Ubisoft has just announced that it’s created an in-house AI tool that generates dial💯ogue for𒊎 NPCs, and nobody is happy about it. Ubisoft Ghostwriter will be used to generate barks for NPCs, which are the things that passersby say as you explore open worlds. The idea behind it is that the tool will free up time for scriptwriters to work on more im൲poꦺrtant dialogue for main characters and cutscenes, because they won’t have to spend time generating more minor dialogue.
This is incredibly stupid and misguided. I’ve spent a lot of time studying the craft of writing, and nobody benefits from lazy shortcuts like this – not the writers, not the work, and certainly not the audience. Ubisoft’s open worlds have already been criticised for feeling bland and lifeless. Removing humans from this process is not goi💜ng to help.
Having Ghostwriter fill in these gaps with generic variations on the same prompt won’t add interest, colour, or dynamism to the world, especially if it’s trained on Ubisoft’s previous barks. It’s just going to make it feel emptier. What Ubisoft should be doing, instead of spending it🌼s budget creating tools like this, is hiring more writers so that it has skilled staff to work on rectifying an already highlighted issue. It’s foolish to think that software can fix what is, at its core, a lack of care for worldb🦩uilding. Ubisoft’s worlds don’t feel curated as it is. One solution is to make them smaller and spend more time on them. Ubisoft is instead getting a computer to fill in the blanks.
That aside, I shudder to imagine the poor writer who will be tasked with editing scripts and dialogue generated by AI. Have you ever seen an essay written with ChatGPT? It can produce grammatically correct text, sure, but it doesn’t have its own unique voice. It doesn’t have experience to draw from, and it doesn’t exist in the real world. So how can we expect AI to be able to flesh out worldsಞ? Ubisoft says its writers want this, and maybe they do. But that’s a sign they’ve been overworked on increasingly bland univerไses, it does not signal that AI is our saviour.
The quality of a game’s dialogue directly impacts the player’s experience. Streamlining the process of creating barks might seem like a good business decision, until you consider that a badly-written open world kills audience interest. Ubisoft has already lost a lot of goodwill amongst gamers recently, what with its microtransactions, hugely bloated open worlds and repetitive gameplay mechanics. Maybe if they fo💫cused on shrinking their worlds and focusing on characters, as I&rsqu♈o;ve suggested they do for Assassin’s Creed, there wouldn’t be so muc𝕴h ‘busywork’ and the games would actually be good.
In essence, this is a prime example of how companies are willing to scrap human touch in favour of AI-assisted efficiency, even if the quality of their products suffers in the process. There’s no saying how far they’ll decide to go with this tech – we’ve already seen big releases like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:High On Life use AI art in-game, and I’m not keen on seeing more artist’s jobs 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:supplanted by 🔥a program with no actual creativity.
Ubisoft’s pride in this technology is worrying in that it might incentivise other big studios to do the same, and the last thing we need is for video games, one of the most mainstream 💦and visible mediums in which art is made, to get taken over by programs with no emotional investment or interest in the final product. Let writers keep their jobs, they deserve them.