Nvidia’s ACE technology lets you talk to AI characters
Have you ever struck up a conversation with the guy at the hotel bell desk? Curious about last night’s football or the weather? We did it again this week. I didn’t do it in real life, I did it in a video game.
Nvidia’s Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) aims to bring talkative AI characters to video games. These characters will converse with you about just about anything, whether or not it’s related to the game’s plot.
They drop hints and try to guide you to the next scene in the story, but if you want to stop for five minutes and learn more about a character’s home life, where they grew up, or whether they think there’s something about pineapples. Put it on the pizza and they’ll talk about it with you. They have a backstory. And you might even be able to use that information against them later in the game.
Nvidia demonstrated the technology to a select group of journalists in London this week, and it’s both full of promise and danger for the future of gaming.
secret protocol
Nvidia’s demonstration consisted of scenes from a detective game called. secret protocol. This game is not scheduled for release, so don’t rush to wishlist it on Steam. This is just an indication of what AI technology can do.
As an investigator, you are tasked with finding the CTO of a company hiding somewhere in a large hotel, chatting with various characters to see if you can extract information from them.
The first player you meet is Tae, the bellhop. Nvidia staff led us through the early portions of the demo and chatted with Tae. And when I say talk, I mean talk. Staff speak into a microphone and use voice recognition to accurately transcribe everything they say, right down to “umm” and “wrong.”
Let me tell you, Tae doesn’t have a very bright personality. In fact, I’ve seen toenails with more character. When the Nvidia staff invites us to ask Tae a question, I ask him what his favorite soccer team is, but Tae doesn’t have time for soccer. When a fellow journalist tries to throw Tae a curveball, asking him to reveal everything he knows about the Renaissance era, Tae admits that he doesn’t know much, but since the hotel has a Renaissance bar, he goes inside. Why not come in and take a look? ?
At the bar, Tae discovers a note with a cocktail recipe. When you ask Tae what he does, he admits that he has ambitions to be a bartender, but not at the moment. Because he wants to be the “best bellboy in the world” and thinks customers won’t appreciate being welcomed by a hungover bellhop. It’s a cute answer, but Tae’s brilliance is not as bright as a sheet of copy paper.
AI characters with backstories
During a lull in activity, Nvidia staff stepped out of the demo to show us the backend of the AI interface. Here you can see how each non-playable character (NPC) is imbued with his or her own back story. It’s written in plain text in a box and goes into quite a bit of detail about where he grew up, his family, his professional background, etc. If anyone wanted to know more about Tae’s life beyond the demands of world-class bell hopping, he would have the answer.
Game developers can also use a series of sliders to change various player attributes, such as how aggressive a character is, how introverted or extroverted they are, how sad or happy they are, etc. can.
Each character is fleshed out in this way, and you’ll see how this can be used to create a rich virtual cast list of NPCs, each with their own unique traits and quirks.
AI makes mistakes
The receptionist divulged a little too much information.
Back in the game, the Nvidia staff member is back in the driver’s seat and has a conversation with the hotel receptionist, asking if she can reveal the mysterious CTO’s room number.
When she immediately replies, “Room 304,” the Nvidia staff is clearly surprised. It was never supposed to happen. Like any good receptionist in her life, she’s going to send us on our way and probably call security, but she definitely won’t divulge a famous guest’s room number to Joe who comes in and asks for it. there is no.
And here lies the problem with relying on AI to converse with players. AI can sometimes mess things up and sometimes go off-script.That won’t happen Red Dead Redemption II.
The Nvidia representative tries to cover up the error by talking to another NPC, this time a colleague of the CTO who is preparing a talk. He is less pushy than the receptionist, more hostile, and the most colorful of the three characters we meet. When the Nvidia demo guy tries to convince the character to reveal his CTO’s room number by claiming there’s a bomb attack at a hotel, he says it’s unlikely he’ll run into the building where the bomb is planted. Tell funny jokes.
The future of gaming?
Yes, Nvidia’s game did have some strange issues, but it’s important to note that this is a limited demo of the AI technology’s capabilities and not a full-fledged game that will be released soon. And despite the character flaws we talked about, there’s certainly something novel and refreshing about being able to literally converse with a video game character and ask them almost anything.
We won’t know until we see this technology in a serious game if it becomes more than just a novelty. In a way, it’s no different than having a conversation on something like ChatGPT today. For example, you can pretend to be a corporal on the front lines in World War II or a bus driver in Alabama and role-play a semi-convincing conversation, but it’s hard to believe that it’s synthetic. You can’t completely overcome your feelings. Conversations with language models. There is no shine, no individuality, no humanity. There’s nothing that makes real conversations any more fun.
An AI-generated character can be a traditional character written by a professional, e.g. red dead or harry Disco ElysiumEven if your interactions and abilities to change the story of such characters are limited.
Perhaps the AI NPCs could serve as secondary characters in the game, filling in around the main plot thrust. But based on the very limited evidence so far, we hope that gaming does not become dominated by generative AI in our lives.
