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It’s GDC week, and conversations are being had about AI. Ubisoft have blundered into this, in classic Ubi style, by revealing that they’ve had an R&D team beavering away on a project called NEO NPC. It’s the usual pitch. “Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?”, asks Ubi’s official post about it. And what all people who make this fail to understand that the answer most normal people give if they think about it is “Erm, probably no, actually?”
Still, the internet made good hay from the prototype image Ubisoft shared on Xitter, as many people took the opportunity to make fun of the dialogue from Bloom, a prototype man in a prototype beanie who wants to be your friend.
How NEO NPC works in practice is that writers create the backstory and personality of a character, and input this into the language learning model. Players talk to the NPC by actually talking, out loud, into their mic (which is the bit I think average consumers do not actually want to do – like, sitting alone in a room talking to thin air). The player speech is then used as a prompt for the AI to spit out a response theoretically in line with the character defined by the writer. Sometimes, if you ask the right question, it will trigger a pre-written piece of plot thread rather than an AI response.
Currently NEO NPC uses Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model to do al this. Ubisoft’s post also gestures vaguely at the concerns people have with AI. VP of Production Technology Guillemette Picard says that “we know that developers and their creativity must still drive our projects. Generative AI is only of value if it has value for them.”
There’s some interesting stuff in there to interrogate, which the post doesn’t really spend any time on, such as trying to filter out “toxicity and inappropriate inputs on the part of the player” and figuring out how the AI will react to antagonism. There’s also a small section on “catching bias” that reveals they created a female character, specified she was attractive, and then the AI “veered towards flirtatious and seductive”. That’s weird and interesting. Where did that come from? What kind of data set is this AI trained on? What happens when players start trying to teach your AI eugenics?
At this stage though, the most front-facing problem is that the NEO NPC dialogue shown is obviously rubbish. Imagine someone in real life saying “I figured we could spend some time together to check if we have a compatible vibe.” Like, immediately you would never want to spend time with this man. This is not a real man. You would dial the first two 9s and hover over the third.
I get that this is an early prototype, though, so maybe the dialogue will get less hilariously bad. But even so, many of the QRTs dunking on the announcement made the salient point, summarised by academic and industry researcher Brendan Keogh, who says “The idea of AI creating ‘realistic’ NPCs is based on a false myth that videogames are ‘worlds’ as opposed to ‘media texts created by people to express ideas and tell stories’. Why would I want to listen to dialog nobody wrote?”
I enjoy games because the best of them are stories told by people with actual ideas about things. My go-to example is that I don’t think an AI RPG character couldn’t come up with something as idiosyncratic as Skyrim’s “arrow to the knee.” Anyway, we’re currently running a very good series on generative AI by researcher Mike Cook. Check it out. Our pals at sister-site GI.biz actually tried out the NEO NPC demo in person.