Ubisoft talks up AI-powered NPCs, only sounds kinda weird until we get to the "soul" and a female character that was reprogrammed for being too "flirtatious and seductive"

Ubisoft is working on a "generative AI prototype" that could let you have actual conversations with NPCs. While the publisher is quick to try and head off many of the standing criticisms of AI-generated content, it's tough to look at it all without a massive pile of skepticism.

In a new blog post, Ubisoft explains that "a small R&D team at Ubisoft’s Paris studio, in collaboration with Nvidia’s Audio2Face application and Inworld’s Large Language Model (LLM), have been experimenting with generative AI" to create Project NEO NPC. It's an effort to build video game NPCs with AI-generated dialog that goes beyond that of a mere chatbot.

There's still a writer behind the character - in this case it's narrative director Virginie Mosser - who shapes the character's backstory and personality, then tweaks the parameters of the language model to ensure it stays true to the vision.

"The model’s task becomes: I must impersonate this character," data scientist Mélanie Lopez Malet explains. "It is really important to us that it behaves like the character Virginie created. So, while we’re talking to it, we ask ourselves: ‘Is this Lisa? Would Lisa say this?’ and if the answer is no, we need to go back and find out what happened within the model to make it stray from the vision Virginie had."

That's all well and good, but this is still an AI language model, which means characters can be prone to whatever biases and stereotypes exist in the material it's trained on. Malet said that the team "created a physically attractive female character and its answers veered towards flirtatious and seductive, so we had to reprogram it."

Masser says the idea is to imbue each character with a "soul," and that their role in a given game would be limited to the structure of that plot: "They are there to play a role in a story. They have a narrative arc." In other words, they wouldn't be fully freeform playthings for you to linguistically abuse.

This article opens with the question, "Have you ever dreamed of having a real conversation with an NPC in a video game?" Judging by the response on Twitter, the answer has been a resounding 'no.' (In fact, Ubisoft ended up editing that question out of an earlier tweet.) That's maybe a bit unfair - I certainly remember imagining the possibilities of conversational AI in a game years ago - but the fact that generative AI has so far only been misused in practical applications has certainly done its part in poisoning this particular well. (Opening this can of worms also raises questions about how a character is defined and how viewers can interpret and relate to that character through the humanity they share with the writer, and I'm not seeing much evidence to justify jettisoning that human element.) 

Project NEO NPC is very much in the early phases of development, and this blog post seems to simply be a rundown of what Ubisoft is presenting at the Game Developers Conference this week in San Francisco. The notion that a publisher this size is working on NPCs with generative AI dialog is perhaps the least surprising thing in the world, but the thing I can't get over is the fact that Ubisoft put out this post in front of an audience of increasingly AI-averse players when it very much did not have to. I can't help but wonder if the publisher didn't learn much from its experience with the whole NFT thing. 

On the plus side, Ubisoft says it's going to make good games again.