Chatgpt is a new way to an old problem

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Hi there, Just a 2 cents.

This is my first post on scripting forum; but there has to be a first time for everything; right.
Chatgpt/ChatGPT…is a new kind of way of scripting and coding; it allows people to go faster by using the power of AI (which right now is a big ‘iffy’ in terms of legal standing; unless you purchase a ‘AI license’ to the work created by AI - that was ‘sourced’ from artists…or, in this case, by other coders). I don’t know if ChatGPT uses ‘snippets’ of code from others scripters/coders…or it really creates it ‘from its own’ and comes up with its ‘own script’ simply just using all the C# variables in that language…like not depending at all of any ‘already made codes/scripts’. Instead of ‘csharp’ it could be recalled ‘csharper’ because you rely on the ChatGPT to find the correct code; faster to avoid ‘searching for it’ (now, of course, if errors happen, you are kind of out of luck, if you don’t understand everything and find the solution yourself (this is akin to a GPS…you use the GPS for guiding…you don’T ‘need’ a GPS…you can ‘guide yourself’ with the stars/sun position and XYZ/Nr/East/South/West…just like on a map; so, -you- are the ‘mental map’; but with GPS, it helps you to pinpoint the location -depending on it. Same thing, for GPT (ChaptGPT); it can build the script immediately…but it may not work in your game; but it gave you an ‘example’ and you can ‘refine it’…instead of ‘building from scratch’ which is tedious, long and costly (why ‘reinvent’ the wheel…where already made/suits…now, of course, games are very much ‘custom’ affairs…and it’s why coders/programmers won’t Totally replace soon by ChatGPT; but, if ChatGPT can make a FULL game/programming code…by Itself Alone…then yes, in the future, coders/programmers/scripters will not become a necessity anymore — if as said, this ChatGPT is able to refine itself and actually help with ‘debugging’ and finding the bugs/errors in the code; ‘self-debugging’ that is what I spoke of a few years ago; in the Asset forum I asked (is is a pipe dream) that the AI could code for us and FIX bugs; for us; if a giant game company has difficulty of fixing bugs – why/how on earth…could AI do it? then…

Yet…here we are. So, I think ChatGPT and new types of AI will refine and go Exponentially…and a certain point they will be able to ‘be capable’ of even donig ‘custom jobs’ and ‘modular fixing’ bugs…which are what games are all about ‘custom’ since no game is the same…and requires specific scripts/code etc…to its needs. Custom.

People think that right now it is too primitive and cannot fix bugs and make ‘complex’ coding…I am not so sure; seeing that it is rapidly ‘learning’ evolving (‘training on huge coding C# C++ data…’); this is akin, to the fear that AI will replace artists…if it can make art faster and better; it could code faster and better; too. Now, I am insinuating that coders/scripters become ‘replaced/useless’; I am just saying that it is Tool to use; to advantage; especially, if you are solo dev; whjo struggles on the coding part/despises it…or like, seeks to ‘outsource’ the scripting/coding aspect…to a ‘professional coder specialist’ who does that as his/her daily job…in that case, ChatGPT would ‘emulate’ that coder. It many not be as good…but in game dev…that is not Ultimately what matter; what matters is ‘finding a solution’ to a problem and Finishing the Game. That’s what matters, more than ‘coding like a pro’…bugs suxs…but bugs are present in all games these days because of Rising Complexity of games and Rising Potential of Errors in games (‘errors are bound to happen’ in the fray…with more complex organisms— Entropy); in humans, it is Mutations/Errors (that cause cancer) because we are Complex beings (as such this is why mortality happens; entropy; it is Harder to keep a complex entity ‘‘immortal’’ than it is to keep a mortal one; that accumulates errors over time; because of sheer rising complexity.). It is why games today; made in Unity and Unreal…always have bugs; most games in the last 20 years; all chalk fulll of bugs…and that’S becaise New Bugs appear with New More Complex Engines…and it is why devs are forced to do the ‘patching patching…bs’ on and on; unlike in the past, it was simpler/smaller games → less potential for ‘errors’/bugs…and it’S a game ‘Was Released’ …and done.

No patching whatsoever; now, everyone patches their games - After - release. That’s the consequence of rising complexity of games and their Expected Quality/Standards of them (that rise with time).

Thanks for reading, just a 2 cents.

PS: You can use ChatGPT…but be careful…it could be a two-faced thing; because it is not Regulated and has no ‘Licensing’ model…behind it…like paying a ‘license’ to ‘obtain the AI code’…that was ‘sourced’ from pro coders…this is the same thing with Midjourney sourcing artists to create a collage/montage image ‘out of the artists images’. Shutterstock solved this problem iwth a ‘licensing model’ that ‘repays back’ the artist…‘sourced from’ to make a AI image (Stability DIffusion). ChatGPT, may end up, the same way, for fairness towards the coders who may feel that the AI ‘rips’ code out of them and does not produce ‘unique ‘Own’ scripts of it self’ (when you ask it to code something for you) using the C# language variables.

PPS: Flappy bird was coded/recreated by ChaptGPT; a Full game, or near full game/an attempt; coded, by ChatGPT; this is the Start of things. It may end up coding AAA games in the future and will be economical.

Can AI code Flappy Bird? Watch ChatGPT try

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ChatGPT knows nothing ‘from its own’. It is trained on a massive data set of informational pages, forum posts, etc, etc, and it is from those posts that it recombines everything it creates. Every piece of code it writes, is some recombination of someone else’s code. That is just how ChatGPT works.

In terms of ownership and legal standing… as far as I’m aware, most coders don’t really care to try and protect ownership of snippets of code. That’s because code isn’t our product, it’s our tool; the app is our product. It’s also because an awful lot of us have been copying and pasting code from StackOverflow long enough that we think of code snippets as communal property.

It’s more of a complement to a programmer’s skill set than a replacement. Yes, it’s part of early programming classes to learn how to implement a linked list or a binary tree, and that can be replaced by ChatGPT pretty well. However, the far more important component of programmer skill is not how to implement those things, but why you want one in a given situation. When you want a grid-based inventory screen, what data structure should you use to store the items that are there? OK, what if those objects are of different sizes? OK, what if they’re not rectangular? OK, does that change if you need to save this inventory storage to file? That is the kind of thing ChatGPT isn’t as good at. ChatGPT is good at finding the answers**, but it can’t tell you what questions need to be asked, and that’s a crucial part of a programmer’s skill set.

** ChatGPT currently gets an unacceptable number of the answers wrong in its current incarnation. 4 is better, but still not good enough to rely on professionally if you don’t already know the material enough to spot mistakes. This is mostly written with the assumption that upcoming AI chat systems will be better at getting answers right without being fundamentally different in usage style.

Going back to StackOverflow - ChatGPT, in programming terms, can be thought of as a more convenient StackOverflow replacement. The answer it gives you will be essentially an average of the StackOverflow replies you would have gotten; it will return with that answer immediately and without debate or condescention; it won’t annoy anybody that you’ve come to ask these questions and asked others to do your work for you. That said, even the most generous and patient StackOverflow cannot create your entire game for you, and neither can ChatGPT.

Amusingly, with this mindset, what it actually might make obsolete are Q&A forums like this one, which are the very thing a lot of its programming data set is built on. I wonder how AIs in 2035 will learn to answer questions about a programming language that comes out in 2025, after ChatGPT spends the next 3 years making Q&A forums obsolete enough that they only exist in small quantities for that language.

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Chat GPT is a demonstration of concept.
If you had nobody to turn to Chat GPT might make a useful tool.

The content it provides you is the same content it will provide anyone who asks the same question. Using it could take a programmer out of their depth, and encourage a dependence on more chat gpt code. If you didn’t learn to make a grid, and just gazed over chat gpt and dumped the code into a file, and ramshackled a project together out of chat gpt responses then I am sure it will show in the final project.
This isn’t a robot that can design more robots after all, this is a general purpose realistic or relevant response producer. Like a search engine, but its been given a character like Ask Jeeves, but has had some innovation with how it handles and connects results to words. I believe in rejecting the product myself, in preference of doing my own work, but as a learning resource to provide guide material to a programmer perhaps it shines competent. After all if chatgpt can give you the right answer is one thing, but can it tell you why that is the right answer is another.

I think i will also add, the value of a ChatGPT produced game would be significantly low, and if it would take a human being the equivalent of a few weeks or a week or a few days to make that game, and then sell it. IF ChatGPT is making triple AAA’s the value of developer produced goes down significantly. But I think it is unlikely that it will make triple A’s on its own.

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Chat GPT <

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I really dislike that they call this stuff “AI” when it’s not actually artificial intelligence but instead just a program that humans have written that, when given a prompt, returns procedural soup based on things humans have created. It’s similar to how they’re calling handlebar-free wheeled Segways “hoverboards” when they don’t hover.

That aside, I’ve spent a good deal of time playing with a variety of the “AI” image generation software that’s come out in recent years in an attempt to use it to create game art that I either couldn’t create on my own or wouldn’t want to spend the time creating. I have yet had it give me exactly what I want. It can only spit out an approximation somewhere in the ballpark. “In the ballpark” is actually too small of an area to describe its approximations. More like “in the city,” “in the state,” “in the country,” and occasionally just “on the planet.”

While I’ve not yet played with ChatGPT, based on everything I’ve read about it I think it’s pretty much the same thing; a procedural soup generator. Maybe far in the future things similar to it will be able to produce usable error-free code that’s exactly what I ask it for. But procedural soup isn’t generally what I want when I’m writing code or trying to work out the source of a bug. To use another baseball analogy, I need to be able to zoom in on first base rather than on a trashcan two states away. Perhaps I’m being overly cynical of it based on my experiences with the image generators, but they have certainly left a bad taste in my mouth for so-called “AI” programs.

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I was watching one of kaze’s recent videos (the guy that’s been super-optimizing Mario 64’s code) and he’s actually made one of the best cases I’ve seen so far - a future where we don’t need to worry about things like code readability or cleanliness since the bot could interpret concepts and ideas to code and later reinterpret back to concepts and ideas thus allowing us to just focus on a very specific problem without bothering with things like ‘best practices’ or 'readability; or ‘maintainability’ just because we still have to manually read the code every time we touch it. Obviously still a long way off from being able to do that reliably so for now I think it’s useful mostly for extremely specific, well defined, and well discussed problems where you just can’t be bothered to type it all out. Even then you obviously have to treat it like a person learning to program by reviewing and vetting absolutely every letter it types.

As for the legality of what it generates, no it’s not pulling snippets of code. It’s generating it itself in much the same way you might by skimming over some different posts and articles and then recombining rather common language constructs to implement an idea. Though obviously this has the limits as others have mentioned: namely that such concepts need to be rather well defined, well discussed, and rather small in scope and scale. Mostly due to the fact that it doesn’t have any capacity for internalizing or modeling any concepts or experiences.

Not to get too far off on a tangent but I was having a lot of fun those first few weeks after they released ChatGPT. Believe me, the first time I saw some poor guy panicking on youtube cause he thought his programming job was gone I had a good chuckle - cause I knew if it was even remotely possible the first thing I was gonna do was give it the prompt “Write me some highly scalable, world-class, high-performance stock exchange software capable of being used competitively on Wallstreet.” Retirement would have shortly followed after :slight_smile:

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We had a HUGE discussion about ChatGPT recently and in the end it was closed.
https://discussions.unity.com/t/902155

Few things you need to care about:

  • The information it uses is not up to date. Cutoff date is 2021, right now it is 2023.
  • It provides very convincing false information, that wastes time. (yesterday it insisted that “Material.SetTextureArray” is a thing)
  • It cannot deal with large codebases or large bodies of information.
  • There are also non-programming concerns, like OpenAI locking out huge number of people out of the service, and someone potentially utilizing ChatGPT for propaganda.

Also, relying on this tool too much will absolutely hinder your ability to program by yourself.

For example, you speak of GPS and say that you do not really need it. That is most likely false, and without GPS you’ll get lost. The reason for that is when you externalize your navigation skills into a device, your brain will “decide” that you don’t really need to learn how to navigate around by yourself, since the handy device is always available. Same deal with programming. You’ll rely on it too much, and in the end it’ll hinder development of your own programming skills, as it will be easy to copy-paste. And because it is easy to copy-paste, you’ll be copypasting a lot. We already have “stackoverflow programmers” which can’t use docs and instead rely on community help. Same thing. Also see how hysterical r/ChatGPT gets when the service is down.

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If you want a car, does it matter to you if the car was assembled entirely by hand by a single person tirelessly working on it for 2 years straight, or built on a fully automated production line in 30 minutes, if both cars are identical to each other and you can’t tell which is which?

While making a videogame, you’re “standing on the shoulders of giants”, and using tropes and works of all people that worked before you. When making a media work of significant, likewise, it’ll be a work of multiple people and not a single person. Nothing is fully original, artistic excellence is debatable, same goes for a honest work.

Personally, I would not want to touch any product with a label “no AI was used in production”. Because it means that developers of the product insist on wasting human time when a machine can do the same thing faster, and human could do something more interesting. This is like advertising that “our cruise liner is driven by authentic galley rowers”.

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Sigh… there are about thousand interesting things going in AI specifically related to games. From code to content to planning and optimization. And yet… in spite of that, 95% of what people seem post here is walls off texts saying basically “I think… in my opinion… AI will do this, or that, blah, blah, blah…” This is not your blog, or reddit. If you want ramble about your opinions of the future… find somewhere else to to do it. Please. We don’t need everyone’s take on the future. Pro Tip : If you start a thread “here’s my 2 cents…” It’s getting closed. This thread being closed for that reason.

I am hoping (and looking a someone in particular in this thread… hint, hint) to start a thread(s) on AI IN GAMES that is useful, informative/interesting and practical. Any "My thoughts on AI… bloggy posts will be removed. (use the discord for that).

Come on people… GAMES… UNITY. No random theory, no speculation, no random stuff you read on the internet, none of your own fun image prompts. Direct implication and application in game development.

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