MSN: Microsoft is bringing AI characters to Xbox via partnership with Inworld

MSN

Title and Tweet says it all, really. MS is partnering with an AI company to add AI into their games. And I don't mean like we had in games before. See: "AI Art" and "AI copying voices of actors alive or dead". Like they want it part of their development tools, scripts, etc.

Needless to say, a lot of people aren't happy. Including Elias Toufexis of Deus EX HR fame.

We learned nothing from the Terminator. Or Blade Runner.

Gamers want highly detailed and immersive worlds for cheap. This is the answer.🤷🏽‍♂️

I've seen enough "AI Art" to know that is not gonna be true.

Yep, it's cheaper.

Commence *shock and awe*

This will be amazing for mods.

That is a part of it, but a really small one, companies just want to get rid of off as many employees and keep making a lot of money for the ones in the top.

@nintendoboy16: I don't care about the voices in video games, i'm currently playing Horizon Zero Dawn and have skipped every cutscene so far. And a guy who has Nintendo in their name shouldn't really care either, as Nintendo have already hired their next "its a me Mario" actor so you should be good lol.

not a huge deal. And I said this before, but all these articles about developers losing their jobs...well, if engineers are going to lose their jobs in such a creative field, then what job in this world is safe?

Not sure how I feel about this yet. On one hand it will certainly be much more difficult for new voice actors, creators, artists, and what not to get work. On the other hand it will reduce costs, time, etc. in game development. It will be interesting to see how things all shake out.

Get used to it. Soon nearly every job will be automated in some way.

I know full well AI is gonna f*** people out of jobs. God forbid I care about THAT.

yeah, thats how I see things going anyway. Maybe not in the next 10 years, but things will shift more and more in that direction. AI will improve, and even robotics are going to improve...so even blue collar jobs are going to be wiped out at some point. Interesting times we live in...and the next 50 years is going to be mind blowing haha. Just imagine...if things keep going the way they are, what money will money even hold?

And this is one of the reasons SAG-AFTRA is striking games.

MS might as well partner up with Nvidia as they have a lead in the A.I investment.

@nintendoboy16: Please, you don't care about no name voice actors losing work, you only care about this because you can find another reason to hate on MS.

I would say that the vast majority do voice overs in games on a very casual basis, and have a full time job.

That's great, state of the art technology should definitely be used in videogames.

Is there anyone who didn't see this coming? I remember arguing with people here like a year ago that it was only a matter of time until AI started taking over video game making in a large way. Smaller studios will have a chance to create games on par with much larger studios and huge budgets at the whim of imagination. At this point it's only a matter of time.

Microsoft... wasting 70 billion to get CoD, cutting corners on everything else

Seething

@BenjaminBanklin: The ABK acquisition is still eating you up on the inside 😂

I'd hate it too if Nintendo did it (I did not give them a pass buying out Next Level Games). I'd hate it if Sony did it (First Party wise, I'm more unimpressed with PlayStation than I am Xbox most of the time, the latter has the games I want anyway even if MS FP is lacking these days, I play more third party on there anyway)

Progress, awesome!

This will in time lead to far more interactive dialog. AI characters will be able to freely respond without being bound by pre-written lines. It will also save a lot of cost and time once the technology is in place. Finally they will be able to do pretty much any language and not just the 5-6 that is standard today.

For example Swedish kids will be able to play their games in Swedish.

If you think this is about cost, you're wrong. Do you know the pittance VAs get paid? It's peanuts.

That's great! Now we can get less original games that are much cheaper for MS to make, while they sell the games for the same price, or more.

Why buy when you can Gamepass? 🙃

We already have that for some games. Whenever I see a game in Swedish, I go to the configuration options to change the console language to english.

Poo lil MS/Xbox anti-fans. lolol :P

I would argue white collar jobs are at a greater risk. Stock trading is almost purely automated these days. Programming is getting automated. Banking is seeing more and more automation as well.

Replace a blue collar worker and you might save 40k dollars a year. Replace a white collar worker, and you might save 100k dollars.

Well I am sure all the whalers and whale oil salesmen were sad when gas and coal make their industry obsolete, but such is the cost of progress.

I'm not trying to sound apathetic or hostile, mind you, I just don't think this is the end of the world.

Also, voice acting, for the most part, is pure garbage in games. Sure they might voice some main characters well, but if using AI means I don't have to listen to the groan-inducing voice acting of an Elder Scrolls game...well, hard to be upset about that 😋

Again, I hope the difference is split and we don't replace voice actors entirely. But if AI can lead to equal (or perhaps better) voice acting in ambient situations--misc. townsfolk, idle banter between NPC's, and other non-story roles--while we still retain quality voice acting for story-heavy roles, then I see this as a win-win.

Yeah but video game developers aren't in SAG-AFTRA.

Glad they're supporting voice actors, but it'd be nice if they included level designers, concept artists, coders, etc. if they want to make this part of their fight.

I'm more like "why gamepass and try out lots of games I don't want to waste time on instead of buying one game I know I'll like and play for a long time, plus probably want to go back to at some point?".

I had gamepass when it was $1/month, and I still barely used it. Tried a few games, and basically just used it to demo games. Now that it costs way more than $1, there's no point for me anymore. Pretty good service for shorter one and done games, I guess, but that's not what I'm after. Also, as many games as they have on there by now, extremely few of them interests me. Gamepass, for me, is a crappy deal.

For the record, this also allows NPCs to be able to react to you, your actions, and their own world and situations dynamically rather than developers having to program every situation and scenario.

This is a huge plus for me as I'm a huge RPG fan and often find background characters lacking since your actions don't matter to them.

I imagine this allowing characters to ask me about a location I've been to or the armor I'm wearing, which would be really cool.

yes, all the office jobs are getting automated, but its been happening for a while. Its a bit scary i'll admit, since i'm also in that industry, but in sum of things, I think its a good thing. What needs to happen is for the industry to open up and government/courts need to get out of the effing way and let the free market work. That means deregulating the patent bs and other such nonsense. We need to end policies that create billionaires and trillion dollar companies, its a fuking joke and a disgrace. There needs to be far more competition in the market, much less consolidation and that all begins with scrapping the patent/ip system and giving us back free speech. I fully and whole heartedly support the open source AI projects, they're the true shining star in all this hot mess.

Regardless of my spiel, the fact is there is huge amounts of investment happening in blue collar work as well. It might be safe for 10 to 20 years longer than other office jobs, but I expect there to be massive disruption in those fields too. Its inevitable.

As for replacing workers or not, that doesn't matter as long as people create more businesses to compete with the existing employers. There needs to be far more businesses opening up, and fight these larger companies. Government needs to fully support small businesses, and this is where prosperity will begin and end.

@SecretPolice said:

Poo lil MS/Xbox anti-fans. lolol :P

:P

^ this..

I hope this technology helps to make gaming worlds feel more natural and immersive in terms of the NPC population.. imagine what the GTA team could do with AI..

@last_lap:

Dude shut the **** up. Has nothing to do with MS, if this was Sony or Nintendo this would still be shitty.

Should we not care when you lose your job to AI and you're out on the street? Ill make sure to point and laugh

You just plain suck as a person. Grow up

I take it a lot of people just see it as AI voice acting, but AI stands for Artificial Intelligence for a reason.

This company has demos for AI that were reacting to objects placed near them and could dynamically navigate around them. It is pretty cool stuff.

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@navyguy21: Very interesting vid.

Imagine getting paid to make stupid noises into a microphone, then being upset when that goes away. 🤦‍♂️

I’m talking about dynamic voiceacting in Swedish with correct lipsyncing. I can’t recall ever seeing an option for Swedish voices.

And Swedish was just an example ofc. There are many countries in which English is less commonly known that would benefit more.

@Pedro: Crap like this is why indie devs are going to eventually outdo AAA studios like MS in the future. Let a computer generate work for you and you'll have tons of created content and assets with zero thought and passion. There are some things A.I. just can't replicate and that's human creativity. I'll gladly take quality over quantity any day of the week and sooner than later, companies like MS are going to find that out the hard way. Quality is going to dip big time.

The question is, "Would the average gamer care?" That is going to dictate the future use of the tech.

It wouldn't bother me if it were Sony or Nintendo who bought and used this company.

Can you name one person who uses voice acting as a full-time profession?

While yes it would suck to lose your job (most of us here have been through that before) but you dust yourself off and go get another one, it's just a part of life.

People lose their jobs all the time, and as I said to Nintendoboy, can you name anyone who has made voice acting a fulltime profession?

Technology has made millions of people unemployed over the last century, but it's also employed millions, yeah that's right without technology you wouldn't be able to enjoy video games, and millions wouldn't be employed either.

And lastly Nintendoboy has had his nose out of joint over the Craptivision deal, and has been hating on MS ever since, so yeah it would be foolish to think this thread would be made if it was Nintendo who did it. And to be clear it wouldn't bother me if it was Nintendo or Sony who was doing this.

Telling people to shut the **** up, you'd laugh if I were on the streets and to grow up in not very mature thing to say.

Very interesting. The role AI is going to play in games is, hopefully, going to be very cool to see in the future. From assisting with production to also the new possibilities it can bring.

There are both pros and cons to this...

• Pros: Considering how AAA budgets have become too expensive, AI is probably the most effective way to bring down AAA budgets.
• Cons: Many people will lose their jobs.

This is always the story any time a new technology comes along to automate jobs.

Your argument doesnt make sense in this context. Inworld deals with generative AI, not artwork.

Inworld is also using traditional voice actors and replicating and modulating their voices to fill out the game world and and Q&A to already voiced NPC.

Its like those AI bots that can take a celebrity's voice and replicated it to say silly stuff. You can still have high quality VO and just use AI to give them more lines without the developer having to go through the tedious process of recording and coding all of those lines. You can make games for fleshed out without significantly lengthening development time and costs.

Its not about eliminating high quality VO.

I would love it if in Horizon I could actually talk to any NPC about what they know about the machines or where they come from, or actually interact with NPCs in Spiderman.

Right now, background characters are static, and even main characters are limited by the scripted dialogue. Inworld gives all characters more interactivity. No one is going to eliminate all voice actors and use AI for main characters.

If it means uninspired characters, levels and voice overs then yeah, they're definitely going to care. Have you ever seen A.I generated levels in games like Minecraft? The majority of the time, you catch floating islands and villages spawned in unnatural locations. I definitely wouldn't want that in any realistic game! lol

@last_lap:

Some people need to be told to shut the **** up, because they don't really deserve to be talked to any other way.

And are you fucking serious? Billy West. Wow that was so hard, now kindly STFU

@nepu7supastar7: I would not rely on AI generated levels in Minecraft as a benchmark. we should not underestimate or overestimate the capacity of the technology.