NVIDIA NeMo SteerLM Tunes Game NPCs With AI Emotions In An Effort To Fix Stupid
NVIDIA is leveling up its Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) technology to make in-game non-playable characters (NPC) a lot more realistic in how they respond to player interactions and conversations. The result is that developers can quickly and easily inject human-like emotions and personalities into NPCs, both good and bad, for a more realistic (and ultimately immersive) experience.
In case you missed it, NVIDIA first showcased ACE at Computex a few months ago, demonstrating how generative AI-powered natural language interactions can take a bland NPC and mold it to respond in a much less generic fashion. The underlying idea is that players can have unscripted conversations with NPCs while remaining in the confines of the game world.
While not without challenges, it's a promising technology that could upend typical interactions with NPCs. Now several months later, NVIDIA is showing off the next iteration infused with NeMo SteerLM, a new framework that enables developers to customize the personality of NPCs to more closely resemble how an actual human might respond.
"Most LLMs are designed to provide only ideal responses, free of personality or emotion, as you can see by interacting with chat bots. With the SteerLM technique, however, LLMs are trained to provide responses aligned with particular attributes, ranging from humor to creativity, to toxicity, all of which can be quickly configured through simple sliders," NVIDIA explains.
Check it out...
The demo centers around the same Jin character, owner of a ramen shop, that we saw at Computex. Business is slow for poor Jin. In the demo, the developer inquires about the slowdown asking, "Why do you that is, is your Ramen any good?"
Jin's default response is logical but not very exciting. He says, "I think it is. I don't know why it's slow." After cranking up the 'helpfulness' slider and nudging the 'creativity' slider, Jin responds in a different way saying, "I think the new flavor I added might be causing the issue. I'm not sure—I've made it more spicy by adding some fresh Korean peppers. That might be the issue."
Cranking up the 'humor' slider and reducing the 'helpfulness' slider results in a different response. Jin says, "I don't know, I can't tell these days. Business is so slow I'm practically going bankrupt. Thank God I already married."
Jacking up the 'toxicity' slider and dialing the 'humor' slider back to zero puts Jin on the defensive. When asked the exact same question, he angrily responds, "Are you questioning my cooking skills? The only reason my shop is even open is because of my ramen."
It's an impressive demo and we can certainly see the potential. The challenge from our viewpoint is turning this tech into a game experience without allowing NPCs to go off the rails. That's easier said then done, as we've seen when chatbots go unhinged. Scripted responses don't face the same roadblocks, but the tradeoff is it can become repetitive. You know, like taking an arrow to the knee time and again.
This isn't the end of the road for ACE with NeMo SteerLM, though. On the contrary, things are just getting started. NVIDIA didn't say exactly what else it has in store, only that it's excited to share its "next breakthroughs."
