Think about your favorite video game character. Picture them in your head, remember their stories and the actors’ performances that made them stay with you long after you put down the controller. Maybe you’re thinking of Astarion from Baldur’s Gate 3whose actor Neil Newbon recently won Best Performance Award at The Game Awards 2023. Or maybe your mind has stuck to your favorite version of Link from The Legend of Zelda franchise, who has accompanied you through every new game in the series over the years, even though he never spoke.
Remember, everything you love about this character was created by a team of writers, artists and actors who combined their immense talents to bring this hero, villain or companion to life. Nvidia, the company responsible for many graphics cards in high-end PCs, along with AI technology company Convai, announced an AI-powered NPC generator called the Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine last year. It tries to emulate the same writing, acting and animation that all these talented people create to give these characters impact. However, there’s one key difference: it sucks.
The edge posted a transcript of a conversation between the site’s managing editor Sean Hollister and two NPCs from a playable demo at CES 2024. The demo from Nvidia and Convai The content shown allowed the user to speak to the characters in their own voice, with the AI characters reacting to what was said in real time. One character was named Jin and was supposed to be an employee of a ramen restaurant, the other was Nova, a customer who sat at the bar. Hollister points out that the technology still has a long way to go, saying that “voices, facial expressions and body language” were all not up to par compared to what handmade work can capture, but still stand out from the crowd Keeping demonstration atmosphere away The technology appearing in video games is “inevitable.” In theory, this would allow developers to create game characters without having to write scripts and record performances. The AI would simply generate responses to whatever the players say. This follows growing concerns from voice actors following SAG-AFTRA’s deal with technology company Replica Studios, which allows it to create AI replicas of voice actors. Much to the chagrin of those whose votes are at stake.
As Hollister describes it in the article, Jin and Nova are “effectively generative AI chatbots.” Neither character seems to have much to think about beyond the walls of the ramen shop. They can imagine the cyberpunk city they’re supposed to live in by mentioning robberies, corporate crime, and other petty crimes, but most of it just feels like they’re pulling from a word bank. There is nothing here resembling prose, emotion, or anything else that makes a character endearing or human-like. AI promises a kind of procedural, endless possibilities that could theoretically make a character feel more alive and reactive than your average NPC, but unless there’s actual dialogue written, it’s just an algorithm trying to tell us to make the world believe is real.
Apparently a lot of work went into making the simulation seem real. Convai product lead Nyla Worker explains The edge that each NPC has backend programming designed to give them a core ethos, including a character description, a knowledge base, and personality traits such as whether they are extroverted or introverted. So these AI-controlled NPCs essentially have a digital character sheet that they draw from so that they don’t break from their role. But again, it’s just an AI being trained to emulate a certain archetype so it can play along as a person. The characters you love made their impact because someone created them, not because an algorithm placed them in front of you to tell a generated backstory. Writers, animators and actors give them a sense of reality, as if they had actual identities and their own hopes and dreams.
All of this follows Thousands of layoffs across the video game industry in the first 19 days of 2024 alone. This kind of callous treatment of workers and their workforce is only allowed to continue because executives refuse to take pay cuts and look to companies like Nvidia’s technology to continue bringing video games to market without having to pay people to make them.
