Artificial intelligence in gaming is moving fast, but a now infamous demo has shown just how unsettling things could get when virtual characters start questioning their own existence.
Two years ago, Australian tech company Replica Studios unveiled a demo based on The Matrix franchise, Matrix Awakens. Players could walk around a simulated city and talk directly to non-playable characters (NPCs) using a microphone.
What made it different was that these NPCs were powered by generative AI, able to think and respond on the spot – and some of their reactions were far from comforting.
Recently, a new report by New York Times demonstrates this — while Futurism looks into it further following the SAG-AFTRA finally coming to a close. As an example of the disturbing elements the demo showed off, at one point, a woman in a grey sweater asks: “What does that mean? Am I real or not?”.
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Another NPC becomes visibly distressed, telling the player: “I need to find my way out of this simulation and back to my wife. Can’t you see I’m in distress?”.
It was an eerie twist that felt straight out of the original Matrix films, blurring the line between scripted gaming moments and something that feels unnervingly self-aware.
The demo caused a stir when it first dropped, and it’s now being cited as a glimpse into a potential AI-driven future for video games. Studios are investing heavily in AI tools capable of writing dialogue, generating new levels from a short video clip, and even replacing human play-testers with “autonomous agents” that can run through early builds looking for glitches.
Companies like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Sony and Nvidia are all racing to make these tools the industry standard within the next few years.
But this tech boom comes with major downsides. Mass layoffs have hit gaming hard over the past couple of years, and unions like SAG-AFTRA have already staged strikes to secure “guardrails” against AI replacing voice actors and writers altogether, as reported by outlets like NPR.
Even Replica Studios, the actual team behind the aforementioned Matrix demo, eventually went under last year after costs skyrocketed and competition from larger AI firms grew too intense.
Running these systems isn’t cheap. Replica’s CTO Eoin McCarthy said that during the height of the demo’s popularity, users were generating over 100,000 lines of dialogue from NPCs, costing about $1000 a day to maintain.
Kylan Gibbs, CEO of AI firm Inworld AI, told The New York Times there’s still a “very big gap between prototypes and production”. That was before adding: “It’s a cheaper way to make games, but it is going to cost you 5000 times more to run a game, so is it actually cheaper?”
Despite the initial excitement around the prospect by some, these AI-powered NPCs can behave unpredictably, raising questions about what it means for players to exist in virtual worlds where not everything can be controlled.
For now, this Matrix-inspired demo remains a haunting reminder of what happens when game characters start wondering whether they’re truly alive — and nobody has a clear answer for them.
In the meantime, the heavy weighing of the monetary, creative, and ethical costs of using AI continues.