Artificial intelligence and video games: towards excessive realism?

2023-05-29 20:40:17

DISPATCH — A world-renowned chip and graphics card specialist, Nvidia has unveiled a project based on artificial intelligence to allow players to have “real” voice interactions with NPCs (non-player characters). At the same time, researchers are using “autonomous agents” and “self-prompting” to create games… without players.

Since the commissioning of ChatGPT, which can undoubtedly be considered as the tip of the iceberg, artificial intelligence has been developing at breakneck speed in many sectors. Among them, chatbots, graphic design… and video games.

Talkative NPCs, but not always responsive

Called Nvidia ACE, the new device of the American company was presented during the Computex 2023 event. In short, it allows players to speak directly with an NPC through its microphone, and the NPC to respond thanks to the AI. As reported The VergeNvidia ACE works off of the NeMo language model and Riva, which allows it to transcribe spoken speech into text and vice versa.

In the presentation video published by Nvidia, we discover what these interactions can look like, with the example of Kai. The player enters a kind of Japanese cyberpunk bar, where he starts a discussion with the bartender (NPC) in a simple way: “Hi Jin, how are you?” The latter, unnatural but reactive, replies that he is worried because of the growing crime in the neighborhood. Kai continues to question him, “Can I help?” There, Jin explains to him where the problem can come from, namely from a criminal who would hide in the undergrounds to the east of the city.

If the answers are quick, the discussion seems to be mistaken for a completely banal beginning of a quest, which one would find in any role-playing game. Especially since the questions asked by the player are very simple. It’s hard to know if the AI ​​would respond with the same ease to less obvious questions.

This is also an experiment that another player conducted on the Skyrim video game, with the help of ChatGPT. As reported Numerama, after adding his device, “NPCs in Skyrim become talkative and creepy”. In a video that he posted on YouTube, one can observe discussions that are more researched and less predictable, but much less fluid. All in all, there may still be a bit of work to make the interactions feel truly natural, but progress in AI is rapid. So much so that it would even do without the players…

Games without players

In a video titled “Video games will change forever“, the Youtuber “Underscore_” presents experiments carried out using “autonomous agents” and “auto-prompting”.

NB: In the jargon, a “prompt” corresponds to an instruction that is given to the AI, which it keeps in memory to give an answer.

He tells : “[Les chercheurs] created 25 such agents, gave them personalities, purpose in life, relationships, memory capacity, and then put them in a villa with no players.” Imagine little characters like SIMS, on which you have absolutely no impact. In this “game”, you are only spectators, and the said autonomous agents make their living. The only thing you can do is click on the characters, to know “what they are thinking, doing, as well as any conversations they have with others”.

With the help of diagrams, the Youtuber explains how the characters work: “They have slots [emplacements] of memory, which they fill as their actions progress. Once 100 slots have been filled, they stop and think about what they have been through.” Concretely, the AI ​​looks at each piece of data, and gives it a score of importance according to different criteria. A bit like we would think about what we have done, or undergone, in our day. Thus, the character sorts through his thoughts and starts again with a memory base that has evolved, and new ideas.

Thanks to this operation, “hallucinating behaviors emerge”. For example, “they decided on their own to have a Valentine’s Day. And fun factonly five of the eleven characters showed up to the party.”

Soon, the NPCs we meet in video games will therefore be able to organize themselves in completely unexpected ways, depending on what will happen around them and what we can tell them. The player’s actions, which are inherently unpredictable, will make their gaming experience unique.