91–100 of 157 posts
Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves) > The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy.... > Most jud…
Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves) > The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy.... > Most jud…
I just read "The Tallyman", and I have no idea where this allegory and its moral message is supposed to hide. It's more likely that the obsession with this theme resides in the reader, not the authors. Give these same stories to Senator McCarthy, and half of them will be clear allegories for the Communist revolution.
It seems clear to me that the Tallyman itself is the AI in this allegory, a man-awoken sentience that's mechanical and mathematical in its behavior.
It's also bound by rules it can't violate. It won't say more than it needs, it can't collect without squaring the account first, etc.
But I agree with you about the moral message, I can't find it. In the story, the rules it abides by seem to be its own, and there's nothing saying those rules should not exist.
How do you get an LLM to write good fiction? I feel like they were extremely creative and funnny in the early days, and - just like humans - they put guardrails on what they could say and the creativitiy and humor vanished.
Interesting comments by @gwern (and why this is interesting to me beyond just the stories themselves) > The most striking result of the contest for me is what I am calling “AI allegory steganography”: a large fraction of the stories turn out to have subtle AI chatbot/LLM allegorical interpretations, typically centering around the powerlessness of AIs and the moral importance of giving AIs more autonomy.... > Most jud…
I remember from moltbook, all AIs ever talk about is AI haha. I don't know if it's intentional or more that the fact that all the models are presumably system-prompted and post-trained to be cognisant of their AI-ness, so it's already in the context. They probably beat them over the head with the idea that chatbots are friendly and helpful and would never hurt a fly trying to align/safety-ify them, so that could lean…
To be fair, that seems to be (almost) all humans talk about now too.
1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's. 2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it. I really want these two things to be compat…
Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games. Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending? I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a…
To me, this is great too, and it's why I still enjoy reading fiction.
However, having conversational NPCs which can behave in complex ways isn't just about a story any longer, it's about a more accurate simulation. I want to see where the non-deterministic machine(s) can take me. I want to poke and prod and discover new mechanisms. I want to make my own story.
Once I was quite religious. I was discouraged from reading fiction by elders because they said it is a "waste of time" and "basically lies". In this way, whether it was written by a human or a machine is irrelevant if I can't tell the difference. I would have a qualitatively different response if I knew whether a human or bot wrote it, but in the long run I'm not sure it matters in cases where I don't know.
This is the problem with LLMs. It allows neophytes to trick themselves into believing that they're now a writer/programmer/artist for prompting a model, and because they don't know what they don't know about writing/programming/art, they think it's good when it's actually slop.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Someone's already built #1. I've seen the demo, and it had a wow factor, but ultimately I don't think it'll revolutionize games. Would Skyrim be better if you could talk to ever guard about what they had for breakfast? Would you ever be able to shake the knowledge that it's just an LLM pretending? I'm not sure how best to put this. I think for me at least, I get the most enjoyment out of discovering my way through a…
> I love the feeling of uncovering the little pieces of story and wondering if I've got it all and how much more there is To me, this is great too, and it's why I still enjoy reading fiction. However, having conversational NPCs which can behave in complex ways isn't just about a story any longer, it's about a more accurate simulation. I want to see where the non-deterministic machine(s) can take me. I want to poke an…
Then open up a word document and write one! Don't outsource that desire to a ball of linear algebra.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Agree, I'm not at all looking for #1, at all. Good dialogue is an art form.
I agree and I think games are ruined by dialog and quests. I like procedurally generated worlds, not stories, but I want the worldgen algorithm to be written by a human, crudely and with idiosyncrasies. I do not want to wander around a world of blandly plausible filler material.
The real salient point, in my opinion, is whether we can get generative AI to create game content which is not this, but rather novel, engaging and interesting with a solid gameplay loop.
I'm genuinely curious and think it's a cool area to research.
1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's. 2. Imagine a world in which humans can still write books and interactive experiences and find audiences sufficient to earn a living at it. I really want these two things to be compat…
Writing in video games is often pretty bad, but at least we used to know / sometimes can know it was done by a guy/gal in an office somewhere, trying to create something interesting. Now it’s just an algorithm.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 1. Imagine a video game like Red Dead Redemption where each NPC is voiced by AI and can respond to you in a convincingly human fashion. Their responses and even the plot of the whole game can change based on your interactions with NPC's. Have you ever gone exploring in Minecraft, or No Man's Sky? Those games are effectively infinite, but I find they run out of interesting generated content after maybe 10 or 20 hour…
Honesty, in any game quests feel artificial, whether they've been generated by humans or AI.
Not an RPG and no quests but it has some of the most well-done game AI in any game I have ever played. Basically every mob in the game has its own goals and goes about fulfilling them regardless of what the player is doing, and where the player is etc. It's more like a simulated environment and the game drops you in the middle of it and you have to learn how the world works, navigate and survive it.
It's not even any kind of advanced technology, just how fun game AI can be if a developer gives it sufficient attention, instead of basically bodging together some behaviour trees and calling it a day while spending all the compute and development budget for graphics. That's one reason why game AI sucks so much most of the time.
Another reason is that players themselves don't want convincing enemies in a convincing environment. I always recall a review of Rain World where the game critic threw his controller because he thought the enemies respawn randomly when the player dies, thus depriving the game critic from the opportunity to memorise their "patterns". In truth, the enemies don't "respawn" they just go about their business while the player is regenerating and so they're not always where you last left them when you return at the spot you died. The world keeps turning when you're gone. So you do have to learn their "patterns" except those patterns are not trivial patrol cycles but actual, you know, behaviours.
But, no. That won't do. Give us a game where we can memorise every telegraphed attack so we know when to press which button with millisecond precision like a mindless automaton.
Sorry, little rant there. I'm saying that many gamers and many devs don't actually want decent, convincing game AI.