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Is AI the Future of NPCs?

Artificial intelligence is poised to have a massive impact on video games in the next few years, something that excites and worries developers. Some think non-player characters might be AI's killer app.

What Bloom doesn’t tell me, at least not directly, is that he’s a “Neo NPC”—a generative AI creation from French video game publisher Ubisoft designed to enable players to hold conversations with characters. He’s been designed to be easy to handle, Ubisoft senior data scientist Mélanie Lopez Malet tells me, though there are other NPCs they’ve created that are more standoffish, if not downright aggressive. I’m far less interested in the extraction in progress and more in poking the NPC to find his guardrails—being rude, asking deeply personal questions, or simply declaring “I’m pretty sleepy” at a critical point in the mission.

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