At the mercy of the infinite monkeys!

Did you know that video games have writers? Well they do. As in people who write things like story and dialogue, not code. They need those too, but I want to talk about this software thing that writes dialogue for video games. 

"Wait, video games have writers?"

-suddenly everyone who's never

 picked up a game controller before

In real life, people who regard others
as NPCs are called sociopaths.

Ubisoft, the French publisher of games like Far Cry, the Rabids series, and like three hundred kind of similar Assassins Creeds--Assassins' Creed?--is planning to use an AI program called Ghostwriter to create in-game dialogue for NPC's. Which, allow me to nerdspalin: Ubisoft makes a lot of open world games, and open worlds are often populated by non-player characters; randos who wander around yammering on and going about their business in order to make the game's world feel more realistic.

Remember? Jim Carey plays a guy who
discovers that everything revolves around him. 
Which also kind of sounds sociopathic...

Filling out a game's setting with enough distinct background characters with unique dialogue that the player doesn't feel like they're in a Potemkin village or some kind of Truman show situation where everything is for their benefit rather than a living, breathing world, has got to be a lot of work. And a tool that writes that dialogue for the developers would be a big help. Cool, right? Well, not so fast. The prog--huh? You weren't jumping to that conclusion? You also spotted the fact that using software to create dialogue necessarily replaces a human writer?

"Whoa, hang on, no we don't all agree."

-some robot

Right, it's settled then. We can all agree that robots taking writing jobs away from actual human beings is an issue. Ubisoft, however, insists that Ghostwriter doesn't replace writers, but rather frees them up to spend more time on the key dialogue. That is, dialogue that advances the story, rather than just the colors the world. Ok, but it seems like they could hire other writers to do the grunt work of NPC speech while using the more experienced writers for the important stuff. So, I mean, someone's job is being done by the AI, right?

Above: Some Target employees seen here
posing with the machine that replaced them.

Ben Swanson, the creator of Ghostwriter, assures us that the AI is writing first drafts of the dialogue, not what will be heard in the game. So a human writer still has to "select and polish" the text. And that's great, but sounds to me a little like the self checkout line at a store. They still need a cashier to watch like six self checkout stations or whatever, and while it's great that they still have a job, somebody or several somebody's are out of theirs.

It's turning game writing into something
akin to a teacher correcting kids' English
papers; an even more thankless job.

It can also make more and duller work for the writers who still have their jobs.

"As a writer having to edit AI-generated scripts/dialogue sounds far more time consuming than just writing my own temp lines. I would prefer AAA studios use whatever budget it costs to make tools like this to instead hire more writers."

-Alanah Pearce, a writer for Playstation,

on how sometimes helping isn't helping

I suppose it was inevitable that someone somewhere would eventually come up with a way to use AI to brute force the infinite monkeys at infinite type writers theorem. Sure, for now it's NPC dialogue, but it's only a matter of time before the technology improves and can generate whatever content we might ask of it, and without human assistance. But are we comfortable with that? Are we comfortable with self checkout? And does it even matter what we are and are not comfortable with at this point, or have the infinite monkeys already won?

Pictured: a grim portent of our own obsolescence at the hands of our creations.