Microsoft Announces New Partnership for AI Game Dialogue, Narrative Tools

The world of video game AI is no stranger to backlash. However, this has not stopped Microsoft from partnering with the company Inworld to make generative AI for future Xbox titles.

This news comes straight from Microsoft itself. It has entered a multi-year deal with Inworld “to build AI game dialogue & narrative tools at scale,” as Haiyan Zhang, Xbox’s general manager of gaming AI, tells it. She also said the aim is “to deliver an accessible, responsibly designed multi-platform AI toolset to assist and empower creators in dialogue, story & quest design.”

Here is a breakdown of the toolset:

• An AI design copilot that assists and empowers game designers to explore more creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more. 
• An AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into the game client, enabling entirely new narratives with dynamically-generated stories, quests, and dialogue for players to experience.

Personally, I think this press release is just a way to sugarcoat something with an insidious design. In a time when major corporations are looking to cut costs by any means necessary, this partnership just looks like a way to hire fewer people to write scripts for games. And when you take the human essence out of a title’s text, what is left is devoid of any character. The time for a video game strike is imminent, it seems.