We just learned via The Hollywood Reporter that dire??ctor James Cameron has joined the board of directors at Stability AI. Yes, the same James Cameron who once made a movie where the heroes prevent a?n evil AI from destroying the world.

Stable AI is the company behind the Stable Diffusion text-to-image generative AI model. That's the tech responsible for turning words into unintentionally nightmarish i??mages that only the bots on Twitter can enjo?y.

Cameron has always been at the forefront of using the most advanced digital tech to push filmmaking forward, he said, “I’ve spent my career seeking out emerging technologies that push the very boundaries of what’s possible, all in the service of telling incredible stories,�he said. “I was at the forefront of CGI over three decades ago, and I’ve stayed on the cutting edge since. Now, the intersection of generative AI and CGI image creation is the next wave. The convergence of these two totally different engines of creation will unlock new ways for artists to tell stories in ways we could have never imagined. Stability AI is poised to lead this transformation. I’m delighted to collaborate with Sean, Prem, and the Stability AI team as they shape the future of all visual media.�/p>

Cameron's move has been met with a lot of derision online. Some have come up with insults as devastating as "Not even Michael Bay would've done that", once again proving you cannot replace humank??ind's ability for sass.

This isn't the first time James Cameron has made the news for his connection with AI technology. He'd recently been put on blast for the subpar 4K remasters of titles such as Aliens and True Lies, remasters he'd doubled down on by acc?using its critics of caring ??too much.

You c??an now enjoy the irony of having lived to see Cameron leading a company aimed at slowly destroying the world not with cool lasers but via awful content and the ridiculous amount o??f unnecessary carbon emissions that it requires.

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SAG-AFTRA, the Ameri?can labor union representing act?ors and media professionals, has struck a deal with AI startup Narrativ. According to the union, it's "setting a new standard for ethical AI use" through the partnership.

A report via Variety described Narrativ as a marketplace offering "tools to advertisers to create audio spots using AI tools." The agreement between the AI company and SAG-AFTRA facilitates the usage of v??oice replicas for purposes of digital advertising. The claim is that this deal allows members of SAG-AFTRA to enter the marketplace in a way that promises fair payment for lending their voice.

SAF-AFTRA claims that this deal sets a new standard for ethical use of AI in voice work, but many are naturally nonplussed. SAG-AFTRA's director and chief negotiator Duncan Crabtree-Ireland seemingly understands how controver??sial ?this deal might prove, but asserts that this is a safer option for its members.

“Not all members will be interested in taking advantage of the opportunities that licensing their digital voice replicas might offer, and that’s understandable. But for those who do, you now have a safe option,�Duncan said. “Narrativ has agreed to our terms, and its platform is an excellent example of how A.I. can be ethically used, by putting compensation, informed consent and control in the hands of individual performers.�/p>

For professionals in games, reactions seem less than optimistic about Narrativ and SAG-AFTRA deal. Many fear that this could be the catalyst for a string of events that harm both voice actors and the quality of the vo??ice work present in the medium in general.

This is likely not the announcement anyone wante?d after the union had gone on strike against the video game industry due to the lack of safeguar?ds against AI.

That's because, no matter how great the deals purposed by AI companies might seem to be, reasons not to trust AI companies keep popping up on an almost daily basis.

The fight for rights over voice actors' rights has been a hard fought one for a while now, as even some big name voice actors seem to?? be blissfully unaware of the deal with the devil that they might be maki?ng - and of t?he bus they're throwing all of their less-successful colleagues under. The fallout of this ?new deal remains to be seen.

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Nvidia, the giant GPU manufacturing company, is now the world’s most valuable company in terms of market capitalization. The company has overtaken Microsoft to reach the pinnacle with $3.33 trillion in market cap, edging past Microsoft’s $3.31 trillion market cap, as per stats on Marketcap (via Gamespot).

After the top two spots, Apple is ranked third at $3.2 trillion, followed by Google's parent company Alphabet? which has a market cap of $2.17 trillion. Amazon is the fifth most valuable company with its market cap at $1.90 trillion at the time of writing.

Nvidia is a leading graphic??s card manufacturer and faces active competition from AMD, but the rival company also invests its time and energy into providing processors to the tech market. While Nvidia’s GeForce RTX graphics cards have been facilitatin??g AAA gaming in desktops and laptops for years, this rise to the top could be attributed to the recent AI boom.

Nvidia has long been known for investing its resources and research into AI, and its shift in focus can be dated back to as far back as 2006 when it released Compute Unified Device Architecture (CUDA), a parallel computing?? platform.

The focus on AI has paid dividends for Nvidia in the long run, now that the tech market is chasing af??ter an AI-powered future. To achieve that, tech companies that are investing in AI require GPUs that can handle the AI processes, and that’s where Nvidia’s value comes into play. The company’s stock price has seen over 200% growth since 2023.

With the focus on generative AI increasing rapidly, and companies such as Microsoft and Apple introducing the likes of Copilot+ and Apple Intelligence, Nvidia stands to profit. Currently, Nvidia’s stock price is hovering around $135, and this is due to the stock split of 10:1 decided by the company in Ju??ne after an announcement back in May.

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Video game and general graphical technology i??s advancing so fast, that it's tough to keep up with it. Now, Nvidia has announced that the latest version of its Deep Learning Super Sampling (or DLSS) is on the way, and it's already going to support some modern titles.

Details can be found on Nvidia's website. The long and the short of it is: DLSS 3.5 is due to release sometime this fall. It represents the next stage in Team Green's upscaling AI tech, with a recent video from th??e company explaining just how it's better than previous iterations.

//youtu.be/sGKCrcNsVzo

On top of that, games like Alan Wake 2 and Portal RTX will support version 3.5, as will the upcoming Phantom Liberty DLC for Cyberpunk 2077.

One for you graphical purists

The recent video announcing DLSS 3.5 gives an overview of how the people at Nvidia have improved the image upscaling algorithm. Bryan Catanzaro, Vice President of Applied Deep Learni?ng Research, says this latest version will fe?ature Ray Reconstruction.

How does it work? Catanzaro gives some insight into how it differs from the ray tracing technology many of us have come to be familiar with. Suffice it to say, most casual gamers probably won't be too concerned with the details. However, side-by-side comparisons showing Cyberpunk with all the iterations of?? DLSS (including 3?.5) do show a difference in quality, especially when it comes to bolder colors in light reflections.

As always, the up?coming Nvidia AI will only be compatible with RTX-enabled graphics cards. Bit of a shame that it's not more open source, but no doubt AMD (and possibly Intel) will follow closely with newer and more powerful versions of their own upscaling alternatives.

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Damn, I’m looking sorry

Blaze Entertainment has retracted a lead image they were using for Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered aft?er it was discovered by fans to have utili??zed AI in its creation process.

There isn’t a lot of official information on this aside from the apology statement from Blaze. On May 31st, they announced that Duke Nukem was coming to their Evercade platform via two collections. The first features Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered and Duke Nukem 3D. The second is Duke Nukem: A Time to Kill, Duke Nukem: Land of the Babes, and Duke Nukem Advance.

However, as soon as their lead image for Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered hit social media, it was torn apart for blatantly being AI-generated. As it often is, the giveaway is the hands, which don’t seem to know how to hold a gun. There are also some extremely warped perspectives going on with some of the featu?res of the guns. It’s kind of hilarious.

Blaze Entertainment initially went on the defense, saying that they did commission an artist, to which some in the community responded with: “You might want to ask for a refund.�Blaze went as far as stating the artist's name in a now-deleted tweet, which further insulated the use of AI, as the artist in question describes themselves as a “hybrid artist.�/p>

[caption id="attachment_383624" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Blaze[/caption]

Duke hates robots

So,?? faced with concrete evidence, Blaze eventually conceded and put out an apology, via Andrew Byatt, CEO of Blaze Entertainment:

“As part of this, an artist was commissioned to produce a lead image for the new Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered game developed by Blaze Entertainment. It is abundantly clear from the response on social media that the work on this commission has fallen below the expectation and standards demanded by fans due to the artists�use of AI in the process. We are immediately removing the art where possible to do so and will be announcing a replacement commission in due course that better meets the high standard expected. We would like to apologise to you, all of the fans, who have felt passionately about this enough and please be assured are working to remedy this. We also would like to thank everyone who’s worked on the project to date for their input.�/p>

Yeah, its clarity is pretty abundant. I ??have to agree with him there.

//twitter.com/evercaderetro/status/166437881556??3419649?s=??20

Robots always piss on the parade

To be fair, the first I heard about Duke Nukem 1+2 Remastered was through all the ridicule for this image erupting through Twitter. If there is a silver lining her??e, it’s that any publicity is good publicity.

At the same time, this is a bad look. Blaze Entertainment doesn’t say that the use of AI in promo material ?was unintentional. If they said, “We were had!�that would be one thing, but they probably don’t want to look foolish. So now, it just looks like they might possibly support the use of AI as a replacement for traditional artists. If that’s the case, where else do they use it? Was the remaster accomplished with machine generation? If so, I don’t want it. I’d rather just download a mod for these games? that was put together by a fan using their meaty, human hands.

Duke Nukem might have been the thing that finally got me to add an Evercade to my collection, but just like that, it’s not so certain. I was planning another playthrough of Duke Nukem 1 and 2,?? b?ut I think I’ll just stick to the DOS versions.

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The bots are not chatty

Last week, Square Enix announced a remastered version of a classic adventure game, The Portopia Serial Murder Case, that would be a showcase for its AI tech. The tech preview is out now, and well, it's not ??going over well.

For context, The Portopia Serial Murder Case is a classic adventure game from the '80s, authored by Dragon Quest's Yuji Horii. This actually marks its first official release in ??the west, years later, and it's got a new visual style and layout to go with it.

Much like the original Portopia, this new version is also a text-parser adventure. This means you type commands in, or speak them using Speech-to-Text in the new version, to investigate and explore. The 2023 Portopia uses the framing ??of? you (the boss) ordering around Yasu, a junior detective. He apparently needs a more hands-on approach for murders.

The AI tech preview part of this comes through NLP, or Natural Language Processing. I wrote a bit about this around the announcement of Square Enix's preview, but basically, it means reading and understanding casual language, then issuing the correct response. In essence, it's something that many text adventure games have done for a while, from Zork up through Facade.

This new version would use Natural Language Understanding (NLU) to help the detective understand the player's instructions. Originally, there were even plans to generate natural replies for situations where the system did not have a preordained answer. This was scrapped, though, as Square Enix was concerned about the risk of the ??AI ge??nerating unethical replies.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=V79jja9qvto

So, ultimately, it's a remade version of Portopia with more natural language tools under the hood and Speech-to-Text capability. How's it being received? No?t very well.

Talk to me, Yasu

At the time of this writing, the Square Enix AI Tech Preview of The Portopia Serial Murder Case sits at a Very Negative rating on Steam, with only 10% of users leaving positive reviews. Most of them found frustration with the actual AI partner, describing situations in which Yasu simply gets st?uck in response loops.

Not one to simply read the reviews, I decided to venture into the AI adventure myself. Things started off okay. A few text bubbles gave me some context, and I soon met Yasu, my partner on the case. Our relationship was fine, at first. I asked him a few basic questions, asked after local suspects. In a few cases, I had to revise something I said. But as long a?s I asked the most straightforward questions, in a very r?obotic manner, I got some info.

Then we went to the crime scene.

Here, I found myself trapped in loops a?s I asked very basic questions of Yasu. I can understand some difficulty with questions like "was the murder weapon found at the scene," though that should still be pretty answerable. Others, like "did the victim live alone," could not seem to garner any information.

[caption id="attachment_375180" align="alignnone" width="640"] Screenshot by Destructoid[/caption]

Taking notes

Here's where I hit another major snag. For one, there is a list of important topics: suspects, locations, and objects. But there isn't really a "journal" or any o?ther record of what's been said. ?Pen-and-paper seems like a necessity to remember anything but the most surface-level details.

It also feels like the NLU Visualizer, a tool Square shows in their promo images on Steam, would help with clarifying and narrowing in my inquiries. Problem is, I use a numpad-less, tiny keyboard that does not have the button Square has assigned to it. There's no key rebinding, either. So aside from assigning a specific system shortcut for the rarely-used "Pause" key, I was out of luck. From the sounds of it, it doesn't see?m like the NLU would have helped a?? ton anyways.

[caption id="attachment_374799" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Square Enix[/caption]

Yasu doesn't provide much help either. Every time I shook him like a magic 8-ball, trying to elicit an answer to my inquiries, I'd get frequent "??Hmmm" or "We should focu?s on the task at hand" responses. Putting aside a need for oddly specific phrasing in a tech preview meant to highlight natural language understanding, there's very little guidance to inform you how to better shape your answers.

The Steam community forums has threads aggregating the right phrasings to get certain pieces of info. But at that point, we've circled back around to the original text-parser problem we were trying to address. My attempts at casual language rarely worked, and even specific inquiries about information I knew Yasu had didn't' click if I didn't ask about them in the right way. Eventually, I found that "ask around" is the best way to get a push in the right direction. But that's somet??hing I only would've learned from other players.

A new case

On top of that, this just isn't a very impressive remaster. I've cited past projects like Famicom Detective Club that have paid a fairly loving tribute to their original works. By comparison, Portopia feels less lively or captivating. The mystery can never be interesting, because I'm too busy trying to solve my phrasing to get?? overly invested in the unfolding drama.

Characters don't have a lot of life to them, backgrounds are fine, and its eerily quiet in a way that doesn't feel intentio?nally creepy. At the very least, this is free. And if you're deadly curious, you can have some fun trying to get Yasu to tell you where he found a knife. As a tech preview, it's still got some wrinkles to iron out. And as a localized version of a classic, it hasn't left a strong impression on man??y people.

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The Portopia Serial Murder Case returns with some extra functionality

Square Enix is showcasing some possibilities for AI tech, and it's using an old classic to do so. The Portopia Serial Murder Case is gettin??g a PC remaster on April 23 with its AI Te??ch Preview, with brand-new Natural Language Processing tech.

Artificial intelligence use in games has quickly become a hot-button topic, and for good reason. The rise of systems that generate text, images, or anything else has open a bit of a Pandora's Box in terms of original sourcing, ethics, and specifically for games, how something gets made.

I'm starting here because, well, Square Enix has a history with new tech trends. So when I first saw "AI Tech Preview" appended to a re-release of 1983's The Portopia Serial Murder Case, I was? skeptical. And I still am. But I'm now, at least, a little bit curious too.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=o6r3hEEJs_0

Machine learning

The AI tech Square is using aligns wit??h Natural Language Processing, or NLP. In a very basic sense, think of it as a machine learning to understand language in a more conversational setting. Using deep learning and large text data sets, a system could start to understand complex text input, and generate responses.

The Portopia Serial Murder Case includes some of this in the tech preview releasing on April 23. Namely, NLU—Natural Language Understanding—is used to help computers understand natural language. Think of old adventure games that used text input, like Zork. Sometim??es, you might have to get speci??????????????????????????fic with your wording or phrasing to do the thing you'd want to do.

The goal of Portopia is to smooth some of that out. Rather than a direct adventure, you're directing a detective around, conducting the investigation with them. You can see in this screenshot how the NLU interprets various ??responses, and then presents a response.

[caption id="attachment_374799" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Square Enix[/caption]

While that's NLU, NLG—Natural Language Generation—is a different story. This is where the idea of chatbots and the like come in; rather than delivering a set response, this is where the AI generates a reply. On the Steam store page, Square Enix says this feature was omitted from the AI tech preview of The Portopia Serial Murder Case because there was a risk of the AI generating "unethical replies." Which, yeah, that can still happen sometimes. Square says it might reintroduce this function, "as soon as our research succeeds in creating an? environment in which playe?rs can enjoy the experience with peace of mind."

This has been explored before, perhaps most notably in games like 2005's Facade. It's ??interesting to see it incorporated here, to stand in for your standard text adventure parser that usually uses a set number of verbs.

Talk to me

Additionally, there's an extra feature added too: Speech-to-Text. This tech, in Portopia, will let players use their own voice rather than the keyboard. It needs a CUDA-capable GPU and a large amount of VRAM for a "satisfactory experience," but it's an interesting addition. It reminds me of the fun, messy times I had with games like Tom Clancy's EndWar. Remember EndWar? What a wild thing.

On top of all that, it's also a full-on remaster of a Sharp X1 game from 1983, authored by Dragon Quest's own Yuji Horii. For comparison, here's the PC-88 version (via MobyGames):

[caption id="attachment_374776" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via MobyGames[/caption]

And here's the new version:

[caption id="attachment_374778" align="alignnone" width="640"] Image via Square Enix[/caption]

Granted, this is also the first time Portopia has seen an English release. There's understandably a bit of tension around that, especially seeing it remastered as a tech preview rather than a direct adaptation, like Famicom Detective Club.

So I'm of two minds on this. On one hand, I think the tech is fascinating, and less egregious than I was worried it would be. On the other hand, seeing a classic adventure game get a re-release is a big deal. Having it tied into the tech preview would, for anyone who wanted to experience Portopia in its more-i??ntended form, rub them the wrong way. For something that's a notabl?e piece of Square Enix's history, it makes this all a bit fraught. It will be free to play, so I'll probably check it out either way.

The Square Enix AI tech preview for The Portopia Serial Murder Case goes live on April 23 for PC via Steam.

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