Epic Games adds AI conversations to Fortnite, but I don't remember anyone asking for them

Fortnite is no longer a game. While it may have started life with a campaign and taken the world by storm (pun very much intended) with its battle royale mode, it's grown and mutated into something more. Like Roblox, players now use it as an online social space, and develop their own games within Epic's ecosystem. Now, the developer has announced you can create NPCs with AI-generated dialogue in your custom islands, something that absolutely nobody asked for.

Where once you could create characters with intention by scripting dialogue trees and building the perfect people for your island, you're now able to replace that with a robot approximating what real people say based on what it has scraped from the internet and put together like Frankenstein's autocomplete. Simply pop in some prompts, and they'll become your narrator or quest-giver. You've just got to hope they'll get it right.

While your personally-penned scripts would never veer from exactly what you wanted an NPC to say, you'll have to nail your prompts lest the AI-powered characters go rogue. If you think the combined powers of Epic Games and Google Gemini are above mistakes like that, may I remind you of the fiasco with Where Winds Meet's AI NPCs? Players easily gamed the system using the Solid Snake method to collect rewards without ever having to complete the quest. I wonder if the same will be possible in Fortnite?

Epic claims the NPCs will remember what's already happened in a game session, respond to player inputs (like any other NPC), and trigger events in-game. It feels like most non-AI generated NPCs already do that, but I digress.

Epic's given example is an NPC who grants you entry to a tournament if you reach the required level. I've never made a custom Fortnite island, but this is basic coding, it fails to persuade me that AI is anything other than a resource-intensive alternative to learning how to do simple tasks in Python.

The good news is that Epic has added safety layers on top of the standard Gemini model. These will keep responses "aligned with [the] Fortnite Developer Rules," and should also protect players from the dark side of chatbots. Gemini is currently facing a lawsuit after it is alleged to have encouraged a user to take their own life, and there's a whole Wikipedia page dedicated to AI chatbot-related deaths.

To further protect against this, Epic has also banned the creation of NPCs who provide medical or mental health guidance, romantic NPCs, or any persona who is designed to bypass content restrictions.

Epic also seems a little late to this particular party. Public sentiment is turning against AI and LLMs. Arc Raiders is replacing its poor quality AI voice actors with real people, admitting that "a real professional actor is better than AI." Capcom has recently confirmed it isn't using generative AI in its development process, and industry titan Jeff Kaplan says that the systems can't replicate the human spirit, so why bother?

Even if Fortnite's AI NPCs work flawlessly - and that's a big if, based on the technology's current output - what's the point? You're creating an island to match a vision in your head, to translate your personal, human experience onto the screen and allow others to share in your creative passion project. Why undermine that with a chatbot who could ruin the atmosphere or mess up a quest simply by misjudging the tone or going off-script? More importantly, where's the fun in letting a robot do all the writing for you?