AI powered NPCs can live forever and live in many games – Yat Siu
Non-player characters in games, known as “NPCs,” may one day be fully augmented with artificial intelligence and even “live forever” on blockchains and in multiple games.
The prediction was made by Animoca Brands founder Yat Siu, who admitted that such success could be years away. That being said, CU believes gamers will see “inklings” of this technology by 2024.
“Games start to build experience by interacting with NPCs,” Siu told Cointelegraph.
“You'll see signs of that in 2024. You'll have AI agents working on your behalf.”
Some open-source and community-run projects have released game mods that allow players to talk to NPCs and turn their in-game characters into generative AI platforms that generate responses and synthesize sounds.
While most of them are relatively unpolished, they allow NPCs to react and make facial expressions on players' speech inputs.
Big tech firms are also looking to AI for NPCs. NVIDIA released its ACE for Games tool in May, which aims to allow gaming devices to bring intelligence to NPCs through AI natural language processing.
Microsoft partnered with Inworld AI on its console gaming brand Xbox in November to create a set of developer tools for creating “dynamically generated stories, missions and dialogue” in video games.
CU points to an April Stanford University study that put 25 AI agents in a virtual city and watched them at parties and engage in seemingly meaningful conversations — with the researchers concluding that the agents behaved like people they believed.
Blockchain-based NPC AI will also need to find a way to support itself and “literally be able to pay their own bills in terms of data,” Siu added.
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Yield Guild Games co-founder Gabby Dizon told Cointelegraph last month that Web3 game devs are using Ethereum's ERC-6551 token standard to embed AI into games and create AI agents that act on the player's behalf.
In some video games, players can give instructions to in-game AI to automate “grinding” — allowing it to complete repetitive steps, such as crafting or collecting items needed to level up.
“I think it's going to be the start of a new genre of gaming where you can interact with AI and not play the game all day,” he said. “You set parameters for the AI and let it do things in the game world.”
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