It's an important part of any life sim: giving the characters life. No one wants to play a life sim where your friends and neighbors act like drones mindlessly following daily routines to meet their needs as if they're going step-by-step through a checklist.
The developers of early access life sim Inzoi are attempting to give their characters better reasoning skills and more realistic behavior through an AI system they call "Smart Zoi." At the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco this week, I attended a panel given by Kangwook Lee, Krafton's head of deep learning, where he explained the Smart Zoi system and gave a brief live demo of it in action.
I will say this: it's pretty ambitious. I know we see AI shoved into everything these days, but Inzoi's AI isn't running on some distant server, it's running right there on your PC. Since the game's gorgeous looks are already taking up so much processing power, that doesn't leave much room for AI to do its thing, either, and there's another important consideration: speed.
You can speed up time by 5x while you're playing Inzoi, so all those characters will need to make all their decisions at five times speed without their little AI-powered brains breaking.
At the panel, Lee first showed us what Krafton calls "Utility AI." That's a basic decision-making system based on a character's needs: hunger, fun, hygiene, social interaction, etc. If a character's hunger meter is lower than its hygiene meter, for example, it'll prioritize food over taking a bath.
Smart Zoi, Lee said, is about a character making a decision not just based on needs but context. Say that same character is hungry, but they have dinner reservations with their fiancee in 10 minutes. A character running on Utility AI would still eat immediately, thus ruining its appetite for their dinner date.
A character with Smart Zoi enabled, Lee said, would take that dinner reservation into account, and either wait for dinner with their darling or have a small snack instead of just wolfing down all the food in sight.
Sounds great. Sounds great. Lee then demonstrated the system with a live demo, and it didn't look particularly great.
In the demo we met Grace and David, a married couple of Zois, and watched them go about their lives, first with just Utility AI running the show. I couldn't quite tell what Grace was doing in the bedroom, but I think she tried to turn on some music. The stereo or speaker broke and started sparking and buzzing. In search of some alternate entertainment, she instead went to the computer in another room to start "investigating interesting facts," which I assume meant she was watching the Inzoi version of YouTube. David, meanwhile, watched TV in the living room.
Then Lee switched on David and Grace's Smart Zoi system. They both began doing different things. But those things weren't exactly interesting and didn't feel like a big leap in AI-powered immersion.
Instead of using the computer, Grace decided she wanted to "clean mouse." I'm going to make an assumption here: Grace's AI-fueled brain contains a typo and she really wanted to "clean house" to feel more productive. Either that or all her investigations at the computer left her mouse filthy. (Third possibility: she has a pet mouse that needed a bath.)
I wasn't expecting to be dazzled, but I was expecting… something.
With his Smart Zoi powers activated, meanwhile, David decided that rather than watching TV he wanted to "splash water playfully." His internal monologue, which can be seen by clicking on him, said that it would feel "cool" and make for a nice start to the day.
That was it. Look, I know this is a life sim, and I wasn't expecting Grace to suddenly foil a bank robbery or David to start building a mech so he could stomp around the neighborhood. Inzoi is also an early access game, so I'm sure there's plenty more work to be done on the Smart Zoi system. I wasn't expecting to be dazzled, but I was expecting… something.
Deciding to clean the house isn't some kind of next-level move for AI: Sims clean their house, too. And splashing water instead of watching TV is perhaps wholesome, but it doesn't feel any more immersive or realistic than a Sim walking around a house and deciding to clap its hands at the sight of a new lamp. (Also: why would you ever stop watching TV to do anything. TV is hella good right now.)
Also, there's a malfunctioning appliance of some sort in the bedroom, buzzing and sparking. Shouldn't that be a priority for the AI over cleaning and splashing? The demonstration was just the latest of an increasingly common interaction with AI in which a spokesperson insists it's very smart and incredible, and then it immediately does something kinda dumb.
Inzoi enters early access next week, so I'll get to try out the Smart Zoi system for myself. Hopefully, it'll do a bit more than what I saw in the demo this week.
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