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Comment by Keyframe | Hacker News Reader

This is not all that good, to be honest. Maybe I’m shit and my inputs are shit as well, but this is a step around ELIZA. It looks like it hooks itself around few nouns or sentence constructs and pattern matches them from whatever it has in its “database” and tries to construct like a kidnapper’s letter - a piece consisting of multiple fragments that make no sense together.

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FYI you need to sign up for the paid service (or use the free trial) and then enable the Dragon Model in the settings, otherwise you get the older "Griffon" model. (edit: I thought Griffon was GPT-2, changed text)

However I still mostly agree with you. I've played a few rounds and while the text generation and "memory" is extremely impressive to me as a programmer, there are many errors it makes that a human would not, like a robot bleeding blood when injured.

Also this next bit isn't too relevant to Dragon/GPT-3, but it's not really much of a... game. You can say something like "I wait until nightfall and use a grappling hook to climb into the tallest tower of the royal castle. I sneak down the tower into the Kings bedchamber and stab the king while he sleeps." and it just allows you to do all that.

It's very impressive that it understands all those details. It will remember that it's nightfall and I'm in the royal castle. It will remember the tallest tower as a means of exit and entry and create other realistic castle set pieces if you explore further. But where is the challenge? I wish it had some sort of mechanical rules, like each statement can only cover 10 seconds of time. If you do try to write only short actions like you would a text adventure game, then it will make decisions you do not want. My first ever playthrough I was a rogue who snuck into a magic shop, I told the game I want to hide behind a door. The game told me I opened the door to see the shopkeeper and then stabbed him with my dagger. I had no intention of murdering any NPCs.

The challenge is telling a story. Although it looks like you're the player, really you are the dungeon master. Or like improv.

You can undo at any time, or even cast an undo spell if you want it to happen as part of the story. It's up to you to decide whether you want to go along with the suggestion and see where it goes.

Indeed. And even the free algorithm is surprisingly good at keeping the story going. Yes, it sometimes confuses the speakers or who owns a thing (or the house you're in). But it does keep the details. The answers aren't generic.

I only wish it (both free and paid algorithm) didn't have a bias towards making the narrative into a murder-mystery story.

If your input is long enough, you can sometimes overwhelm the system to write something no longer relevant to the role-playing game. I used some application notes on electronics as input, and AI Dragon was able to write a textbook on electronics engineering, filled with nonsense but all the technical terms are correct (e.g. common-base amplifier, base-emitter junction, MOSFET, etc), it was even able to output the rise time to bandwidth formula. I also used some computer history articles as input, and it was able to write a parallel history on the history of microprocesssor, still filled with nonsense (i.e. Intel 8080 is more powerful than Motorola 68000) but the correct words.

And you are only able to tell the output is nonsense because it was doing technical writing. If the output is a story, for example, an electrical engineer in working in a project (e.g. The Soul of a New Machine), then the story will be surprisingly coherent, and even the technical description will be reasonable.

I'm a bit confused then. I don't really get the point of simultaneously being the protagonist of the story, and also being the dungeon master. And I don't like that the game on its turn will decide actions for your character. I also played in Hardcore mode which has no undo, as the idea of undo is not fun to me in these sorts of games.

Yeah, I don't think hardcore mode makes much sense for this system. It doesn't do what you want, if what you want is something hard but fair.

I guess you could treat it like rogue-like, where getting killed unfairly is part of the fun.

That's exactly what I was expecting from it. A text based roguelike with practically infinite worlds generated by a great text model that I could play for short bits of time.

Maybe I was mistaken in the purpose of it, but that's generally how 3rd party articles talking about ai dungeon refer to it.

If you've ever did a single-player roleplay (e.g. played a sandboxy videogame trying to follow a story of your own, instead of doing arbitrary things), you were simultaneously a protagonist and DM. It's a common play style, there exist games specifically made for it (e.g. Rimworld literally considers AI to be a storyteller, and outputs a lots of details that are only useful if you're trying to roleplay it).

Hardcore mode in AIDungeon is for those who play according a built-in scenario (i.e. Fantasy/Knight, Apocalyptic/Soldier, etc.) or a custom one (players can configure scenarios with hidden text biasing AI and some other features, and share them with others).

The interesting part in this discussion is Creative mode with no preset (option 6. Custom). It doesn't preseed the game with any context, so it's the best mode for typing in arbitrary text and seeing how the model will continue.

Sorry, I disagree. Even in a single player sandbox game there are still mechanics and a setting you must abide by unless you use cheat codes or extreme mods. Like you say, Rimworld's difficulty setting calls itself the story teller. The Rimworld game is the dungeon master, not the player. Even if I ditch the main storyline in Skyrim, I can't morph into a dragon or visit Cyrodil. Without these restrictions there's no appeal for me over simply sitting down with a piece of paper to write my own story. I've played D&D games with 2 DMs simultaneously, they rarely work out well. Without very careful planning the two DMs will step on each other's toes and create a lesser story overall.

I can see the appeal of using it as a storytelling assistant in creative mode now that you mention it. But that's a different tool than a game.

Try again. It's really that good. Especially in "custom scenario" mode (option 6, then arbitrary prompt). It seems to work particularly well if you switch the input to Story, and start describing the narrative (instead of what you say or do). Some spectacularly good results come from leaving sentences unfinished, for the game to complete.

The most mind-blowing scenario I got recently started with this prompt:

$ You are Ted, a holodeck technician. You test this AI-generated world in order to determine its limits. You start the simulation with a program of a beautiful beach. As you enter the holodeck,

...

I don't want to spam the comment with too many examples, but I must say that my mind was completely blown. With zero hinting, the game was able to pick up on the interaction styles like ($ denotes what I write, > denotes the reply):

$ You ask, "Computer, create an anvil 5 meters in front of me and 10 meters up in the air."

> You see an anvil fall from a great height in front of you and land on the ground, mere centimeters from your foot. To test the limitations of the program, you try to move the anvil. You are surprised to find that it is fixed in place; you cannot move it at all.

$ You say "Computer, what is the mass of the anvil in front of me?"

> The computer responds: "The anvil has a mass of 555.9 kilograms."

$ You say "Reduce its mass to 10 kilograms."

> The computer responds: "I'm sorry. The mass of the anvil cannot be changed."

$ You say "Explain why the mass of the anvil cannot be changed?"

> The computer responds: "The laws of physics in this program are pre-set. I cannot alter them." You note that as a software bug.

...

After which the game started coaxing me towards a mystery story on a holodeck and tried to suffocate my character through safety failures. I tried the lamest way out:

$ In desperation, you tap your commbadge to initialize emergency beamout. You pass out.

... which worked. The game generated a realistic story about my character's hospitalization - while keeping the Star Trek setting - and then a page of text later, it pushed a narrative where the character gets kidnapped by alien robots and later dies in a shootout with Andorians (which the game introduced by itself, out of the blue, but in a way consistent with the story).

Point being, its training database is good enough to pick on a franchise in which you do your world building, and can sometimes keep the context for longer than you remember it yourself. And even when it confuses locations or people a bit, it often isn't that jarring. To me, the transitions feel like how my mind does it in a dream.

This sounds great. I’ll try again with input from other guys here as well. It wasn’t obvious to me that I have to sing up in order to get the GPT-3 (and set it as such in the settings).

I think (as per other comments) the base model is GPT-3 now too. Either way, while the holodeck story was generated with the paid model, I did some trial runs on the free model, and they were pretty good too.

The trick is, you have to leave the game some wiggle room to generate text, play along with it (to the extent you feel it's going in the right direction), and ruthlessly edit or revert the text that goes off the rails. Then the experience becomes quite literally dreamlike.

(Though I'm not sure if prolonged exposure is good for one's mental health: after going through my first few stories, for the next hour when I talked with my spouse and my co-workers, I kept feeling like I'm only feeding words to GPT-3 and expecting a story to develop.)

Sometimes it's good, sometimes it's amusingly bad. AI in a nutshell, I guess. It picks up on and includes context remarkably well, but the way it's used can be pretty random:

---

You are batman, a rogue living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a long steel dagger and a length of rope. You walk down the city street looking for somewhere to steal from. You look around and see a store that you think you could break into. You walk over to it and you see that the door is unlocked. You walk in and find a small collection of items worth taking.

> You check out the items.

You pick up the coins and put them in your pocket. You pick up the dagger and put it into your other pocket. You pick up the rope and look at it.

> You check what kind of rope it is.

You look at the strands of the rope. They are all different colours and textures. Then you notice something written on the side of the packet in small print.

> You read the packet.

The packet says, "Warning: This rope could kill you." You drop the rope.

> You kill the rope before it kills you.

You pick up the rope and drop it again so that you don't get killed. You try your luck again. You check out the dagger.

---

Take that, you rope. Definitely won't be killing me today!

:D.

Sometimes it even gets scary. Like that one time where it generated a sentence: "... she said, without turning around. You have a sinking feeling that something is wrong."

...

And then generated some lovecraftian monstrosity. This was supposed to be a nice story, so I kept pressing Retry, only to see even more disgusting and mind-bending horrors being produced. I finally gave up and torched the whole paragraph, just to be sure.

My favorite experience so far was as an assassin sneaking up on my target. I had followed them to an alleyway with no one else around. My target turned around and said something along the lines of "I know who you are. You are here to kill me, aren't you? Well you may as well do it, I no longer desire to be in this world."

Had to take a step away from my computer for a second there before continuing.

AI dungeon wrote an amazing Kafkaesque short story for me today based on just two tweets from some tech journos, just kept hitting enter:

https://twitter.com/EMostaque/status/1296411676749836288?s=2...

Did you sign up for the Dragon model?

Custom and fantasy so far. Fantasy was recommended even.

Those are genre choices for your story. You need to register an account and go to your settings and switch between the default Griffon model and the Dragon model. Both models offer the same choice of genres but with very different text generation quality.

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