AI Characters Fight To The Death In Microstreamer ‘Non-Player Combat’

Tom Paton, whose Where the Robots Grow was one of the first AI animated feature films, debuted a new AI generated series today, Non Player Combat. His small team in the UK has been building AiMation Studios around a pipeline for long form generative AI content and a companion iOS microstreamer for distribution.

Non Player Combat introduces six photorealistic contestants who are dropped on a remote island in a survival contest that blends elements of battle royale games and unscripted competition shows. Each contestant carries a detailed psychological history created by AiMation’s writers. It all seems very familiar except for one twist: they are actually going to kill each other, or die trying, and the writers don’t know who, or how, or where this will happen.

Once the simulation begins, the Ai characters make each decision independently. They may form alliances or forgo them as they hunt each other, avoid predators, and fight for survival. Paton describes the show as a mix of Naked and Afraid and The Truman Show, unfolding because the characters believe their circumstances are real. In Hollywood the log line would be: Hunger Games in Westworld. The production team does not plan outcomes. Episodes are edited from logs of the simulation. The first episode debuts December 8 on YouTube and on the AiMation VOD app, with additional episodes released weekly.

Paton describes the approach as a hybrid of game development and documentary editing. “Every player has hundreds of pages of backstory. Childhood, trauma, love, crimes, philosophy. Their behavior emerges from that foundation. The AI takes those inputs and becomes the character,” he says. “We did not pick the winner. We did not pick who died and when. We created the psychology, not the plot.”

AiMation built the series with a five person team using its Omnigen workflow platform. The core reasoning system that controls the internal reasoning of the agents and governs moment to moment behavior was built in-house. ElevenLabs provides the synthetic voices. Seedance and other ByteDance models are the main generative AI models used in the production workflow. Paton says four episodes were completed in under two months at a reported cost of about 28K for the entire season. Traitors, a survival series with a comparable format, clocks in at one million dollars per episode.

The six contestants (four men, two women) in Non-Player Combat come straight out of a video game, consisting of a former Navy Seal, an egghead Chess champion, a hot influencer, a wilderness guide, the suicidal ex-con, and an a lethal martial arts. These not-quite human AI agents in Non-Player Combat don’t know they are AI. But we do. From the looks of the trailer the performances may be subtly uncanny, and have what I call an ‘AI accent,’ but that doesn’t matter. The agents don’t know they are AI, we do. That’s what makes this original, and dramatic.

We see AI animated characters everywhere now, and it seems like every other producer is working on some secret AI entertainment project on the down-low with “the studios.” If you like this sort of thing, there are thousands of responsive avatars waiting for you in places like Grok, Character.ai and Replikant. Showrunner’s Sim Francisco also follows AI animated characters, but the AI ‘animation’ of the characters is crude.

The characters in Non-Player Combat act with instincts inherited from a century of storytelling rather than written instructions, because of all the media the AI generators have been trained on. Paton believes the intended audience will absorb this without hesitation. “When they see the show and someone explains it is not real, it is AI, they will say who cares,” he says.

Paton says Non Player Combat is the beginning of a new AI driven entertainment format. “The future lies where the characters from the shows and films we watch are living their stories in real time, and it is those stories we are seeing edited down,” he says. The effect is unsettling and commercially interesting. Paton is marketing the series with a Gladiator line, a reminder of what entertainment has always relied on: spectacle. Are you not entertained?