Ubisoft, the publishers behind Assassinās Creed, Far Cry and Ghost Recon, tonight announced that an āAI toolā is currently helping its developers write dialogue for some of its games.
This tool, called Ghostwriter, is described as:
Introducing Ubisoft Ghostwriter, an AI tool developed in-house that aims to support our scriptwriters by generating the first draft of our NPC barks – the phrases or sounds made by NPCs when players interact with the game world.
This tool was created hand-in-hand with scriptwriters to create more realistic NPC interactions by generating variations on a piece of dialogue See how our teams will use AI to handle repetitive tasks, and free up time to work on other core game elements.
The trailer below, which goes out of its way (for obvious reasons) to say that itās there āto save scriptwriters timeā, provides a rundown of how it works:
I have this problem all over the place at the moment, but Iām going to call it out specifically here: calling this tool āartificial intelligenceā imbues it with an underserved sense of awe and respect stemming from our association of the term with examples from science fiction. Itās wildly inaccurateāthis stuff is machine learning, not AI, thereās a differenceābut calling it āAIā is exactly what its creators (and chief profiteers) would like us to think.
Maybe this will save time? I donāt know, Iām not an Ubisoft writer, and the video above says the tech was created in consultation with the companyās ānarrative teamsā. Somein the field have certainly had some positive takes on the news
On a personal level, though, I donāt care how annoying the game is, or how repetitive the soundbytes, I would prefer bad lines written entirely by humans over optimised lines originally written by a machine 100 times out of 100. Even if I couldnāt tell, Iād just prefer it on a psychological basis. Humans can be weird like that.Ā
