News Summary

• This kind of callous treatment of workers and their labor is only allowed to persist as executives refuse to take pay cuts and look for outs like Nvidia’s tech to keep pumping out video games without having to pay people to craft them..
• Convai Head of Product Nyla Worker explained to The Verge that each NPC has some backend programming meant to give them a central ethos, including a character description, knowledge bank, and personality traits like if they’re extroverted or introverted..
• Writers, animators, and actors imbue them with a sense of realness, as if they have actual identities and their own hopes and dreams.All of this follows thousands of layoffs across the video game industry in just the first 19 days of 2024..
• The demo Nvidia and Convai were showing allowed the user to speak with characters using their own voice, with the AI characters reacting to what was said in real time..
• Nvidia, the company responsible for many of the graphics cards in high-end PCs, announced an AI-powered NPC generator called Omniverse Avatar Cloud Engine alongside AI tech company Convai last year..
• They can conceptualize the cyberpunk city they’re supposed to live in by mentioning heists, corporate fuckery, and other petty crimes, but most of this just feels like they’re pulling from a word bank..