Nintendo to go in a different way with AI: Miyamoto.

https://mynintendonews.com/2024/09/26/miyamoto-says-nintendo-would-rather-go-in-a-different-direction-with-ai/

And that’s what makes Nintendo so special. They don’t conform to the industry norms. Fun games is the order of the day. And I’ll admit sometimes, it doesn’t work.

But on topic, do any of the regular forum users here have any good knowledge in AI?? What does it mean to go in a ”different“ direction in AI??

There is not enough information to derive anything from the claim of "different direction in AI". AI has so many application that it can be wide variety of interpretation of different.

@Pedro: I see.

Every company likes to say they are different from their competitors. Did they say what this different direction was? Hopefully they are successful.

@girlusocrazy: no. That’s why I wanted a forum interpretation.

@outworld222: I don't think there is enough from that article to put together an idea.

I can say that if they want to do something different, then maybe that means they won't be using DLSS style upscaling or frame interpolation, they won't be identifying objects seen through a camera, they won't be generating assets, they won't be translating speech to input or text.

@girlusocrazy: ok. So basically programming games in C++ will be obsolete??

@outworld222: If Nintendo will be using AI differently then they won't be using AI to generate code, so they will probably need people who understand C++ or another programming language. But even if you generate code, you should still understand the generated code and test if it works as intended when integrated with the rest of your code and doesn't cause any other issues.

@girlusocrazy: I understand. But this is so complicated.

@outworld222: Guessing without any parameters is kind of complicated. All we can do is look at what people are using AI for now and say "Nintendo won't be doing that", but that means anything else is a possibility and it's difficult to narrow that down.

Maybe we should wait for more information from Nintendo.

Being "behind the times" has benefits.

@girlusocrazy: all I know about AI is that there are two types.

Reactive AI. This one is easy to program. For example, player pressed the forward d-pad in a fighting game, other character (AI) walks backwards a little bit.

Random AI. This one is much tougher to work with. AI opponent acts randomly.

@outworld222: Oh yeah. It would be cool if they could think up a new way to approach that. They could come up with some weird behavior for alien creatures in Metroid that is unlike anything previously done with character AI.

They will use it to search and sue people easier around the world. Sounds like a bad attempt for a joke, but you will see.

@adsparky: lol. 😂 I actually found your joke funny. No need to downplay it. 👍

@nintendoboy16: In this case, yes. As someone who doesn't like where the industry is heading in terms of its competitors, I'm happy if Nintendo sticks with it's "old school" approach to gaming.

They already have AI Miyamoto:

@R4gn4r0k said:

They already have AI Miyamoto:

That wiimusic presentation has to be one of the very cringiest moments in all of gaming.

Rough translation as per reddit: "The legal stance on ownership over AI generated content is an unknown which means we can't sue the crap out of everyone from the content we generate using it. Thus...it has no value to Nintendo as a company." 😋 J/K....mostly.

In all seriousness I do hope they do something a bit more interesting than just DLSS with the tensor cores in the Switch 2 (which it will probably have but not confirmed of course).

Off the top of my head, more dynamic and reactive responses in letters to the player in Animal crossing: taking in things like History, previous gits, the text of a letter the player wrote and so on. There is only so many pre canned responses with a view variables a mere mortal can write. Even going so far as to have animals leave if you write really mean letters. ...Or they could train the model on 4chan...talk s*&t if you dare! In all seriousness though the animals and how you could interact with them were always the more interesting side of Animal Crossing for me and it would be great to see that further developed. I dunno if the Switch 2 would have the capacity to pull something like that off mind.

....Or a new version of Skyrim (as is custom) with that enhanced NPC mod built in as standard.

I take it as them not using AI to generate art which should be lauded, AI generated art looks like Bryce 3D from back in the day

There are so many different uses of AI for games.

• Upscaling
• Voice-acting (the new ChatGPT voice mode is pretty wild and META has something similar)
• Generating concept art
• Generating assets
• Generating levels/envrioments
• Writing code
• Composing music
• Writing NPC dialog
• Making non scripted NPCs that you can talk to in real time.
• Smarter enemies/bots that can learn by interacting with real human players.
• etc

And I'm sure much more.

My thinking is that Miyamoto is refering to using AI in unexpected ways in the game-design, rather than to use it for production. Like inventing new mechanics based on the technology. I think that is Nintendo's strength. They launch some whacky hardware and then they are able to innovate and use it to do genuinely new things (AI is more software, but still).