After Ubisoft's new AI-driven writing assistant tool was met with backlash online, one former developer has said it's not as bad as it first seems.
Earlier this week, Ubisoft unveiled its 'Ubisoft Ghostwriter' tool, an AI-driven program that claims to help writers by generating barks and other dialog snippets for NPCs. The reaction to the tool hasn't been kind online, with plenty of developers and actors alike calling out Ubisoft and claiming the tool is something that writers simply wouldn't want to deal with.
However, Liz England, former developer on Ubisoft's Watch Dogs Legion, has claimed that's not the case. England attended a talk at the ongoing Game Developer's Conference called Machine Learning Summit: Natural Language Generation for Games Writing, where the tool was discussed in further detail, and now claims it's the "gold standard" of how to integrate the tech into game development.
- Split Fiction's Josef Fares thinks game devs should embrace AI: "I can understand the fact that some people could lose their jobs, but that goes for every new technology"
- Resident Evil and Witcher 3 mocap director says video game industry layoffs have made it so "nothing is guaranteed," but AI won’t be replacing real actors "anytime soon"
My gamedev mutuals, please, I love you but don’t love your immediate knee jerk reactions to this. I attended this talk. It was fantastic. Gold standard of how to integrate this tech into your development, in direct collaboration with writers and using their own datasets. https://t.co/xK70G509tMMarch 21, 2023
"This is not 'we will replace writers with this tech' this is 'writers tell us what they want with this tech.' Reading your takes is exhauuuusting," England further wrote on Twitter. The former Ubisoft developer also stated the GDC talk was very firm about this being a tool "for writers, authored/programmed by writers," when responding to queries about the tool online.
In short, the Ubisoft Ghostwriter tool isn't designed to generate complete scripts for writers. It's instead meant to come up with 'barks,' bit of repetitive dialog for NPCs and other character to use in certain moments of gameplay. Remember all the times guards and other characters have told Geralt to piss off in The Witcher 3 while you're roaming around? Those are barks.
Currently, the GDC talk itself unfortunately isn't available to watch online. Make sure to keep an eye on GDC's YouTube channel though, where the event periodically uploads talks online in the months after they've first aired at the conference in San Francisco, just in case it eventually appears. Ubisoft's new tool undoubtedly isn't popular right now, but it does have its defenders.
Check out our new games 2023 guide for a look ahead at all the games coming out over the rest of the year.
