Chatty AI video game characters could soon go mainstream • FRANCE 24 English

I’ve been fidding around with a fan-made modification of the game Skyrim called Mantella, and it’s pretty wild. It almost broke my computer, but when I eventually got it working, I was able to use my microphone to talk to any of the characters in the game, and they’d give me unique responses depending on what I said. Let me show you a clip of me talking to Raof and his sister, Gerder, after escaping a dragon attack. Raof, how’s your friend here doing? He seems a bit lost. Yes, I am a bit. That was a disturbing experience. Well, don’t worry. You’re safe now. You’re welcome to stay here with us as long as you need. So, the recording perhaps wasn’t the best there, but the AI characters, you can see react to what I’m saying dynamically, and they can even talk to each other as well, and you can walk around the game talking with them. Catherine, how does it work, Peter? Yeah. So each character has essentially been primed with a bit of context and a bit of backstory to their characters. And then it works very much like it does when you talk to an AI chatbot using your voice. So it translates your voice to text. The AI then reads that text, understands it, and responds. And it responds with a voice that’s been trained on the original voice uh actors in the game. So even though I was on a very cheap and basic version of this, I was still at many points not able to distinguish from which lines were in the original game and which lines were generated by AI. And uh does it actually really feel immersive? Yeah. So, I’d say on this budget basic attempt of mine, it didn’t feel hugely more immersive than normal. But there are many things you can do to make it more immersive, like downloading voice uh voice models which are a lot more realistic, and even paying for more advanced AI, which allows the characters to see what’s around them and understand wherever they are in the game. And of course, you can do it all on a virtual reality headset as well. Well, in fact, there are many people doing this. YouTuber Brainfrog has made a career out of interactions that he’s had with AI in VR. Take a look. I have a letter here that is proof that Yarl Scald is working with the Imperial Legion. These accusations are preposterous. I am a loyal son of Skyrim and a true Nord. I would never conspire with the Empire. Myarl, if I may, it’s important that we address any evidence presented. I spoke to Brainfrog aka Eddie about the potential of this technology. There are a substantial amount of issues and times where you run into this stuff and you’re just like, “Oh, I’m speaking to a dumb computer, but there are some moments that everything aligns and it’s and it’s and it’s really really breathtaking.” You’re creating your own world with your own relationships. And I found myself building genuine relationships with these characters. Like the name Aurora comes with history now for me of adventures we’ve had. Now, Peter, a few weeks ago, we had a Tech 24 about um AI psychosis and people chronically getting addicted to chat bots. Is there a risk of that here with this? Well, people are definitely getting very emotionally attached to their characters. Some people at least, obviously not the majority, but let me share one users experience that I found on an online forum. Ugur, he says, and I had a kid. We decided to name her Hope. We We roleplayed her water breaking and her giving birth, which was wild. Skyrim VR is definitely therapy. When I play it, I’m instantly put in a good mood. And as I mentioned in that last edition, psychologists are already pouring through what it means for people to have such in-depth relationships with chat bots. And this interacting with characters in video games using advanced AI only provides yet another avenue for people to do this. Now listen, there’s no judgment from me. I’ll let the viewers decide what they think. Now, um, as we’ve been discussing, this is experimental. How quickly could all of this become mainstream? Yeah, I think it might become quicker more than u might happen more quickly than you think, but perhaps before the end of the year, we’ll start to see these characters in games we’re playing not through modded games and sort of fan-made games, but for real through real games. Just this week, developers on Meta’s Horizon Worlds were let loose on tools that let them design characters who can respond with AI. Fortnite earlier in the year introduced an AI voice, Darth Vader, you can see here, that was wildly popular. They since introduced another couple of AI characters, and they’re introducing the ability for developers to create custom AI characters soon. I’ve also got my eye on this game, Stella Cafe, which is a VR game where you talk to robots in a diner. That’s developed by one of the guys behind Job Simulator. That should be out soon. Now, the next thing AI labs are working on will be characters that don’t just verbally in react, but physically interact with the space around them as well. Well, the Financial Times reporting today that Elon Musk is poaching specialists from Nvidia to work on that. Not all the big gun gardens are happy, though. Michael Dow, head of publishing at the widely respected Larian Studios, said this week AI would not solve the big problem of the games industry, which he says is leadership and vision.

We’re used to video game characters repeating the same lines of scripted dialogue. But artificial intelligence is now allowing players to have unique, unscripted conversations with the characters they meet. In Tech 24, we look at this experimental tech and its path to the mainstream.
#AI #gaming #tech

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