Ubisoft’s Latest Innovation: Game Characters Now Speak with AI-Generated Dialogue

Ubisoft is not exactly going through the best moment in the company’s history. The Gauls have canceled up to 7 projects during the last nine months, which adds to the poor performance of the last video games released, the delay of some planned ones and, most importantly, the anger of its employees, who even called a strike in Paris to improve their conditions. If all this seems not enough, now they add one more: the use of artificial intelligence to create dialogues in the characters of their games, in the purest ChatGPT style.

If Ubisoft is known for anything, it is for having its own open-world video game formula. It is one that has been used for decades in Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry, Watch Dogs and many more games. In this one, one of the keys is always in the large number of existing non-playable characters. These are in the world and have their own lines of dialogue when interacting with the game. Well, Ubisoft has created an AI tool to help create these conversations.

Under the name of Ubisoft Ghostwriter, what this program does is to give the starting signal to the studios’ scriptwriters. They must enter a phrase, add the tone they want and the artificial intelligence will do the job. From there, the scriptwriters can make modifications to achieve the desired style.

The tool creates two versions for writers to work on. Once they mark the one they consider the best, Ghostwriter learns automatically (the already known machine learning) so that it becomes more precise, concise and direct when used.

From Ubisoft La Farge, department in charge of the development of this AI, they point out that Ghostwriter has been created together with Ubisoft’s scriptwriters. It seeks to streamline the process to make everything more dynamic, particularly in those more complex activities. However, the use of an AI for writing has only generated a lot of criticism to Ubisoft, as it is seen as a reduction of jobs in the future, especially considering the financial problems the company is going through.