Ubisoft is introducing a new Artificial Intelligence-powered tool called Ghostwriter to help with narrative design, and the community’s negative response to the March 21 announcement didn’t come as a surprise.
Players have voiced concerns over this initiative and are worried that future games will decline thanks to AI.
Others wondered whether narrative designers are going to lose their jobs because of it. “Ubisoft to force scriptwriters to train the program that will eventually replace them,” a user on social media joked.
Ghostwriter is described as an “in-house AI tool [that] helps narrative designers and scriptwriters to generate a first draft of barks.” Barks are lines an NPC will say when a character wanders into a location or a fight.
They aren’t vital to the game’s narrative but are here to provide information and strengthen immersion using narrative design. It’s also a first glimpse into a character’s personality.
In the announcement, Ubisoft outlined the bot wasn’t meant to “replace” game writers but instead to alleviate “one of the video game writer’s most laborious tasks,” referring to barks.
On one hand, barks are sometimes considered a “boring” part of narrative design in video games, because they’re not tied to the main plot or complex narrative arcs.
On the other, these tools are a great way to start out as narrative designers. Sam Winkler, Gear Box’s lead writer on Borderlands 3, said “barks, ambient dialogue, and descriptive text is a lot of writers’ first billable (and résumé-able) work when they are starting out.”
Cutting out these tasks using AI can make things harder for debuting writers in gaming, who will have fewer job opportunities to get a foot in the door.
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Alanah Pearce, a Santa Monica Studio writer, also argued that proofreading through AI-generated narrative content actually was more time-consuming than writing them in the first place.
“I would far prefer AAA studios use whatever budget it costs to make tools like this to instead hire more writers,” she wrote in a tweet.
Ghostwriter might be implemented for Ubisoft to cut costs in the future. The French company has been navigating troubled waters since the start of the year, following a new policy that features more game cancellations and massive cost-cutting measures. Employees expressed worry over potential layoffs in January, while Ubisoft didn’t specifically mention this as part of this new policy.
