3 ms·

As a game dev, the fact "AI" as a keyword became totally unusable is quite annoying.

Terr_ 4mo ago
I try to say "LLM" as much as possible, but I'm aware that it's unlikely to work. Partly for technical accuracy, partly to manage the average person's expectations when they hear "AI", partly to avoid contributing to a big dumb-money "everything is AI" bubble, etc.
- jiggawatts 4mo ago
  I call it "mechanised coding".
- Rendello 4mo ago
  Or "gen(erative) AI". I must admit that as soon as I saw AI in the title, I lost interest until I realized it was classic AI. The term seems so far gone now but we don't have a good classifier for the non-gen-ai yet.
- _0ffh 4mo ago
  You can try "language model", that's what I use when talking (when writing I use LLM when I expect the abbreviation to be understood). I find just juxtaposing these two normal words flows much more nicely from the tongue than the comparatively awkward "LLM".
- amelius 4mo ago
  We probably should call LLMs "Alchemy" at least until the big AI companies remove the disclaimer that "AI can make mistakes".
Rendello 4mo ago
The same thing happened with crypto (cryptography) after Bitcoin blew up, though it was just an abbreviation so it wasn't as bad. There's no ambiguity when speaking, but when searching Rust-related things I get a lot of Rust game stuff. "Rust crates" or "Rust drops" correspond to in-game things so the fandom wiki will pop up. Occasionally I'll even get rust-removal webpages.
- killingtime74 4mo ago
  Crypto is not short for cryptography though in that context, it's cryptocurrency?
  - sph 4mo ago
    Different meanings in closely related contexts is exactly the point of OP and GP. If you search for 'rust crypto', you get results for Rust cryptographic packages as well as Rust in the cryptocurrency space (as it's become very popular with that audience) Same with googling 'game dev AI', as I've been doing to learn about behaviour trees/FSM, you get inundated by articles of people with a Claude subscription and a dream.
    - Rendello 4mo ago
      Exactly, "crypto" has been hacker jargon for cryptography and its implementations for a long time [a][b]. Since cryptocurrency appeared (and went mainstream), that original jargon has been awash in the tide. a. Like on /r/crypto: https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/ https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/ b. "Don't roll your own crypto(graphy)!" is/was a popular hacker slogan: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
munificent 4mo ago
As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic. It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games. Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk. The term is just a muddled mess.
- fracus 4mo ago
  NPC behaviour has always been described as AI though, even before the AI as we know it now was even invented. AI is a very general umbrella term being repurposed to describe LLMs.
- rootlocus 4mo ago
  LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.
  - xdertz 4mo ago
    > LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.
    - trashb 4mo ago
      But you can use hardcoded while referring to interpreted languages as well, it's a bit of a difficult term. I feel it's more about repeatability when non of the input changes. I would define it more broadly, "same input == same output, with the same program" and using that definition all computer programs are hardcoded in the end. There is a gray area, you can consider that even programs that use random() are in the hardcoded category as with the same (semi)random value they will produce the same output. You just need to think of the random value as input, since not all input needs to be user input.
trashb 4mo ago
Everyday I hope a LLM enthusiast discovers how game "AI" (and games in general) fool/trick people and realizes LLM's don't do anything different. Some of my favorite examples are the Mario kart AI, Amnesia and Deadspace. It's all an extension of the ELIZA effect.
hbn 4mo ago
Probably not as annoying as what guys named Al are going through
- Rendello 4mo ago
  Ai 愛 is a common Japanese name, too. Though I suppose the lowercase 'i' is easier to distinguish than the lowercase 'l'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_(given_name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_(given_name)

Terr_ 4mo ago

I try to say "LLM" as much as possible, but I'm aware that it's unlikely to work. Partly for technical accuracy, partly to manage the average person's expectations when they hear "AI", partly to avoid contributing to a big dumb-money "everything is AI" bubble, etc.

jiggawatts 4mo ago
I call it "mechanised coding".
Rendello 4mo ago
Or "gen(erative) AI". I must admit that as soon as I saw AI in the title, I lost interest until I realized it was classic AI. The term seems so far gone now but we don't have a good classifier for the non-gen-ai yet.
_0ffh 4mo ago
You can try "language model", that's what I use when talking (when writing I use LLM when I expect the abbreviation to be understood). I find just juxtaposing these two normal words flows much more nicely from the tongue than the comparatively awkward "LLM".
amelius 4mo ago
We probably should call LLMs "Alchemy" at least until the big AI companies remove the disclaimer that "AI can make mistakes".

Rendello 4mo ago

The same thing happened with crypto (cryptography) after Bitcoin blew up, though it was just an abbreviation so it wasn't as bad. There's no ambiguity when speaking, but when searching Rust-related things I get a lot of Rust game stuff. "Rust crates" or "Rust drops" correspond to in-game things so the fandom wiki will pop up. Occasionally I'll even get rust-removal webpages.

killingtime74 4mo ago
Crypto is not short for cryptography though in that context, it's cryptocurrency?
- sph 4mo ago
  Different meanings in closely related contexts is exactly the point of OP and GP. If you search for 'rust crypto', you get results for Rust cryptographic packages as well as Rust in the cryptocurrency space (as it's become very popular with that audience) Same with googling 'game dev AI', as I've been doing to learn about behaviour trees/FSM, you get inundated by articles of people with a Claude subscription and a dream.
  - Rendello 4mo ago
    Exactly, "crypto" has been hacker jargon for cryptography and its implementations for a long time [a][b]. Since cryptocurrency appeared (and went mainstream), that original jargon has been awash in the tide. a. Like on /r/crypto: https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/ https://old.reddit.com/r/crypto/ b. "Don't roll your own crypto(graphy)!" is/was a popular hacker slogan: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto https://hn.algolia.com/?q=Don%27t+roll+your+own+crypto
- deleted 4mo ago
  [deleted]

munificent 4mo ago

As an ex-game dev, I always found it a little annoying that they used "AI" for what was essentially just hard-coded logic. It's a hard problem because "AI" has been a term since the 50s but has been used to describe different approaches to making a computer do things over time. The way game developers use "AI" to mean "hardcoded logic for game behavior" is fully inline with what "AI" meant in the 60s when they were using symbolic AI to write the first computer-controlled chess games. Then AI programmers hit the wall of hard-coded logic, went through an AI winter, and what survived on the other end was logic that was automatically trained from big data sets. We used to call that "machine learning" because "AI" had connotations of snake oil from previous AI winters. But then within the past decade, tech companies with grandiose ambitions decided that "machine learning" was too nerdy so resurrected "AI" to refer to LLMs and their ilk. The term is just a muddled mess.

fracus 4mo ago
NPC behaviour has always been described as AI though, even before the AI as we know it now was even invented. AI is a very general umbrella term being repurposed to describe LLMs.
rootlocus 4mo ago
LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I think AI for game NPCs is perfectly valid terminology. The actor senses the surroundings and makes decisions to achieve its goals within the constraints and events of the environment.
- xdertz 4mo ago
  > LLMs can be described as "hardcoded weights for generating the next token". All code is "hardcoded". I disagree. Hardcoded means you need to change and recompile the entire program. So neither an .env file nor model weights that are loaded at runtime are 'hardcoded'.
  - trashb 4mo ago
    But you can use hardcoded while referring to interpreted languages as well, it's a bit of a difficult term. I feel it's more about repeatability when non of the input changes. I would define it more broadly, "same input == same output, with the same program" and using that definition all computer programs are hardcoded in the end. There is a gray area, you can consider that even programs that use random() are in the hardcoded category as with the same (semi)random value they will produce the same output. You just need to think of the random value as input, since not all input needs to be user input.

trashb 4mo ago

Everyday I hope a LLM enthusiast discovers how game "AI" (and games in general) fool/trick people and realizes LLM's don't do anything different. Some of my favorite examples are the Mario kart AI, Amnesia and Deadspace. It's all an extension of the ELIZA effect.

hbn 4mo ago

Probably not as annoying as what guys named Al are going through

Rendello 4mo ago
Ai 愛 is a common Japanese name, too. Though I suppose the lowercase 'i' is easier to distinguish than the lowercase 'l'. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_(given_name) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ai_(given_name)