Published , by Donovan Erskine
Published , by Donovan Erskine
Ubisoft was one of many video game studios to appear at this year’s Game Developer Conference to share updates on its newest technology. AI has been a hot term in the tech space as of late, and was the main focal point of a brand new technology that Ubisoft plans to implement in its games in the future. Ghostwriter is an AI tool that will generate dialogue for NPC characters in games, though it’s not meant to replace the scriptwriting process.
Ubisoft La Forge’s Ben Swanson helmed the keynote, where he shined a light on Ghostwriter and how it will work. Game Developer.com attended the keynote and shared the details that Swanson provided. The plan is to use Ghostwriter to generate barks, a term for brief lines of dialogue that are said in the background. He also said that the tool could be used to generate text for user interfaces.
Swanson was adamant in the fact that Ghostwriter wouldn’t be used to create lore, and it wouldn’t generate any dialogue for cutscenes. In an image shown during the presentation, Ubisoft specifically calls out crowd chatter, combat barks, and town barks as instances where it sees Ghostwriter coming into play. When developers opt to have Ghostwriter create dialogue, it will combine writer input with a language model to create that dialogue. The writer will then have the option to edit the dialogue or scrap it.
Ubisoft also showed off examples of potential dialogue and how Ghostwriter would use machine learning to come to logical conclusions based on existing information. The use of AI in any sort of content creation is heavily controversial, so it will be interesting to see how audiences and other developers take to Ghostwriter once it becomes available. For more of the biggest stories out of GDC, stick with Shacknews.