Krafton to introduce AI characters in PUBG

South Korea's game developing and publishing giant Krafton Inc. plans to introduce virtual characters using generative AI in the first-person shooter game PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG) next year.

The AI companions will resemble human gamers, engaging in emotional voice conversations and offering tactical opinions.

The company announced on Mondy that it will present a total of five papers, including those related to AI players, at the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) 2023 main track, taking place in New Orleans until Dec. 16.

NeurIPS is the world's largest AI conference, where big tech companies like Google and Nvidia showcase their AI research achievements.

Among South Korean companies, Krafton ranks fourth in the number of papers published on this main track, following Samsung (26), Naver (13), and LG AI Research (8).

Krafton aims to release generative AI technology, allowing players to enjoy the game together like friends. The goal is to apply the game-specific generative AI called Virtual Friend to PUBG next year.

A Krafton source stated that the technology introduced in these papers would be applied to game development by the end of the year, enabling interactions with AI at a level comparable to ChatGPT, including teaming up or encountering AI enemies. "Technologies such as text articulation and mimicking facial expressions in 3D graphics will be applied to game development within the year," he added.

Krafton has established a dedicated organization for AI game development, creating the ReLU Games game studio as a separate entity in June. The studio aims to create new games using AI voice recognition technology.

Krafton has been preparing to adopt generative AI on a company-wide scale, establishing the Deep Learning Division in 2021 and the AI Ethics Committee in April this year. The company also said that over 90% of its employees use AI in their work.

Write to Ju-Hyun Lee at deep@hankyung.com