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Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games

gwern.net

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Re: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games

#21

Post by arcastroe »

dfabulich wrote: post #14

In this article, Gwern proposes replacing AI Dungeon's free-text parser with a menu of CYOA options. I don't think it will work, at least not with the current generation GPT-3. GPT-3 won't be able to generate a good CYOA until it can generate a good non-interactive novel. Today, GPT-3 can generate text, so you could try to use it to generate a whole novel. People have, but the novels it generates aren't worth reading…

> Today, GPT-3 can generate text, so you could try to use it to generate a whole novel. People have, but the novels it generates aren't worth reading.

Novels are definitely out of reach for these language models. GPT-3 currently has a limit of 2048 tokens. This is short-story territory but definitely not "book" length. I agree in this regard.

> GPT-3 won't be able to generate a good CYOA until it can generate a good non-interactive [story].

I disagree here, however. One of the best things about AI-generated text is that it can generate a multitude of options for story progression. Sure, not all progressions will be good, but the most important thing in CYOA is the _choice_. As long as there are some good options, users can choose which progressions they like best, even if the other options suck.

For example, with this toy example [1], not all the options for the progression of the story are great. But if you pick and choose which progressions you like best, you can arrive at a pretty good ending, such as [2]. -- Albeit this is entirely subjective to what each individual finds entertaining

[1] https://toldby.ai/arK_3OpvpkG

[2] https://toldby.ai/aQAXlq3LNku/end

(the site in the links above is GPT-3 generated CYOA)

Re: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games

#24

Post by arcastroe »

Wow, I am saddened that I've only now found this post, I wish I had seen it sooner! This article perfectly describes my motivations for building [1] - exactly what is described here, although as a smaller toy example

[1] https://toldby.ai

I launched this weekend project in August, but it looks like Gwern's post preceded it in June.

There's unfortunately a delicate balance between caching, ranking, and novelty. Caching absolutely helps keeps costs low - no need to regenerate new text for every user. Ranking also helps bring the popular branches to the top. But with naive ranking, the site quickly becomes stale and the same branches always show up. My girlfriend complained that she's bored of the same branches that always appear on the home-page. There needs to be some sort of novelty factor to keep the site fresh. But implementing this would increase costs!

Something like per-user ranking is needed to avoid showing the same branches to the same users over and over, but this is currently beyond my level of time commitment :)

Re: Choose-Your-Own-Adventure AI Dungeon Games

#25

Post by bardan »

kmstout wrote: post #22

The last time I played AI Dungeon, I burned down a hotel, then checked in, went upstairs and connected my laptop to the wifi. When I summoned Cthulhu, a bottle of red wine arrived.

It is funny how dream-like deep learning produced content can get. Like how in https://thispersondoesnotexist.com/, you will sometimes find someone wearing a cap which looks like it has a logo but it's just a jumble of nonsense, like when you try to read text in a dream.
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