

Voice acting has always been challenging for modders, who often work solo or in very small teams, and yet demand has soared as RPG games trend toward fully voiced casts. Jonx0r, creator of the Wyrmstooth mod for Skyrim, thinks these abilities will not only help modders achieve technical parity with triple-A games, but also unleash a new wave of creativity. These can help modders target core constraints like image quality with AI image enhancement, and voice acting with AI speech synthesis. Of all the recent applications, one of the most interesting is the employment of publicly available AI tools in modding communities. AI is already behind world-building tools for artists, voice filtering in multiplayer, more intelligent bots, image upscaling, and generating photorealistic graphics. Videogames are uniquely positioned to take advantage of AI at almost every stage of their production. We're already in the middle of this revolution. Whether or not you consider machine learning to strictly be AI, the acceleration in this field has game-changing ramifications. Developments in the field will likely represent the single largest technological advance in the coming decades, yet today we’ve seen only a miniscule portion of that revolution unfold. Artificial intelligence is in an interesting place in 2021.
