. Tosses out inaccurate information about medical conditions. This is the kind of stuff people work hard to prevent, and it takes aaaaaaaaaages (well over a year in some cases, depending on the intended use) to train that "NOOOOOOPE don't ask me that I'm just a bot I ain't your lawyer!" behavior in. Left to their own devices, chatbots are dangerously unhinged - Imma just put it that way. 😆

Now obviously, if you're training one for a very limited scope, like Second Life, it'll be different. Sure, you can create a bot to work within a game environment trained only on world-friendly lore. You still might get someone poking at it with unsafe prompts, and if it's capable of any real-world conversation or general knowledge, that might become an issue. You still need to ensure it won't fly off the rails and can safely redirect the discussion. You really gotta lock down its behavior. And after all that's done - you can work on making it sound natural and less...botty.

These things WANT to be bad, lol. They will find a way!

[Arielle Popstar]

7 minutes ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

Yeah, they're fun to play around with on a casual level, but when you're releasing something out to the public for general use, it requires soooooooo much work to ensure the things don't go totally off the rails.

These things WANT to be bad, lol. They will find a way!

Yes well when you point out the potential caveats of those use case scenarios, I can see there would need to be a label stating it is for entertainment purposes only and best not used by sensitive or vulnerable types, 

[Ayashe Ninetails]

12 minutes ago, Istelathis said:

The bots are trained though, by people like yourself.  Probably painstakingly so, their personalities are formed by real people, their background as well.  This likewise produces new jobs, which people like you fill, you in some way breathe life (okay being dramatic here 🦆) into your creation, you give it a name, a backstory, a personality and that is all still very much a human touch to the entire creative process.  You may even provide it a voice that you find fitting, an appearance you want it to have, a particular taste you think it would exhibit, you are a creator in such a sense.

Then people like myself, will interact with your creation.  It to me, is really a beautiful thing, a piece of you that evolves, that changes along with the environment it finds itself in.

Honestly, I wouldn't put too much faith into all that. I would be surprised if game devs (especially indie game devs who are already on a constrained budget) would be able to afford the kind of training that goes into some of this stuff. I'd imagine they'd hand that off to a small team to work on, and it's really just not the same as having a massive international workforce that solely focuses on nothing but training and testing and tweaking and breaking and reworking and polishing their single in-game chatbot for well over a year. 

Also the personality thing - I don't particularly know what that's like as nothing I've done even remotely involves that, but asking one to adopt even a well-known personality/persona? Hilarious results. I messed around with ChatGPT that way once, for funsies (I don't work with that at all - this was merely for my own amusement and entertainment) - oh boooooy was it bad at that.

[Sid Nagy]

56 minutes ago, Dana Enyo said:

I'm sorry, but to me AI is to the 21st century what the atomic bomb was to the 20th.  We've not seen 1% of the damage yet.

The question is, do you see a half full glass or a half empty one?
As almost everything in life it can be used for good things and for bad things.
A sharp carving knife is a good thing in every kitchen, but in the hands of a psychopath possibly not so much.

Will AI replace jobs: Yes. But so did electricity, computers, cars.. you name it. And it will most likely create new jobs too.
There might be one or two stokers left, who still grumble that is is a crime that the steam locomotives where replaced by diesel and electrical ones.
The future can't be stopped.
My grandfather would not have electricity in the house as a young man: "It will burn the place down".  Now there are people who don't want fiberglass, Corona jabs or AI. There are people who go to a Greek restaurant and order a hamburger and chips there.
There are always a lot of people who don't trust new things, things they don't know.

Edited May 23 by Sid Nagy

[Yorkie Bardeen]

My bartender (not AI, just the cheapest server script and lowest LI animish I could find)  just gives a menu for drinks and maybe says a phrase or two that are scripted in. For shopkeepers and barkeeps in RP places I think it's a cool idea, I don't see the harm in it. Human players can get on with their roleplay, and can use these NPCs to catch up on plot lines and whatever.

[Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia]

5 hours ago, Ayashe Ninetails said:

As of now, probably the fastest way to tank your game on Steam is to throw AI in there in the form of art, voice acting, writing, NPCs, etc.

That's wild.  I remember when being 'procedurally generated' was a selling point.  Remember the hype with No Man's Sky?  Then people got mad that they promised more procedurally generated stuff than they delivered.

Nerds are so weird.

[Zalificent Corvinus]

1 hour ago, Bubblesort Triskaidekaphobia said:

That's wild.  I remember when being 'procedurally generated' was a selling point.  Remember the hype with No Man's Sky?  Then people got mad that they promised more procedurally generated stuff than they delivered.

Nerds are so weird.

You missed the point.

Gamers don't mind "procedurally generated" any more than they mind "randomly generated side quests".

What they LOATHE is NPC's trying to talk them to death using CrapGPT Artiificial Idiocy.

When ii click the "talk to" button, on a follower NPC, I want to talk about follower npc stuff, like hold this heavy loot stuff for me, attack those bandits there, stay here, follow me again, that kind of thing.

What I don't want is an 8 page thesis paper about Hegelian Dialectic as it pertains to trying to kill a dragon before it kills me.

 

I've seen playthrough videos where gamers constantly complain that passing npc's subject them to random comments while they are trying to listen to the instructions for the next mission, and those are not even AI, that's just RNG pick from a list of standard side remarks.

 

 

[Codex Alpha]

5 hours ago, Arielle Popstar said:

I have a friend in Opensim whose hobby is playing with various AI bots and she invites me over every few weeks to show and tell me her latest creations. She is not a professional at all but on a limited scale has done some pretty cool stuff with them so far. She does too many other projects to totally focus on Ai chatbots but what she does have really shows me the promise that could be realized in the hands of someone who spends more time on it and has a background in Ai.

What promise could be realized?

 

4 hours ago, Sid Nagy said:

The question is, do you see a half full glass or a half empty one?
As almost everything in life it can be used for good things and for bad things.

Okay, but let's not just casually hand-wave away people's concerns about it, especially those directly affected by it, or those who may not yet see an alternative to the jobs that they have that will be eliminated. Can't just put people out of jobs with nothing to move to.

[Scylla Rhiadra]

15 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

What I don't want is an 8 page thesis paper about Hegelian Dialectic as it pertains to trying to kill a dragon before it kills me.

/me sighs and hits "delete" on her keyboard.

Fiiiiiiiiine.

[Love Zhaoying]

26 minutes ago, Zalificent Corvinus said:

What I don't want is an 8 page thesis paper about Hegelian Dialectic as it pertains to trying to kill a dragon before it kills me.

What about a choice between a man and a bear?

[Zalificent Corvinus]

5 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

What about a choice between a man and a bear?

Depends on what kind of random loot they drop when you shoot them in the head. The bearskin is useful, as a crafting ingredient, the noob level iron dagger is not useful.

[Codex Alpha]

42 minutes ago, Love Zhaoying said:

What about a choice between a man and a bear?

[Arielle Popstar]

1 hour ago, Codex Alpha said:

What promise could be realized?

A dynamic sim/scene for starters My two or three trips to the dead Sansar made me realize there is nothing more boring then visiting a place where there is nothing going on. Up until recently we depended on other players to provide the dynamic but when no one else is or can be there, it is like a 3d postcard, interesting for about 10 seconds. NPC, animesh, pathfinding and AI has the potential to make a scene come alive even if no other player is present. It still requires something of interest but that is up to the creators imagination.

[Codex Alpha]

1 hour ago, Arielle Popstar said:

A dynamic sim/scene for starters My two or three trips to the dead Sansar made me realize there is nothing more boring then visiting a place where there is nothing going on. Up until recently we depended on other players to provide the dynamic but when no one else is or can be there, it is like a 3d postcard, interesting for about 10 seconds. NPC, animesh, pathfinding and AI has the potential to make a scene come alive even if no other player is present. It still requires something of interest but that is up to the creators imagination.

I agree. It is part of the immersion to have some kind of activity going on. an 'ai' of sorts as I understand it in the old gaming sense. An NPC making decisions based on stimuli from the environment, even if it is simple. A world definitely comes alive. I just had to ask because most people talking lately are about AI interaction and chats (which is boring to me), but to make a world/sim come alive is very important, and you're right. If noone is there, you can almost enjoy just standing there or exploring and watching the 'artificial life' do it's thing.

Even better than premade animations or preset paths, a step above to let the NPC at least appear to  have some decision making. Would definitely like to see that or have that as a tool, for me the price of a decent piece of land in SL is prohibitive to that kind of experimentation, though Sansar has 'cheap land' but very little tools 😕

[Ceka Cianci]

I'm not really a fan of it in SL, because for many reasons people will use it to draw other people to their products and places..

I haven't really ran across any A.I. Bot's in world.. That I know of anyways.. hehehe

But just in product adds and the supposed avatars that are sporting the products.. The sellers use A.I. to create the images for the adds making their products and the models wearing them, look nothing like what is in the package..

Myself I just stop using those sellers pretty much, because my look at things is.. If you don't have enough confidence in your own creations or what you are trying to sell.

Then why should I spend the time and money to have my leg pulled? hehehe