Ubisoft is Developing an AI Ghostwriter to Save Scriptwriters Time

I have this problem all over the place at the moment, but I’m going to call it out specifically here: calling this tool “artificial intelligence” imbues it with an underserved sense of awe and respect stemming from our association of the term with examples from science fiction. It’s wildly inaccurate—this stuff is machine learning, not AI, there’s a difference—but calling it “AI” is exactly what its creators (and chief profiteers) would like us to think.

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Maybe this will save time? I don’t know, I’m not an Ubisoft writer, and the video above says the tech was created in consultation with the company’s “narrative teams”. Some in the field have certainly had some positive takes on the news.

On a personal level, though, I don’t 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 couldn’t tell, I’d just prefer it on a psychological basis. Humans can be weird like that.