Sony Creates Artificial Intelligence System to Transform Dialogue Into Fantasy "Persona"

Sony created an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of turning dialogue pieces into fantasy "Personas" (photo: x @sony)

JAKARTA - Researchers at Sony have created an artificial intelligence (AI) system capable of turning snippets of dialogue into fantasy "personas" that can be adapted for use as non-player characters in video games and other media.

An AI persona is a character or personality adopted by an AI model, such as a large language model. Typically, the process of creating an AI persona involves training a natural language model and then further tuning it through a combination of parameter adjustments and labor-intensive human feedback.

Sony's latest experiment involves automating this process by training an AI model to extract important details from dialogue. According to the team's paper, the main goal of this work is to make personas less boring.

"The main issue with dialogue agents is their boring and generic responses and their inability to maintain a consistent, often conflicting persona in conversation," Sony said in a blog post.

Instead of building personas from scratch, Sony researchers approached the problem from the other side. They created a process called “persona extraction” that develops personas based on existing information.

For example, a pirate persona may be developed from dialogue in which the character discusses various aspects of pirate life.

One of the main challenges with developing personas using this method is that dialogue can often contain extraneous information. For example, a character who discusses the life of a pirate may also discuss things unrelated to their persona as a pirate.

The team trained the AI ​​to differentiate between useful and useless information, and the result was the development of complete personas.

Although the scope of the experiment does not include the creation of artificial agents in video games such as non-player characters (NPCs), initial work on these personas appears to be highly customizable.

These personas are capable of generating dialogue, which, combined with other systems, can be used seamlessly to give NPCs the ability to speak in real-time while maintaining character immersion and should lend itself to automated scripting and routines for those characters.

Unfortunately, as the team mentions in their paper, there are ethical considerations involved in developing these automated systems.

"The ethical concerns of this work center on the possibility of automatically impersonating an existing person, not on the intended use case of a fictional character," Sony said.

In other words, these researchers' experimental system could theoretically be used to extract personas from existing people for the purpose of selling them products and services. Simultaneously, the more accurately a persona can reflect an individual consumer, the more targeted the advertising aimed at them.