Inworld shows off impressive AI-powered character generation and interaction

techcrunch.com:

Characters in games and other digital experiences tend to be rather static, working from a set of lines and responses written long ago. But the future of games could be more responsive, generative, and of course AI-powered — something Inworld AI is attempting to enable with a newly available beta tool that lets developers create a rich, interactive characters as simply as they might tell another AI to draw a bird.

Inworld’s claims, which it has been putting about over the last year, are that it is able to quickly create NPCs and such like characters with just a few sentences of description and twiddled dials, and that once created they will instantly be deeper and more interesting to interact with than ordinary scripted characters.

Now, there are obvious limitations to these claims — you couldn’t, for example, outdo the cryptic utterances of characters in Elden Ring, since those are highly crafted scripts intended to be encountered in a specific way. But what about the lady who runs the weapon shop in a fantasy world? Normally all she’d say is “Buy somethin’, will ya!” or the like — and Inworld wants to make her a more real presence, someone you can ask about the world, her family, the problems of the area, the weapons themselves, and get intelligent, meaningful answers.

Be sure that I went into the demo more than a little skeptical. In the first place, who wants to ask the shop lady about her favorite color or the weather? And in the second, how would you be able to make such a fully fleshed-out character with such a simple process?

The second part first. If you think about how generative AIs like GPT-3 work, they are trained on huge datasets of language, and when you give them a short prompt, they extrapolate from it based