Ubisoft, a well-known game development company, behind such popular titles as Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, presents Ghostwriter, its AI tool for internal use, developed by its R&D department, focused on the automatic generation of dialogues for non-playable NPC characters (or NPCs for its acronym in English), looking for these characters to become more “interesting and realistic”.
The company notes that this tool isn’t trying to replace game writers, but rather to ease their workload by focusing on one of the more time-consuming tasks, so writers can spend more time on the overall narrative.
Came to help, not replace game writers
According to Ubisoft, Ghostwriter will be in charge of creating the first drafts of the barks (phrases or sounds made by NPCs during a triggered event) allowing game writers to buy time to invest in improving other aspects of the overall narrative.
Ubisoft notes that:
Crowd chatter and barking are central features of player immersion in the games: NPCs talking to each other, dialogue with the enemy during combat, or a trade triggered by entering an area; all provide a more realistic world experience and make the player feel like the game around them exists
For this, we must take into account the complexity that game writers have to face depending on the number of NPCs that may be in the games, being quite challenging, which without a doubt the new AI will play an important role in. when it comes to facilitating creative work without making them lose control of it.
In this sense, having already created the first drafts, game writers only have to select samples and polish them instead of creating them from scratch.
By way of summary, Ubisoft explains that:
The writers first create a character and a type of interaction or expression that they would like to generate. Ghostwriter then proposes a select number of variations that the writer can freely choose and edit to suit her needs.
A tool that will become more accurate over time
But the most interesting thing is that the AI tool learns from the selections becoming more effective for the writers over time:
This process uses pairwise comparison as a method of evaluation and improvement. This means that, for each generated variation, Ghostwriter offers two options that will be compared and chosen by the writer. Once one is selected, the tool learns from the preferred option, and after thousands of selections made by humans, it becomes more effective and accurate.
Ben Swanson, the Ubisoft R&D scientist who developed Ghostwriter, sees it as necessary for writers to start learning how to use tools like Ghostwriter and introduce it into their creative processes, ultimately enabling game writers to create their own AI systems tailored to their needs, for which Ernestine already exists as a tool for anyone to create their own machine learning models used in Ghostwriter.
More info/Image Credit: Ubisoft
