At the Game Developers Conference 2023, now in full swing at San Francisco's Moscone Center, Ubisoft La Forge unveiled the Ghostwriter AI tool, which aims to save the precious time of scriptwriters by creating a first draft of the so-called NPC barks.

　　The chatter of crowds and triggered NPC lines known as barks are essential to player immersion and behind every line of speech is a narrative team that writes it. Ghostwriter is an in-house AI tool created by Ubisoft La Forge.

　　It helps narrative designers and scriptwriters generate a first draft of these barks. Scriptwriters first create a character and a variable input, an event or situation for a character to experience.

　　Ghostwriter can then generate new versions of the line depending on the mode selected. These modes vary in style depending on the needs of the scriptwriter. The scriptwriter selects the lines to keep and edits them freely until they're ready for voice recording.

　　When scriptwriters accept or regenerate line options, the machine learning model learns from each selection, effectively creating a more accurate tool with use.

　　Ghostwriter was created hand in hand with narrative teams to help them complete a repetitive task more quickly and effectively, giving them more time and creative freedom to work on the game's narrative, characters, and cutscenes and ensuring players encounter NPCs that are interesting, consistent, and just chatty enough.

　　The creator of Ghostwriter is Ben Swanson, who first unveiled the tool during yesterday's GDC 2023 session called 'Machine Learning Summit: Natural Language Generation for Games Writing'.

　　He also shared some insights in a blog post on Ubisoft's website. After a stint at the now-defunct Google Stadia Games and Entertainment division, Swanson worked at Latitude on AIDungeon before joining Ubisoft La Forge in 2021. Therefore, he developed Ghostwriter, which he believes will be implemented in future Ubisoft titles thanks to the user-friendly interface that should make it easy for developers to take advantage of its AI capabilities.

　　Ubisoft La Forge previously worked on AI and deep learning to squash bugs through the Commit Assistant. Generally, the rise of AI is a major topic at this year's GDC. Yesterday, during NVIDIA's conference, the GeForce company announced AI Foundations, a suite of generative AI tools available through the cloud. This includes tools for game developers such as the Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) and Omniverse Audio2Face, which is being used to create facial animations from audio files in games like STALKER 2 from GSC Game World and Fort Solis from Fallen Leaf.