Discussion NVIDIA's AI NPCs are a nightmare

Sphinx

Sphinx

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While the use of generative AI in games seems almost inevitable, as the medium has always toyed with new methods for making enemies and NPCs seem smarter and more realistic, seeing several NVIDIA ACE demos back-to-back made me genuinely sick to my stomach. This wasn't just slightly smarter enemy AI — ACE can craft entire conversations out of thin air, simulate voices and try to give NPCs a sense of personality. It's also doing that work locally on your PC, powered by NVIDIA's RTX GPUs. But while all of that that might sound cool on paper, I hated almost every second I saw the AI NPCs in action.
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TiGames' ZooPunk is a prime example: It relies on NVIDIA ACE to generate dialog, a virtual voice and lip syncing for an NPC named Buck. But as you can see in the video above, Buck sounds like a stilted robot with a slight country accent. If he's supposed to have some sort of relationship with the main character, you couldn't tell from the performance.
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I think my visceral aversion to NVIDIA's ACE-powered AI comes down to this: There's simply nothing compelling about it. No joy, no warmth, no humanity. Every ACE AI character feels like a developer cutting corners in the worst way possible, as if you're seeing their contempt for the audience manifested a boring NPC. I'd much rather scroll through some on-screen text, at least I wouldn't have to have conversations with uncanny robot voices.
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NVIDIA's AI NPCs are a nightmare

At CES 2025, NVIDIA made it plainly clear AI NPCs are around the corner, and I think they look genuinely awful.
www.engadget.com
 
This isn't how Ai should be used. Writers and voice actors should always have a place to carry the main stories of the game. Ai should then be used to supplement outside of that. Like asking a npc where a location is or for some information about something in game. Then restrictions should be placed to give limits to how they respond.
 
Why is everyone expecting it to be perfect when all this AI thing is just starting? We're in the stone age and there's already pretty impressive stuff, give it a few years.
 
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