Generative AI can help bring tomorrow's gaming NPCs to life

Elves and Argonians clipping through walls and stepping through tables, blacksmiths who won't acknowledge your existence until you take single step to the left, Draugers that drop into rag-doll seizures the moment you put an arrow through their eye -- Bethesda's Elder Scrolls long-running RPG series is beloved for many reasons, the realism of their non-playable characters (NPCs) is not among them. But the days of hearing the same rote quotes and watching the same half-hearted search patterns perpetually repeated from NPCs are quickly coming to an end. It's all thanks to the emergence of generative chatbots that are helping game developers craft more lifelike, realistic characters and in-game action. "Game AI is seldom about any deep intelligence but rather about the illusion of intelligence," Steve Rabin, Principal Software Engineer at Electronic Arts, wrote in the 2017 essay, The Illusion of Intelligence. "Often we are trying to create believable human behavior, but the actual intelligence that we are able to program is fairly constrained and painfully brittle."