Nvidia
Nvidia brings generative AI to video games. Announced during the Computex 2023 keynote, Nvidia ACE is a new platform that allows developers to use generative artificial intelligence to drive conversations with characters in games.
Think ChatGPT, but instead of a general purpose chatbot, you get a chatbot with a specific background and knowledge. Nvidia emphasizes that flexibility is one of the most important aspects of ACE, as it will allow characters to have a fleshed-out backstory that informs their responses and prevents them from veering too far off topic. The company’s recently announced NeMo Guardrails plays a role in this, steering the conversation away from topics the developer doesn’t intend.
ACE is not made just to generate text, similar to what we have seen The Portopia Serial Murder Case from Square Enix. It is a full AI system. Nvidia says ACE not only generates responses for characters, but also uses AI to animate character models to match their responses.
If suddenly the dialogue is bad in the game, who is to blame?
It’s not hard to imagine how cool this could be — recently Shadows of doubt I was blown away by the gaming possibilities that come from artificial intelligence. But there is also a lot that could go wrong.
For starters, Nvidia says the system is designed in such a way that characters can talk to each other; you don’t have to be the one driving the AI. That’s great, but Nvidia hasn’t tested it. I’d be shocked if we didn’t see two AI-driven characters fall down some unrelated rabbit hole, like the early days of Bing Chat.
There’s also the possibility that these AI characters just aren’t interesting. Sure, generative AI tools can be a lot of fun to tinker with, but dialogue and character interactions in games are determined by developers, and they choose conversations for a reason. If suddenly the dialogue is bad in the game, who is to blame? Writers or AI? There may be a rich, detailed backstory to each character, but the AI may not pick it up, leading to boring, uneventful interactions.
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This was certainly the case with The Portopia Serial Murder Case from Square Enix, which promised unique dialogue with every interaction. Instead, it mostly pushed players along a certain path without any of the flair that comes from written dialogue. We’re sure to see some terrible facial animations as well, which is something Square Enix’s demo didn’t need to worry about.
However, this seems to be the future for video games. Ubisoft has a generative AI tool that it uses for some dialogue, and leaders for game engines like Unity are seeing developers already starting to take advantage of the AI framework. I’m sure we’ll see interesting uses of generative AI in games over time, but we’re likely to have a long road of weird, disturbing, and funny hiccups ahead of us.
Nvidia is taking the first step on that path with ACE. It’s currently in development, and Nvidia has been careful not to make any promises about when we’ll see ACE in action. The company showed off a demo at Computex, built in the Unreal Engine, suggesting that we might see a plugin for that engine in the near future. As for the demo, the AI-generated voice sounded a bit robotic, but there could be a future here.
NVIDIA ACE for Gaming brings virtual characters to life with Generative AI
We don’t know when ACE is coming or exactly how it works, but Nvidia says most systems run in the cloud. This hopefully means you don’t need any special graphics card to use ACE, since most of the AI processing doesn’t take place on your computer.
Even with certain concerns, the ball is ultimately in the game developers’ court. Nvidia’s technology simply enables more sophisticated artificial intelligence in game characters, so it’s up to developers to learn how to best utilize Nvidia’s new technology, if at all.
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Categories: GAMING
Source: newstars.edu.vn