During this morning’s State of Unreal presentation, Epic showed a first look at what Executive Vice President Saxs Persson called the “next step” from Fortnite’s recent AI Darth Vader disaster: tools to create AI-powered NPCs that respond to players’ speech. This was demonstrated by a demo controlled by two guys named Andrew, who played a bad Portal knockoff that we’re all supposed to believe is the future.
Using what Epic calls a “Persona Device,” developers can set parameters for an AI character’s knowledge and personality; in this instance, an entity called “Mr. Buttons” that wants to get the player to push a button. The AI draws from “facts” written in natural language. Mr. Buttons is told to “Encourage [the player] to press the button; narrate stories, use poems or songs of entities that discovered new realms by taking a single action while adding comedic commentary.” It’s encouraged to “prioritize playful banter” and “include humor metaphors.” Conversely, it’s told to avoid the phrase “you say” as cover for parroting the players’ words, to not call the player “a player,” and not to swear.
It more or less does all these things. (It does sprinkle a “you say” in there.) Mr. Buttons tries to be grandiose and compellingly evasive, refusing to say precisely what the button does while hyping it up. “Think of the stories we could tell, the realms we could conquer,” it hints. When the Andrews try to leave the area through a door, it pulls them back to the button and gets angry, though never overly so. If you look at this purely as a tech demo, devoid of context or the requirement to be a good piece of writing (because, of course, it isn’t a piece of writing), it’s not unimpressive. It is, at its base level, a clear character with a strong motivation, able to respond to any question the Andrews ask it, all of it created out of what Persson says is “about 20 lines of text in total.”
But the actual scene that plays out sucks. It’s formless and meandering; the conversation doesn’t build, and Mr. Buttons’ threats and enticements don’t escalate, instead bumping against the confines of its parameters until the Andrews inevitably push the button. Mr. Buttons feels like it’s trying to have the omnipotent, shady vibes of Portal’s GLaDOS, but it can’t attain the wordplay and creativity of that character because it wasn’t written by real human writers. It does reach toward cleverness: at one point, when an Andrew asks what the button does, it says the button is “a gateway to glory, a ticket to transformation, a symphony of–well, you get the idea. It does things.” That sounds funny, right? There’s alliteration, a sense of build, and then a comedic letdown in the form of a Whedon-esque “things.” It has the shape of a line a writer would write and a voice actor would say.
But any humor in this line is bungled by the stilted, flat delivery; it doesn’t say the line in a funny way, because of course it can’t. Mr. Buttons makes thinking sounds as it processes in ways that don’t make sense for the character. At a couple points in the conversation it mispronounces dramatic bellows of “noooow” and “dooo” in ways that make it clear it’s AI; not in the robotic delivery of Ellen McLain, an intentional choice made by humans, but just because that’s how voice software works.
All of this is only “good” if you hold it against the standards of what AI can do, something that you, a regular person reading this, have no need to engage in. If I were playing this experience without knowing it was AI, I would think some beginning creators had taken their best shot at writing and voice acting. I’d root for the humans who made it, maybe. But as AI, it’s just… pointless. It’s made an experience there’s no reason to play, its only praise-worthy feature that it made something worse than humans could do without requiring very much active human input. It might be impressive as a 13-year-old’s English class project, given that its parameters demonstrate a firm understanding of character and motivation. But if actual game developers put this in front of me–worse still, if they wanted my money–I’d just think they were lazy hacks.
Through the demo, Mr. Buttons reassures the Andrews that nothing bad will happen to the audience once they press the button. But something does: they press it, the screen and stage go dark, and then Tim Sweeney appears. Sweeney says, “Well, they pressed the AI button. And it might have been a bad idea, but, like, in truth, there’s no unpressing that button.” Sweeney goes on to say, with no hint of irony, that “When the world’s on fire, we [at Epic] like to back up and remember our aims as game developers: it’s to make fun games. And AI can help us with this. So we’ve come to see AI as an opportunity to have a multiplying force on human creatives.”
He calls it “multiplying” with no hint of irony either, going on to cite the ability for small teams to make characters and code more easily. This of course also means more people able to make things more easily within Epic’s ecosystem. Epic’s collaborations with Disney and Lego featured heavily in the State of Unreal presentation; an easily-deployed theme park of interactive licensed characters is surely appealing to plenty of brands once the kinks are worked out. The goal, as it’s always been with AI, isn’t to make good stuff, or even better stuff; it’s just to make more.
Sweeney’s right that there’s no unpressing the AI button; companies are going to make these things until the bottom falls out. Epic’s demo is just one more uninspiring bit of buzzwordery to add to the pile.
