Ubisoft unveils generative AI "NEO NPCs", and the spirit of Peter Molyneux's Milo lives on

Much the same as last year, AI remains the talk of the town at GDC 2024. Roblox Studio has announced a new generative AI-based character creator. Graphics card manufacturer Nvidia unveiled a new AI-powered chip, sending its stock price skyrocketing. And behind closed doors, Ubisoft demonstrated something of its own to a small collection of the press: a partnership with Inworld AI to create a prototype for «Newly Evolving NPCs», or NEO NPCs as Ubisoft calls them.

It's important to stress the «prototype» factor here. At the event, Ubisoft gave a brief presentation explaining the origins of its research team — led by Ubisoft Paris and a supporting Ubisoft Production Technology crew — and its goals, often referring to the project as an «experiment». After this I had a chance to sit down and actually «play» three, roughly 10-minute long demonstrations of the technology in action within a hypothetical game scenario. But while these demos were technically playable, they were explicitly described as an «independent proof of concept» for now. In a brief panel discussion after the hands-on time, Mélanie Lopez Malet, senior data scientist on the R&D team, said they were only just «scratching the surface… implementation [in a real game] for me is not even on my radar.»

Still, this is one of the first working examples of generative AI being used in an actual, player-facing role from any major studio — and it does work. Sort of.

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The full premise is that, in Ubisoft's words, the typical approach to using generative AI with NPCs — like large language model (LLM) mods for standard games that patch ChatGPT-style functionality into dialogue options — were often somewhat «empty» or «shallow» in practice. While they can technically say anything, what these NPCs say doesn't impact the game itself, and so what you end up with, as scientific director David Louapre put it, is