Microsoft has announced a multi-year partnership between Xbox and an AI partner firm, Inworld AI. Inworld AI is primarily a character design expert that helps gaming studios create AI NPCs that display complex behavior patterns to enhance player immersion.
This partnership is stated to “bring the power of generative AI and GPT to empower game developers in storytelling and character creation.”
According to Microsoft, the purpose of this multi-year partnership is to equip their developers with better tools, so they can ‘make even more extraordinary games’. Inworld AI is supposed to aid Xbox Game Studio in building narrative tools and AI-based in-game dialogues at a scale. Together, these two companies are aiming at delivering ‘an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story, and quest design’.
The toolset offered by Inworld AI to Microsoft’s Xbox will include two key assets:
- An AI Design Co-pilot that helps game designers speed up the process by turning their prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, and quests, among others.
- An AI Character Runtime Engine that is directly integrated with the game client, powerful enough to weave together completely new narratives, filled with dynamically generated stories and unique dialogues.
Fans Skeptical About Increasing Use Of AI In Gaming Industry
With new apps and faster and stronger algorithms popping up every day, entertainers, writers, developers, and creators across the world are looking at every instance of AI cautiously. While Microsoft is claiming to help game creators ‘realize their vision’, fans and gamers across the internet are skeptical about this partnership.
AI in the entertainment industry is currently a topic of hot debate. Many behold a strong opinion that art created by AI isn’t ‘at par’ with human sensibility. However, over the past couple of years, many companies have shown how easy and cheap (at times effectively free) this AI-generated art is. From music to scripts, paintings to building whole worlds out of a few prompts, the threat is ever looming.
While a synchronous and harmonious relationship between a creator and a tool is essential for the creation of anything of value, it’s clearly getting harder and harder to see where the line is. With players already lashing out against procedural generation and the lack of ‘human element’ in certain instances, one can only imagine what the landscape of game design would be, in a few short years.
This increasing insistence on AI integration is rapidly becoming alarming. While it certainly helps developers, designers, and animators in streamlining their workflows and minimizes a certain amount of stress, it creates less and less need for human intervention. Even with profits at a record high, many gaming studios have let go of many of their employees over the past few months. One has to wonder what these increasing AI interventions will mean for the industry’s already suffering workforce.
Source: Inworld AI (Via X)
