A Skyrim modder called Art From The Machine just showed off a mod that uses ChatGPT and other AI tools to give NPCs a memory of your adventure, endless things to say, and a way to ask them questions using you. voice.
As I mentioned computer games , This mode uses ChatGPT in concert with xVASynth text-to-speech which allows NPCs to speak these new answers with an AI version of their voice and Whisper to convert speech into text so players can use their voice over a microphone to ask them questions.
as you see in the video here, New responses from NPCs aren’t quite natural yet and can be a bit slow, but they do show promise for a world where NPCs can comment on almost everything you do and even answer questions directly from the player that aren’t just canned responses from the dialogue options menu.
For example, the video released by Art From The Machine shows a conversation with Ulfberth War-Bear of Warmaiden’s in Whiterun, and the player can ask him about the shop’s hours and even how much time is left until the shop closes based on the in-game clock.
He is also seen describing a sword the player picks up, and explains that any NPC – with the appropriate knowledge, of course – can dynamically explain various elements of the world to you as part of a conversation rather than just having that information in text form in some menu.
Ulfberth War-Bear says: “It appears to be a well-made iron sword with a soul gem embedded in the hilt. Its magic allows the wielder to capture the souls of his enemies.”
For NPCs that remember your conversations, Art From The Machine uses a basic memory system in conjunction with ChatGPT to help make this possible.
“I have a basic memory system set up where I have ChatGPT summarize the conversation on exit to help condense it for future prompts,” Art from the Machine said on Reddit. “There are a lot of sophisticated tools for working with memory though like Langchain that I hope to use in the future.”
While the technology is clearly impressive, one of the biggest ongoing questions will be whether AI-driven text can match human text. Sure, it’s great to have endless content in a game, but does it matter all that much if it doesn’t feel real or layered or handcrafted with the context of our past experiences and identity? Only time will tell.
For more, check out all of our content from IGN’s AI Week, including whether AI will spell doom for anime, how AI could change video games forever, and how players crave all-new RPGs with ChatGPT, And why does ChatGPT seem so ubiquitous.
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Adam Pankhurst is a news writer for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter @employee and on twitch.
