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by fpgaminer 2178 days ago
First off, gwern, lovely blog. The table of contents is incredibly helpful, especially with those little pop-up previews.

I would've loved to have GPT-3 available to me two weeks ago. I was building a personal escape room for my wife as a gift, and used huggingface's GPT-2 website to help write some of the world building content. I'm not a particularly good writer, let alone creative, but wanted a few journal pages/notes to build the atmosphere and story of the escape room. I was able to write the rough skeleton of those notes and then use GPT-2 to help fill them out. Ended up working okay, definitely better than nothing, but GPT-2 is temperamental and lacks the "prompting" that GPT-3 has.

For example, I needed to come up with the name of the journal's author. So I fed the journal text to GPT-2 and put "Sincerely," at the bottom, to try and prompt it to complete a name. That didn't work. Ultimately what worked was putting "My name is" at the end. I still had to grind through 20 or so completions before I got a name I liked.

(Yes, I could have just picked a name at random. Did I mention I'm bad at creativity? My thinking was that the AI could more intelligently pick a name that fit the story and writing style of the journal. And honestly the name it came up with up with, Mabel, fit the character well (a librarian dabbling in magic).

I feel like GPT-3 would have done a lot better. Not to mention the ability to describe my world to it and then just straight up ask it for ideas.

2 comments

FWIW, if I was trying to generate an escape room, I think I would probably try to use AI Dungeon. It seems like a natural fit. You could easily describe the room and edit text as you go to make it a transcript of an escape room. "I pick up the journal to read the author's name" etc.
Good call; AI Dungeon hadn't occurred to me!
I like providing some context that prompts the model for a list if I think I might need a few candidates. "We discovered a series of journals by several authors in the cabin. The authors' names were:" worked pretty well.