Seed's AI avatars talk a lot and say almost nothing worth hearing

Seed, the MMO colony sim from Klang Games, just hit early access after roughly a decade in development. It lets player-made seedlings — Sims-style avatars — chat with each other and with you using built-in AI, even when the actual players are offline. The pitch is compelling: persistent characters who can hold a real conversation about anything, not just scripted lines.

In practice, the AI mostly falls flat. One early exchange landed well — asking a seedling why it looked so high-waisted got a charming, self-aware reply about trends — but that turned out to be the exception. Most conversations quickly revealed the telltale signs of chatbot filler: unnecessary padding, hollow affirmations, and responses that sound vaguely human but don't actually mean anything. In one exchange between two AI-driven seedlings, both independently declared they were eighteen years old, with one describing the age as a "heavy, beautiful number" — the kind of phrase that sounds like language but communicates nothing. The other seedling called eighteen "totally iconic," which is the conversational equivalent of a loading screen.

This isn't a problem unique to Seed. The writer previously tested a ChatGPT-powered companion mod in Skyrim — a character supposedly capable of passing college entrance exams — and found it couldn't solve the game's easiest puzzle, let alone hold a convincing conversation. AI NPCs have a consistent failure mode: they can generate words indefinitely, but stringing words together isn't the same as saying something. The gap between "can respond to anything" and "responds well to anything" remains wide, and current large language model implementations haven't closed it in a game context.

Seed is still in early access, so there's room for Klang Games to iterate on how the AI behaves. But right now, the feature that's supposed to make the world feel alive is doing the opposite — every hollow exchange is a reminder that you're talking to a chatbot, not a character.