Ubisoft has announced the development of a new tool that will allow you to obtain richer dialogues and with less development effort thanks to the artificial intelligence. The idea is that in games where NPCs complete a large part of contextual dialogs, they can develop more nourished dialogues depending on what is happening in the game. But is this good or bad?
Games with a new level of artificial intelligence
With the name of Ubisoft ghostwriter, this AI will be in charge of writing dialogues focused on the NPC characters, so that conversations are generated practically automatically in the game development process. And it is that the tool is a utility that the writers will use in the development period of the game, and it is not about any technology that the game will implement to generate dialogues in real time (at least, for now).
a hostile environment
This sounds pretty good at first, however there are already some industry players who don’t seem to be happy about the direction this decision could take. Criticism about the system comes from Alanah Pearce, a writer at Sony Santa Monica, who doesn’t seem to be too enthusiastic about it at Ghostwriter.
As a writer, having to edit AI-generated scripts/dialogue sounds far more time consuming than just writing my own temp lines 🤷🏼♀️. I would far prefer AAA studios use whatever budget it costs to make tools like this to instead hire more writers. https://t.co/VKYPeMHiwY
— Alanah Pearce (@Charalanahzard) March 22, 2023
According to her, implementing a tool of this type only hinders the work of the writers, who will have to review the proposed phrases, wasting more time than if they wrote them themselves first. In addition, her protest also criticizes the Ubisoft investment policysince he thinks it would be more profitable and reasonable to hire more staff for the writing team instead of spending money on an AI.
Ubisoft for its part ensures that the tool will allow writers to focus on less repetitive tasks, and focus on things like main scripts or scene dialogues. But of course, the question that exists is, what if what started as phrases for NPCs ends up creating the complete dialogue of the story mode? Where is the work of the scriptwriters?
At the moment the giant’s proposal is to “help the writers”, since they understand that spending so much time on the NPCs’ dialogues is not especially productive. That is where the AI will begin to learn, since, through corrections by the writers themselves and a machine learning model, it will improve the interventions until it comes up with phrases and dialogues that fit perfectly. We’ll see if the writers are threatened with these measures over time.
Fountain: Ubisoft
Via: destructoid