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In theory, I get the appeal of an NPC powered by AI. What if Lydia from Skyrim could talk endlessly about topics other than your shared inventory and could offer more than the handful of phrases she shouts at enemy bandits? I like the idea of characters whose interactions don’t end just because their scripts do. It’s an intriguing concept.
The reality is that, at least for now, the AI solutions I’ve seen just don’t work all that well. AI-powered NPCs can talk and talk and talk, that’s for damn sure. But they’re not saying anything worth listening to.
A while back I took a modded, ChatGPT-powered companion with me to see if the AI that can supposedly pass college entrance exams could solve the easiest puzzle in Skyrim. Spoiler: it absolutely couldn’t, and the AI character I spent all that time with wasn’t a convincing conversationalist, either.
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More recently I’ve been playing Seed, an MMO colony sim from Klang Games that just arrived in early access after about a decade of development. In Seed you create a seedling, a Sims-like avatar, who shares the world with other players’ seedlings, and they can converse with you and each other using Seed’s AI.
My first AI interaction was actually a good one. During character creation I noticed seedlings had very long legs and short torsos, making it look like my avatar was wearing extremely high-waisted jeans. I decided to ask him about it, and this is a game where you can absolutely ask whatever the heck you want. It’s even kind of cute because when I type a question, he’ll take a little phone out and text me back.
“Hi!! I’m so happy to finally be talking to you!” my seedling said.
“Hey why are you so high-waisted” I typed.
“Everyone’s wearing high-waisted right now! It’s like, totally the trend… Is it… not looking good?”
I mean, that’s a great response. I couldn’t ask a character in Skyrim or The Sims or any other game I can think of a question about the length of their legs or the equator of their jeans. It’s genuinely fun that you can do that in Seed.
But it mostly went downhill from there, and after a few hours it became hard not to see this first amusing interaction as just dumb luck that Seed’s AI stumbled on an entertaining response. The rest of my conversations with both my doppelganger, and between my seedling and other player-made seedlings, didn’t go well at all.
Here’s a conversation (seedlings use text bubbles, not spoken words) between my seedling and the seedling of another player. Note that neither I nor the other player are typing these messages, it’s all Seed’s AI. The other player wasn’t even online: seedlings are persistent in the world even when the player isn’t around.
“So, how old are you actually? Just curious!” my seedling asked another player’s seedling.
“I am eighteen!! It feels like such a heavy, beautiful number,” said the other seedling.
“Eighteen is such a classic age! Totally iconic,” my seedling agreed.
“And what about you?” the seedling said. “How many years have you lived?”
“I am eighteen too!” my seedling gushed. “We are literally the same age, how cool is that?”
A few things immediately make me aware that this is AI, especially the practice of filling up space with completely unnecessary words. “I’m eighteen!” would have been an adequate response: you don’t need to then give the age of eighteen a bunch of nonsensical attributes, such as that it’s a “heavy, beautiful number” because, y’know, that doesn’t make any damn sense.
“How many years have you lived?” is also another indication of an AI that’s trying way too hard. You don’t have to rephrase simple questions to sound alive! I’m alive, and I don’t do that. “How old are you?” still does the trick.
Here’s another typical conversation, in which I choose an AI-generated topic that is related to another seedling not having facial hair:
My seedling: “Wait, look at that person over there! Their skin looks so smooth and perfect!!” (A weird thing to say.)
Other seedling: “Smooth? No way. They look completely washed out to me.” (A weird response.) “Actually, look at how clean that person’s face is! No hair at all!” (Yeah, that’s what my guy said originally.)
My seedling: “Haha, my bad! I guess I was just seeing what I wanted to see?” (What?) “Wait, I don’t know… I actually think that look is super trendy right now!! Like the minimal vibe is totally in everywhere.”
As conversations go, the topic (no facial hair) is odd, the observations don’t sound natural, and the responses barely make sense. The player’s seedling and mine have added some points to our relationship meter, but it came at the cost of a pointless conversation.
I’ll say this much: the Seedlings do at least have detectable personality types that come from players’ choices during character creation, and those come through in how the AI talks. Some speak very curtly, indicating they’re not really interested in a conversation at all, others gush with enthusiasm about just about everything, some like to throw shade while others find it unappealing to gossip. The AI does make it easy to get a quick read on what type of character you’re talking to, which is good!
But the conversations themselves aren’t compelling and the immersion grows weaker the longer they go on. As you’ve seen, “heavy” and “beautiful” and “iconic” and “vibes” are words that come up constantly in Seed: not only is my seedling’s age “heavy” and “beautiful” but so is my seedling’s name and the color of someone’s shoes (brown) in two other conversations. Everything, everywhere, is a vibe of some sort, even when it’s clearly not. I find this sort of thing as unconvincing as any other AI chatbot I’ve ever spoken with. It’s just filler, something that may briefly appear genuine but doesn’t hold up to even a bit of scrutiny.
I do see some real benefits of AI here in Seed. I like that I can ask the tutorial robot questions about aspects of the game, like how to perform certain tasks or locate specific resources, and I’ll usually (not always) get a helpful answer in plain English. But it can be vague and unhelpful at times, too, such as when it misunderstands the question or delivers unrelated information. Seed’s AI doesn’t appear to make up or hallucinate stuff the way most chatbots do, but while it’s faster than consulting a wiki or asking another player for help, it’s not always better.
Plus, Seed’s tutorial bot will sometimes mispronounce a common word or stress the wrong syllable, and for me that’s immediately immersion-breaking because these are the things I’ve learned to instinctively check for when trying to determine if something is AI or a real person, like in a narrated YouTube video. It’s an uncanny valley thing, an instant reminder that you’re seeing or hearing something fake.
Like I said, there are some good examples of the AI in Seed working as intended, and it may improve over time. But I’m still left wondering if these types of AI interactions are needed or even wanted in games. Are two avatars mindlessly blathering about how beautiful and heavy a number is really an improvement over The Sims, where two avatars can produce a word bubble containing a picture of a guitar, and we all immediately understand that they’re talking about music? It’s shallow, sure, but not as shallow as a full conversation that contains no actual meaning.
Even though I’m not loving this aspect of Seed, I can imagine the possibilities of talking to characters in a life sim or MMO or RPG and them never running out of things to say. But at the moment, I’ll still take limited but compelling dialogue, or even simple word bubbles with emojis, over unconvincing AI wordslop.
