Virtual Versions of People Will Replace NPCs in Games Using AI

Artificial intelligence (AI) is slowly making the metaverse its next stop to spread its roots in digital twins. The metaverse is empty, many have complained before. However, by leveraging AI, developers are trying to breathe life into non-playable characters (NPCs) to make metaverse gaming fun. Virtual worlds are incomplete without gaming and gaming without NPCs.

Safety Must Be the Priority

NPCx, an AI company, is working on similar technology, Michael Puscar, the company’s CEO told The US Sun, the US edition of the British newspaper The Sun. He said in an email “Our aim is to allow video game players to clone themselves into video games, acting on their behalf in the game when they’re unavailable to play.”

Their flagship product, which they are calling BehaviorX, can be central to metaverse development according to the company. “Our clones need to exist in not just a video game environment but in the Metaverse as well,” Puscar told The US Sun. The term metaverse has lost its spark during the past few months.

Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta Platforms, came up with his vision to develop the metaverse in 2021. However, rigorous research on virtual worlds ended up losing over $40 Billion through Reality Labs, their metaverse research arm. The company recently added AI to its list. Recently, the company launched LLaMa 2, the next generation of their large language model (LLM), in collaboration with tech giant Microsoft.

Puscar’s innovation is focused on bringing realism to gaming. According to him, “for gamers, playing alongside or against AI clones of real-world players or celebrities adds an element of realism and excitement to the gaming experience.” Recently, Nvidia, the GPU maker, came up with a similar technology called ACE, an AI model infusing intelligence to NPCs.

The company showcased a demo during Computex 2023 in Taipei where an NPC interacted with a player in real-time. Jason Paul, Nvidia VP of GeForce Platform, told online news publication The Verge that “the tech can scale to more than one character at a time and could theoretically even let NPCs talk to each other.”

However, there is a downside to such technology. Puscar highlights that they cannot stop anyone if they decide to go down perversion. He said, “We cannot control the counterparty, and you can imagine situations where someone nefarious decides to simulate sexual acts with a clone, uses profane language, or otherwise attempts to put them into compromising situations.”

British online newspaper The Independent reported in May 2022 that a woman experienced a sexual assault virtually in Horizon Worlds, Meta’s virtual world. Similarly, a beta tester reported that her avatar was groped by a stranger. Virtual worlds are still in the early stages and require additional security to attract users to the platform.

Think Tank Brookings believes that “The move from the internet we know today to the metaverse is a transformational move from observation to participation.”

Anurag is working as a fundamental writer for The Coin Republic since 2021. He likes to exercise his curious muscles and research deep into a topic. Though he covers various aspects of the crypto industry, he is quite passionate about the Web3, NFTs, Gaming, and Metaverse, and envisions them as the future of the (digital) economy. A reader & writer at heart, he calls himself an “average guitar player” and a fun footballer.