There's a lot of non-trivial applications to AI in games:
1. AI-controlled physically-accurate character rigs instead of inbaked animations [1]
2. Conversations with AI NPCs (maybe lore-conditioned ChatGPT): think interactive Skyrim where you could actually talk to everyone
3. Evolving Neural Networks to control battle AI, but where Neural Networks get the same input as player (screen pixels, sound) instead of decision-tree based AI strategies. Then think how AI will learn along with player (Remember how PodBOT learned new maps in CS?) Current methods may work for any game, and bots may discover entertaining strategies by themselves
4. Multi-Agent large-scale simulations: there's some research [2] going on, imagine it applied to open-world games
5. Simulation for sim2real. How about testing a new robot prototype in the game before making it real
1. AI-controlled physically-accurate character rigs instead of inbaked animations [1]
2. Conversations with AI NPCs (maybe lore-conditioned ChatGPT): think interactive Skyrim where you could actually talk to everyone
3. Evolving Neural Networks to control battle AI, but where Neural Networks get the same input as player (screen pixels, sound) instead of decision-tree based AI strategies. Then think how AI will learn along with player (Remember how PodBOT learned new maps in CS?) Current methods may work for any game, and bots may discover entertaining strategies by themselves
4. Multi-Agent large-scale simulations: there's some research [2] going on, imagine it applied to open-world games
5. Simulation for sim2real. How about testing a new robot prototype in the game before making it real
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[1] ASE: Large-Scale Reusable Adversarial Skill Embeddings for Physically Simulated Characters, NVIDIA, 2022 https://nv-tlabs.github.io/ASE/
[2] Neural MMO: A Massively Multiagent Game Environment, OpenAI, 2019, https://openai.com/blog/neural-mmo/