Just How Smart Are the AI Characters in Inworld's 'Origins'?

Great video. Really excited to see where this tech leads

Presumably this game is always online? Or is all the language processing done on your own computer?

Very interesting! I'm looking forward to seeing more games utilize this technology to make NPC's more lifelike and interesting to talk to.

Please talk about the work of Chris Crawford on Interactive Storytelling and how it can be applied on today's AI technologies.

Still lacks Dachshunds, I see.

It's probably a good thing there wasn't any burglar alarms going off as a result of the blast.

I had this video running on my second monitor when i kept hearing someone saying "N-WORD!" and was like WTF is goin on? lol😂

Anyhow, that's pretty cool and i would be lying if i weren't excited for more studios to go down this path. My largest critique is the way they subtitle it, as it can be sort of confusing when they scroll up one row and pop the next row of text in below. Would be much preferable if they just swapped both rows of text at the same time.

I feel like this kind of tech in its current state might work better in a more visual novel style of presentation. Removing voice acting from the equation and tying the dialogue to a set of varying character portraits rather than full animations seems like it would be a lot easier to sync up properly.

This seems pretty horrible on a few levels.

First, I am not a professional writer. I am a bit of a hobbyist writer, but I do not come to video games to do that hobby. Even if I was a professional quality writer who wanted to write the main character of a game, this kind of situation does not allow me to be creatively engaged with other writers as people in order to produce interesting things for the player character to say. Remember, most video game characters are not the player in a certain hat, they are characters in their own right. Geralt Riveria might fight how I tell him, go where I make him, and choose the dialog option I select, but the options to do that all inform who he is as a guy. Likewise most other player characters that have a name, and even some who do not (Mass Effect is a good example of this). As a player, I cannot know the whole story of what this character is like coming into the situation in order to write this character in a way that tells a story about them rather than a story about me.

Second, this kind of system is going to require some kind of dreadful monetization system. Randomly looking at a CNBC article on this estimates that running a prompt costs something like a half cent per. Currently, venture capital (VC) money is underwriting people getting to play with this stuff for free. This is like how Uber and door dash used to be really cheap and pay okay for its drivers. Literally like it because that too was being paid for by VC funding. When this dries up, there is going to be a wild need to squeeze for funds here.

Finally, this is going to make everything have a real "Bethesda game" vibe imo. The whole thing of LLM work is that they are great at feeling plausible. This is a problem, because it is really hard to tell when the AI is doing some kind of glitch. Is the AI just spitting out random nonsense, if a character is lying, or if they are misinformed. The latter two are cool, but the first one is the most basic text of the game beginning to suffer bugs. There is also no way to robustly test this kind of system. The use of AI in other parts of a computer system has had some work put into figuring out how to reduce the risks of hazardous malfunction, by putting guards around what the LLM can consider and what it can interact with as a result of this consideration, but when the thing to be considered is "a character who has had all of these prior conversations with a player character" that becomes a most likely unknowably complex and chaotic space.

I would really prefer if we were just comfortable having writers and artists make our games, rather than relying on systems that hoover up data and produce something that can plausibly pass for such work that is then trying to be wrangled by some new job of "prompt engineer".

I recommend the 2kliksphilip video on this demo too

While I know that sponsors are like important for getting money, it still feels like a conflict of interest when you make stuff like this and the convai videos while being directly sponsored by the companies that are making the product. I don't feel like I can really trust it, which is disappointing as you have previously had good unsponsored videos on the use of generative AI in video games, covering both the potential and shortcomings as well as their impact on the broader development pipeline while this just feels closer to an advertisement.

Elon Musk is so damn right about AI. AI can be scary if you falll wrong hands to wrong AI. in otherwords. AI can be evil. it was warned by many many top companies and even video game companies too.

the response time for speech recognition followed by llm followed by generation seems very impressive. Looking forward to the followup to see how much is local vs remote and if its remote, how they’ll handle a successful game launch traffic

A neat if unimpressive game as a player who's mostly in games for narrative rather than "cool that tech can do this"-reasons. From that perspective the stiff delivery is bad enough, but also the game itself feels like it solves a "problem" that's really just a problem in the eyes of money-infusers who wants a product to be generated as quickly as possible, instead of a creative mind who wants to take their time making a good story that people enjoy.

I have a pretty thick Dutch accent and the dachshunds-like issues broke any enjoyment of this demo for me. Plus, I can't get over the lousy voice quality. It's on the level of Ren'Py self voicing.

This is great tech but the lack of emotion in the NPC voices leaves a lot to be desired. This is something OpenAI seems to have solved already, so I wonder if they've also solved it internally already.

Can't wait for NPCs in games to start reacting terrified to glitches that happen around them XD.

Oh wait, imagine NPCs that can learn to exploit bugs...
Generative AI (obviously once significantly more developed past its current state) has insane potential for emergent behaviour in games.

I spent about 30 minutes talking to that officer about breaking bad. She knew everything about the plot, it was just crazy

I did a video on inWorld origins six months ago and the voices were quite good back then. InWorld have gone through a number of voice models over the past few months and they may have had to switch to a cheaper voice engine by the time you made your video.

Man I can't wait to see what this will be like in 10 years, then 20.

When the voices sound fluid, when the animations of the NPCs move more lifelike, have perfect mouth/voice synching, it's going to be Soo damn cool.


And especially when smaller studios someday have access to stuff like this, to flesh out a world in a way that usually only big studios are able to.

I’m not particularly bullish on this. Firstly, you need an internet connection so outside of online games or live services this is simply a no go for me especially for single player games. More importantly when I looked, their pricing was per conversation or similar, so you’re telling me that if someone talks to the same NPC over and over it will cost the developers more? No go. But beyond this, I don’t want to talk to my computer or game. And their responses just feel far too artificial, I just don’t find that appealing.

gotta say while the demo is pretty wonky i kinda found it an AMAZING concept. just IMAGINE what this could be in a few years. and how INTEREACTIVE you can be in games. like a dective story you can actually ask questions and get feedback and what. it would be awesome! and a rpg. where you can connect and bond with charecters or a life sim! i find it pretty amazing!

i cannot login to inworld. Has inworld stopped accepting new user requests?