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I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

joshfonseca.com

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Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#151

Post by zamadatix »

loliver666 wrote: post #76
ameliaquining wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Presumably the author encountered it by accident and then thought it was an amusing contrast with the Animal Crossing setting.

Yes I get it the LLM is trained on current news. But it's in very poor taste for the author to post that screenshot.

It looks like the news feed data is external, not part of training, same as the character sheet data (at least according to the diagram). This makes sense from a design perspective as then you don't need to retrain the model each time the news changes.

When an unplanned result is worth qualifying as poor taste instead of humorous is a debate unlikely to be resolved on HN, but it doesn't need to be to explain why the author bothered to include it when documenting their experience.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#152

Post by jerf »

dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

There's a number of little games and a major mod for Skyrim that implements this. I've spent a bit of time playing with the Skyrim mod.

There are some significant issues with it at the moment. One is that you have to train on vast swathes of text to get an LLM, and it's difficult after the fact to remove things after the fact. If you cooperate with the AI and stay "in Skyrim" with what you say to them it works out OK, but if you don't cooperate it becomes clear that Skyrim NPCs know something about Taylor Swift and Fox News, just to name two examples. LLMs in their current form basically can't solve this.

The LLMs are also prone to writing checks the game can't cash. It's neat that the NPCs started talking about a perfectly plausible dungeon adventure they went on in a location that doesn't exist, but "felt" perfectly Skyrim-esque, but there's clearly some non-optimal aspects about that too. And again, this is basically not solvable with LLMs as they are currently constituted.

Really slick experiences with this I think will require a generational change in AI technology. The Mantella mod is fun and all but it would be hard to sell that at scale right now as a gaming experience.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#153

Post by vonneumannstan »

beckthompson wrote: post #55
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

I'm unsure how useful they'll really be honestly! In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC when they start repeating lines etc... There could probably be cool uses but I don't think it will be a pure "upgrade" as the repeating dialog is kind of a feature honestly. We'll have to see how it pans out xD

>In many situations its very useful to know when your "done" talking with an NPC

Kind of like in real life...

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#154

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

perching_aix wrote: post #44
lazide wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Social media platforms censor emulator?!?

Yes. Facebook at some point filtered links to them from private messaging. I know this from personal experience. Not sure if they still do. Also fairly common on Reddit and Discord for communities to ban discussions of them, or even falsely claim they're blanket illegal outright.

Why? An emulator isn't legally any different than a virtual machine.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#155

Post by HeatrayEnjoyer »

cheschire wrote: post #106
stavros wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

Generative AI can reason in novel problems in an analogous way that bands continue to make new melodies even after all these years using the same instruments as all the other bands in their genre.

So, yes?

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#156

Post by testdelacc1 »

jerf wrote: post #152
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

There's a number of little games and a major mod for Skyrim that implements this. I've spent a bit of time playing with the Skyrim mod. There are some significant issues with it at the moment. One is that you have to train on vast swathes of text to get an LLM, and it's difficult after the fact to remove things after the fact. If you cooperate with the AI and stay "in Skyrim" with what you say to them it works out OK…

Feel like they could probably be used in text based adventures. Doki Doki Literature Club, despite the silly name, is a very unusual game that might really benefit from this.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#157

Post by johnzim »

RajT88 wrote: post #136
wincy wrote: post #5

That's hilarious that you give the villagers thought and the first thing they want to do is overthrow Tom Nook. If this works in Gamecube on an emulator, surely it'd be possible to make it work on the Switch emulators as well?

I also want to overthrow Tom Nook. He traps you (and one presumes) all of the rest of the villagers in a vicious cycle of debt, and can only be satiated by millions of bells.

To be fair to Tom Nook, the interest rate on those loans is 0% and there's no risk of being foreclosed upon!

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#158

Post by jhatemyjob »

jerf wrote: post #152
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

There's a number of little games and a major mod for Skyrim that implements this. I've spent a bit of time playing with the Skyrim mod. There are some significant issues with it at the moment. One is that you have to train on vast swathes of text to get an LLM, and it's difficult after the fact to remove things after the fact. If you cooperate with the AI and stay "in Skyrim" with what you say to them it works out OK…

It's solvable it's just a lot of work. You need to have guardrails, i.e. multiple sanity-check passes (maybe there are other techniques, but I found this to be most effective)

One concrete example I'm sure these Skyrim mods aren't using is: enums in structured outputs [1] with a finite list of locations/characters/topics/etc that are allowed to be discussed. The AI is not allowed to respond with anything that is not in the enum. So you can give it a list of all the locations in the game in a huge array and it would be forced to pick one.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/structured-outputs#a...

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#159

Post by BizarroLand »

stavros wrote: post #81
smt88 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LLMs are heavily trained on reddit, and "Tom Nook is a capitalist dictator if you think about it" is a reddit meme. Like many LLM reactions, it's less "thought" and more "regurgitating reddit jokes/opinions".

How can you tell? Either you're saying that LLMs have no "thoughts", and just regurgitate everything, which doesn't explain how they can reason in novel problems, or you're saying you can tell what's original thought and what's regurgitation, in which case I'll ask "how do we know your comment isn't you regurgitating an HN opinion"?

As far as I know, no current gen model AI "thinks". It's all processes trained against a body of work generated by actual thinkers along with a bevy of smoke and mirrors to fill in the gaps.

It's amazing that it's as good as it is given how far it is from thinking, but if you threw something actually novel at it, all it would do is confidently word salad a response.

Re: I replaced Animal Crossing's dialogue with a live LLM by hacking GameCube memory

#160

Post by faxmeyourcode »

jerf wrote: post #152
dolebirchwood wrote: post #15

This is awesome. LLM-powered NPCs is one thing I'm most excited about in the future of gaming. Characters repeating the same scripted dialog over and over again is one of the biggest immersion breakers.

There's a number of little games and a major mod for Skyrim that implements this. I've spent a bit of time playing with the Skyrim mod. There are some significant issues with it at the moment. One is that you have to train on vast swathes of text to get an LLM, and it's difficult after the fact to remove things after the fact. If you cooperate with the AI and stay "in Skyrim" with what you say to them it works out OK…

This is something fine tuning should be able to improve. The main caveats are the same as always: dataset collection, labeling, and training/experimentation time.
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