Nvidia is bringing generative AI to video games. Announced during its Computex 2023 keynote, Nvidia ACE is a new platform that allows developers to use generative AI to power conversations with characters in games.
Recommended Videos ACE isn’t just built to generate text, similar to what we saw with The Portopia Serial Murder Case from Square Enix. It’s a full AI system. Nvidia says ACE not only generates responses for characters, but it also uses AI to animate the character models to match their responses.It’s not hard to imagine how cool this could be — the recent Shadows of Doubt has me excited about the possibilities of emergent gameplay from AI. But there’s also a lot that could go wrong.
There’s also the possibility that these AI characters just aren’t interesting. Sure, generative AI tools can be a lot of fun to mess around with, but dialogue and character interactions in games are determined by the developers, with conversations curated for a specific reason. If suddenly the dialogue is bad in a game, who’s to blame? The writers, or the AI? Maybe there’s a rich, detailed backstory for each character, but the AI might not surface that, leading to dull, uneventful interactions.
It seems this is the future for video games, though. Ubisoft has a generative AI tool it’s leveraging for some dialogue, and leaders for game engines like Unity are seeing developers start to take advantage of AI frameworks already. I’m sure we’ll see interesting uses of generative AI in games eventually, but there’s probably a long road of weird, unsettling, and hilarious hiccups to get through first.