Xbox and Inworld AI have announced a multi-year deal to develop AI game dialogue and narrative tools.
The deal, announced today on the Xbox blog by AI general manager Haiyan Zhang, the partnership, aims “to deliver an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design”. Inworld’s experience with generative AI models for character development is cited, along with industry use of AI models like GPT in going forward with this new effort.
“Together, we aim to deliver an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design. The toolset will include:
- An AI design copilot that assists and empowers game designers to explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more.
- An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.”
re: xbox, I’m not inherently against working with AI—but I am against using AI to replace the work of good writers where the effect will be less work for creative professionals and more bland, tropey writing in games
— Cat Manning (@catacalypto) November 6, 2023
While they're framing this as an accessible toolkit for developers of all sizes, and keep emphasizing responsibility without necessarily defining it that well, there's real concern that tools like this could push developers out of the industry. With so many rounds of layoffs reported all the time recently, that concern is an understandable one, especially when your AI toolkit is designed to generate quests and dialogue, and more work that humans are losing already.
