First of all, I’m going to replace AI with LLM, since that’s probably what you meant.

There are 2 distinct questions asked in this post:

1. Why not use LLMs to provide different levels of automation? (Like, manual, medium, auto)

Answer: you don’t need LLMs for that. You can just code it in like any other feature. It’s not particularly hard, game developers know how to do it since they are used to programming automation for NPCs.

2. Why not use LLMs to procedurally generate NPC dialogue?

Answer: games are primarily a form of art. NPC dialogues are written with a purpose. Different characters have different personalities. Some dialogues are meant to drive the plot. Other dialogues are meant to teach the player how to play. Others are meant to show the player things that they may have missed, or things that are interesting.

Procedural dialogues removes all the control from artists. They would all be generic npc n#473, with the “personality” of the LLM, maybe slightly varied if the developer writes a different prompt for each character.

Procedural dialogues would have the same issues as procedural world generation or photorealistic graphics, it would just not be interesting.

There is a practically infinite amount of Minecraft worlds, yet they all feel the same way. The thing that differentiates a Minecraft world from another is that which the player has built. The only part of the world that wasn’t procedurally generated.

There is a great amount of photorealistic games. And they all look very similar. You may only distinguish one from another by looking at their handcrafted worlds or their handcrafted characters. But not by staring at a wall. You can stare at a wall in non-photoreslistic games and know what game it is.

So if you put procedurally generated dialogues, no one will read them, since you’ll be bored by the time you read the same thing being said by 5 different NPCs from 5 different games.