When AI hallucinations are a Good Thing
« previous post | next post »
Locally consistent hallucinations, anyhow… Zoë Hannah, "We pushed this ChatGPT game to the limits, but playing it the right way is more fun", Polygon 7/30/2024:
Apparently, we all like playing god, and we all like doing it badly. I bet none of us thought that removing the ladder from our Sims’ pools was such a universal experience until it became a pretty popular meme, and it’s no secret that lots of mods are centered on adding, uh, explicit elements to games. So, naturally, when I started playing around with DeepGame, Utile Labs’ ChatGPT-based choose-your-own-text-adventure game, I put my best sicko foot forward.
The game, which runs on ChatGPT and is available to anyone with an account, generates stories in a variety of genres. You start off with a command like “Play a romantasy story” or “Surprise me” and let the GPT do its thing — and despite my desire to break the game, I found it much more enjoyable when I took it just a little more seriously.
DeepGame’s first response almost always begins with scene-setting followed by introducing you, the protagonist, as well as a few side characters and a clearly stated challenge or adventure. Then the game asks, “What do you do next?”
Answering the question is titillating, to say the least. There are no prompts or choices to pick from — you can go in any direction at all, and the game keeps up, spitting out several paragraphs to move the story along after each of your responses.
What’s more, if you have the paid version of ChatGPT, you can use the command “visualize” to generate an image of the current scene using Dall-E. It’s a feature that’s easy to forget about if you treat the game like reading a novel — at least for me, since I typically create an image in my head as I read — but you shouldn’t ignore it, because whatever parameters the devs put on the image generator make for some truly delightful interpretations. It’s the more imperfect side of DeepGame, which is part of why it makes me so giddy — and you can always regenerate the image if it decides to throw in some random characters or elements that don’t match up with your narrative.
Adventure games were initially developed in the 1970s and early 1980s as text-based interactive stories, using text parsers to translate the player's commands into actions. As personal computers became more powerful with better graphics, the graphic adventure-game format became popular, initially by augmenting player's text commands with graphics, but soon moving towards point-and-click interfaces. Further computer advances led to adventure games with more immersive graphics using real-time or pre-rendered three-dimensional scenes or full-motion video taken from the first- or third-person perspective. Currently, a large number of adventure games are available as a combination of different genres with adventure elements.
Exchanging old-fashioned parsers and story-generation rules for an LLM is an obvious development, but this is the first example I've seen. The transcript for one of Ms. Hannah's DeepGame adventures is here.
In any case, this is an application where real-world facts are not relevant — though keeping track of the state of the fantasy world still matters, and forgetting what's happened, what's been found and what hasn't, etc., would definitely be bad.
Update — in real-world trip planning, an AI-based system "has no concept of time or space or what a human being might find interesting" (Natasha Bernal & Amanda Hoover, "We Asked AI to Take Us On a Tour of Our Cities. It Was Chaos", Wired 7/18/2024). Users will be more tolerant of chaos in DeepGame's in-adventure travel plans, but I wonder how much chaos they'll need to tolerate.
Haamu said,
August 2, 2024 @ 4:36 pm
I feel like this post deserves at least one comment, so I had the game generate the following. Rather than providing the prompt that I used, I think it's more entertaining to let you imagine it.
I don't know how to post images, or I'd include the visualization, which is quite nice. "Linguist_Sleuth" looks a little like the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.
If anyone wants to suggest a next action, I'll post the next chapter.