Ubisoft, the developer of popular games like Assassin’s Creed and Far Cry, has announced that it is using the AI Ghostwriter tool to write dialogue for some of its games, with the goal of making NPCs (non-playable characters) individually interesting and realistic. , with less manual work.
The company specifies that the tool does not replace video game scriptwriters, but makes it possible to ease the task of writing “barks”, which are sentences or sounds made by NPCs during an event. Ghostwriter generates early barks to give writers more time to focus on the storytelling itself.
Chatter and barking are key to a player’s immersion in games – NPCs talking to each other, enemy dialogue during combat, or the change caused by entering an area all provide a more realistic experience of the world and make the player feel like Ubisoft wrote in a publication The game around them exists outside of their actions blog.
However, both require time and creative effort from the writers, which can be spent on other essential plot elements. Ghostwriter edits this time around, while letting the writers have a degree of creative control.
As games get bigger, the writers have an increasingly difficult time making NPCs fun and realistic. How do you make every interaction with them – especially if there are hundreds – separate? This is where Ghostwriter comes in, an in-house AI tool created by La Forge, Ubisoft’s research and development division.
Ghostwriter doesn’t replace a video game script writer, but eases into one of his most daunting tasks: writing boats. Ghostwriter already generates first drafts of barks – phrases or sounds NPCs make during a triggered event – giving script writers more time to refine the narrative elsewhere. Ben Swanson, an R&D researcher at La Forge Montral, is the creator of Ghostwriter.
Ghostwriter’s Beginnings
Ben’s interest in creative applications of natural language processing began during his PhD in computer science at Brown University, where he took a course in digital literature with two creative authors from Brown and the Rhode Island College of Design. In this course, Ben was introduced to the idea of creating artwork using generative models, and has since explored the possibilities of combining this technology with creative writing. This interest led him to Google where he worked at Stadia Games and Entertainment in 2019, then Latitude to AIDungeon, where he furthered his machine learning research and published an article on the topic in 2021.
In 2021, Ben was inspired to join Ubisoft, as he was intrigued by the GDC chat from the Watch Dogs team. I actually attended a conference on narrative design for Watch Dogs: Legion, and was very impressed, he explains. “I thought I would love to work on something like this, with professional writing teams, so I applied.”
This coincidence allowed Ben to reach out to Ubisoft La Forge, which was already looking for a solution to some of its technology questions. “It was the perfect time because they were looking for someone to do exactly what I wanted to do.
Ben’s desire to work with professional, like-minded teams paid off when he began collaborating with members of the La Forge team in China, whose expertise in UX/UI and web application development enabled them to create a tool that now works: the Ghost Writer.
The specter of artificial intelligence is there
Ghostwriter is the result of conversations with narrative designers that reveal a challenge, one that Ben believes can be solved with an AI tool. Chatter and barking are central to the player’s immersion in the games – NPCs talking to each other, enemy dialogue during combat, or a switch triggered by entering an area all provide a more realistic experience of the world and make the player feel more like the game than around them exist outside of their actions. However, both types of dialogue require time and creative effort from the writers, which can be spent on other essential plot elements. Ghostwriter edits this time around, while letting the writers have a degree of creative control.
Instead of writing the first drafts themselves, Ghostwriter allows the writers to pick and polish the samples that are created, Ben explains. In this way, technology is a tool teams use to support them on their creative journey, with every interaction and feedback from the members who use it.
Ubisoft has unveiled Ghostwriter, an NPC-generated AI that barks phrases that characters say when players interact with the game world. It should help screenwriters save time and create more realistic interactions.
details: https://t.co/bY1FqOaFTe# Ubisoft #Owns pic.twitter.com/dYKY5EUI2U
– 80 levels (@80 levels) March 22, 2023
To recap the process, writers first create a character and the type of interaction or expression they wish to create. Ghostwriter then offers a number of variations that the writer can freely choose from and modify to suit their needs. This process uses pairwise comparison as a method for evaluation and improvement. This means that for each variation created, Ghostwriter presents two options that will be compared and chosen by the writer. Once a selection is made, the tool learns from the preferred one and, after thousands of selections made by humans, becomes more efficient and accurate.
Challenges and global support
Collaborating with Ubisoft La Forge with this cutting-edge technology has not been without its challenges. Artificial intelligence in video games is not a new concept, with most associating this technology with the behaviors of NPCs. Sependant, ce concept d’apprentissage automatique est restrictif par rapport ses implications relles, car l’industrie voit maintenant une place et un besoin non seulement for les outils d’IA, mais also for les machines that peuvent apprendre par le biais de la rtroaction mankind. Ben’s research and work on Ghostwriter, as well as his collaborations with teams around the world, have resulted in the creation of an AI infrastructure at Ubisoft that takes this potential into account, while working alongside narrative designers to help unlock their stories and creativity. games.
However, working with like-minded teams and taking the tool built by Ubisoft was only half the battle, with Ben making clear that the goal now is to support adoption of the tool through production. By working closely with writers, the team can understand their needs in order to better adapt the tool to each game’s unique worlds. Technology like Ghostwriter requires writers to learn not only to use the tool, but also to integrate into their video game production process.
The team aspires to give this AI power to narrative designers, who will eventually be able to create their own AI system themselves, adapting to their design needs. To do this, they created an easy-to-use website called Ernestine, which allows anyone to create their own machine learning models used in Ghostwriter. They hope teams will consider Ghostwriter before they begin the storytelling process and build their models with a vision in mind, making the technology an integral part of the production pipeline.
source : Ubisoft
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