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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