Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zug_zug | Hacker News Reader

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Played a solo-campgain with GPT4 for 1-2 hours yesterday, summary:

- Created character sheet for me, at desired level with spells and abilities

- Was able to add a cat to the game upon request

- Took hints.

- Was an outstanding writer, far better than any DM in terms of sensory descriptions and articulation

- Had to ask it to only tell 5 paragraphs at a time

- Performed combat rolls and math, all apparently correctly for a long while

- The first 20 rolls were all greater than 10, asked it give more random rolls and it seemingly did for a while

- Added elements on the fly consistently without losing track mostly

- Used puzzles and challenges and created a sense of danger. Adapted well on the fly to unusual character behavior (guessing an unreasonable answer for a puzzle solution).

- After a few hours it started confusing classes in my party (I think there is some context window). It forgot I had agonizing blast after a few hours.

- Sometimes fudged distances

Overall for a DM with infinite patience and an entirely customizable campaign on the fly with no need to plan/recover it seems promising at first. But some sort of prompt engineering will eventually prove necessary i think.

Also, “asked it give more random rolls and it seemingly did for a while” seems a problem area to me, not as much for that “for a while” as for the fact that it complied. What happens when you ask it to give you more favorable rolls or to let you kill a monster with your bare hands?

This is a case where Asimov’s laws of robotics would have to be bent a bit. If you ask an AI to let you win a single-player game, should it comply, or argue that letting you win will harm you?

Human DMs will frequently respond to a player's mood, and will fudge rolls to be more (or less) favorable to the player if they feel that players aren't having fun. The only real difference here is that GPT couldn't respond to the mood, and had to be told to fudge the rolls.

Nobody writes about a perfectly average dnd session, so its training data probably has less than usual “average” rolls, which might result in it not understanding that dnd can be average sometimes.

Had to be told NOT to fudge the rolls, right? If it seemed like the rolls were skewed in the first place?

> Asimov’s laws of robotics

This comes up every time AI is mentioned and I feel like people are drawing entirely the wrong conclusion from Asimov. First and foremost he designed his laws so conflict was inevitable. The laws are designed to produce interesting fiction, not to be a template to follow in real life. They are as much a manual as "1984" is, that is - not at all. Asimov's laws should have no bearing on AI in reality except to inform people to do something different.

So broadly I am agreeing with you - AI should follow laws that are more rich than Asimov's made up universe. The part that irks me is that people even consider using them at all. It's fiction, not reality. The consequences of an action in a person's imagination rarely match the consequences in reality. The entirety of science is an effort to produce word-based imaginary systems and processes, whose outcomes match the outcomes in reality. You cannot just substitute one man's imagination for the missing science of AI reasoning.

>This is a case where Asimov’s laws of robotics would have to be bent a bit. If you ask an AI to let you win a single-player game, should it comply, or argue that letting you win will harm you?

Game AI (single player in particular) is all about providing the player with openings and ways to win and feel powerful without them realising that's what is happening... all the way from NPCs coordinating with one another (and barks to make it clear what they are planning so they can be ambushed or stopped), to "Director AIs" that work on rules of tension and release to make sure the player's having the most fun and not being overloaded.

I wonder if there's something that you can do as you're nearing the end of the context window to summarize the "state" of the world so far and put it into context so that the model always has context on the most important details. I'd imagine that you'd lose some of the minor stuff by compressing context this way, but, hey, humans forget minor details too.

1) is there a sample transcript? YOu say OUTSTANDING WRITER and I think GRR Martin.

2) an interesting runaround copyright. GPT4 probably has every "d20" product and others ingested for processing and use.

Look people, here's the ultimate test: write Winds of Winter and Dream of Spring for us.

Between all the reddit /r/asoiaf and fantheories plus all the other works of fantasy, it should be able to do some facsimile.

Honestly GRR should be cranking out a chapter or two a day with GPT4 help.

There should be entire eras filled in by GRR with edited GPT4 output.

> YOu say OUTSTANDING WRITER and I think GRR Martin.

Wow. G.R.R. Martin, much like Stephan King, writes to the least common denominator, which is about a 5th or 6th grade reading level. I challenge you to find a complex sentence in either of their catalogs, which is not to say their ideas are bad, because they're not. But their writing is absolute shit. Shakespeare, Dickens, Hemingway, Tolstoy, Joyce, and Camus are all outstanding writers, while the only thing that made Martin's writing bearable is H.B.O.

> Look people, here's the ultimate test: write Winds of Winter and Dream of Spring for us.

GPT-6 or 7? That would be great.

At some point, each of us can have our own ending to the series, with as many additional books as we want.

Then all recreated as a photorealistic VR show. Viewed from the perspective of the respective point-of-view character of each chapter.

Then a complete role playing version where the entire plot is contingent on our own choices, ... all the Martin and HBO's Westeros world building paying off. Every time you die, you are dropped into another interesting character in the vicinity of one of the latest fulcrums of the Westerosy future.

Massively multi-player, in real time.

This would have seemed speculative fantasy (hah!) not so long ago. But now perhaps, inevitable in the not-too distant future.

The dystopia of having no work, but being endlessly entertained, has never looked so good.

The way I would build a DM with GPT4 is with a few external tools: the character sheets, random dice, and perhaps other things should be available on the side, and fed to the chatbot when needed. Same for a summary of the campaign, so that previous events are not forgotten.

It might be possible to 'extend' the context window by summarising important information from time to time, to refresh it's memory.

Did it feel fun?

Definitely did for me, but I also wonder if I learned the limitations/weaknesses of the AI too much that it would break the immersion.

It's dizzying to think about how immersive these things will become after the next however-many iterations that are foreseeable.

When they understand and can manipulate psychological "archetypes" (or whatever they find in the structure of our minds) and we let them make our kids' cartoons and games...

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