First-Of-Its-Kind Survival 'Reality' Show Depicts Fatal Fights Between Humans, Animals

A new competitive "reality" show, the first ever to be solely generated using AI, pits contestants against polar bears, deadly snakes, and each other in a bloody battle for supremacy.

Non Player Combat Is The Hunger Games Meets Traitors

Non Player Combat is a four-part series pitched as a cross between The Hunger Games, Fortnite, and Traitors. Created by Tom Paton, a visual effects producer and the CEO of AiMation Studios, the series is set in a dystopian future in which humans must wage battle with a cadre of fearsome animals as well as other people while they contend with the harshest environmental conditions imaginable. Paton previously directed Where the Robots Grow, one of the first AI feature films.

The first episode introduces the six (fictional) contestants, including a Navy Seal, a chess champion, and an ex-con, who have been dropped onto a remote island and instructed to kill one another…if the elements, or the island’s non-human inhabitants, don’t off them first. The twist here, amongst many, is that the show’s creators didn’t script the series or otherwise determine when (or how) the contestants would perish. In the first episode, which dropped Dec. 8 on YouTube and AiMation, a survivalist is mauled to death in a gory bear attack; and another man is bitten by a venomous snake, suffering for several hours in agony and projectile vomiting blood until he dies. It ends with two characters with automatic weapons taking aim at one another from across a verdant forest.

Creators 'Do Not Plan Outcomes'

“They are relying on what we know about reality shows and characters like these. The production team does not plan outcomes. Episodes are edited from logs of the simulation,” Charlie Fink wrote in Forbes. “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."

Each of the contestants has been “trained” on intricate character histories. “Every player has hundreds of pages of backstory. Childhood, trauma, love, crimes, philosophy,” Paton explained to the outlet. “Their behavior emerges from that foundation. The AI takes those inputs and becomes the character. We did not pick the winner. We did not pick who died and when. We created the psychology, not the plot.”

'The Future' of Reality TV

As for the ongoing controversy surrounding AI, Paton believes that viewers won’t mind as long as they’re entertained. “When they see the show and someone explains it is not real, it is AI, they will say who cares,” he said. “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.”

Non Player Combat dropped its first episode on YouTube and AiMation on Monday, Dec. 8. You can check it out here.