Ubisoft has unveiled a new internal program called Ghostwriter, an AI it says will help its scriptwriters create dialogue more efficiently.
The announcement was made on the Ubisoft news page this morning in a post titled The Convergence of AI and Creativity: Introducing Ghostwriter. According to the post, the tool was created by Ubisoft’s in-house R&D department La Forge, but and is currently being used to generate first drafts of barks. Barks are the lines of dialogue you hear NPCs spout in open-world games when you pass by them on the street. Any time you’ve run past an NPC in GTA V, and they’ll yell something bizarre at you? That’s a bark. Enemies yelling at you in combat? That’s a bark. Developers working on the kinds of open-world titles that Ubisoft prefers need to record hundreds, sometimes thousands of barks, to help the world feel a little more alive.
Of course, immediate concerns leap to mind. This seems like a deeply suspicious first step on a slippery slope. At a certain point, if you’re going to use AI to spit out even the most rote dialogue, when does it start getting used for the more important stuff? When does it start getting plot beats fed into it or generating them itself? How long does it take for Ubisoft to send out a press release boasting about its first game with a story created entirely by Ghostwriter?
Don’t worry. Ubisoft came prepared to answer those questions.
“Ghostwriter isn’t replacing the video game writer, but instead, alleviating one of the video game writer’s most laborious tasks: writing barks,” reads the post. “Ghostwriter effectively generates first drafts of barks – phrases or sounds made by NPCs during a triggered event – which gives scriptwriters more time to polish the narrative elsewhere.”
Ghostwriter was created by an R&D Scientist at La Forge Montreal named Ben Swanson, who gave a talk on the AI at GDC this week. According to Swanson, the creation of the AI came out of conversations with narrative designers that wanted to spend less time on crowd chatter and barks. Swanson also reiterates that Ghostwriter isn’t coming for narrative designer jobs just yet, saying that it is merely a tool to cut down time spent on a dull task. “Rather than writing first draft versions themselves, Ghostwriter lets scriptwriters select and polish the samples generated,” he says.
The process for Ubisoft staff using Ghostwriter is that they must first create a character and a kind of interaction or utterance they would like the AI to generate. Ghostwriter then gives the scriptwriters a pair of options, which are chosen and edited by human writers. The AI will note which option is selected and learn from preferred choices to make it more effective over time.
It all sounds so innocent when they put it like that, doesn’t it? It just spits out some options! Don’t think about how Ghostwriter’s purview could be expanded from here or how a foot-in-the-door moment like this could lead to widespread redundancies later! It’s just a time saver. Don’t even worry about it!
One could argue that Ubisoft’s NPC chatter already sounds like it was written by a computer, I suppose, so maybe it’s not that big of a stretch. Regardless, I remain sus about the whole thing because it’s literally my job to be sus about these things.
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