Ubisoft's New AI Tool Automatically Generates Dialogue For Non-Playable Game Characters

Ubisoft, the maker of well-known games like Assassin's Creed and Far Cry, has disclosed that it uses an AI "Ghostwriter" programme to compose dialogue for certain of its games in order to maintain NPCs (non-playable characters) individually engaging and realistic with minimal manual labour.

The tool, according to the manufacturer, won't take the place of video game writers; rather, it will make it easier to compose barks, which are the sentences or noises that NPCs make when a trigger event occurs.

First draughts of barks are written by the ghostwriter in order to give the scriptwriters more time to concentrate on the overall story.

“Crowd chatter and barks are central features of player immersion in games – NPCs speaking to each other, enemy dialogue during combat, or an exchange triggered when entering an area all provide a more realistic world experience and make the player feel like the game around them exists outside of their actions,” Ubisoft wrote in a blog post.

“However, both require time and creative effort from scriptwriters that could be spent on other core plot items. Ghostwriter frees up that time, but still allows the scriptwriters a degree of creative control.”

The process begins with the creation of a character by the scriptwriters, along with the interaction or utterance they hope to produce.

The scriptwriter can then select and modify the versions that the ghostwriter generates to suit their needs.

The procedure employs pairwise comparison as a technique for evaluation and improvement, which means that for each variation produced, the tool offers two options that the scriptwriter will compare and select from.

Once one is chosen, the tool picks up knowledge from the selected option.

The assumption is that the tool will improve in usefulness and accuracy as scriptwriters make thousands of selections.

According to Ben Swanson, the R&D scientist at Ubisoft who developed Ghostwriter, scriptwriters must learn how to use such technology as well as incorporate it into their video game development process.

Swanson and his colleagues want to empower storytellers with AI so that they can someday build their own AI systems that are specific to their own requirements.

To do this, the production team developed a tool called Ernestine, which enables anyone to build custom machine learning models that can be utilised in Ghostwriter.

It's important to note that after Ubisoft made their announcement, various video game developers urged the business to spend money on hiring real writers.

In in response to criticism, Ubisoft stated that the tool was developed in conjunction with writers and serves only to add more variants to the short lines given to NPCs.