[4dahalibut]

I know this is not directly relevant to this article, but I have a story about AI Dungeon.

I loaded it up with my (female) roommate a few months ago during the dark of the pandemic, and long story short, what ended up happening was this.

Our character had a AI man approach the door of their house with magic "love potion" berries. We tried to get our character to not eat the berries, but the AI "tricked us" into eating them. Then, no matter what choice we made, we had no way out. The AI forced us into a bedroom and raped our character.

We closed the laptop and haven't brought this up again.

[causality0]

The dichotomy of sex and violence in tabletop roleplaying is always fascinating. If Steve the Rogue breaks into a house, slaughters an entire family, and then makes lawn decorations with their entrails, his tablemates will probably be exasperated with him. If Steve the Rogue breaks into a house and rapes one of the NPCs, he's probably getting ejected from the game and most likely the friend group.

[apocolyps6]

The difference is that people (usually implicitly, sometimes explicitly) consent to some topics and not others. Most tabletop roleplaying groups have an understanding about what topics and behavior are appropriate with that group. There are also more formal tools/mechanics to help groups agree on what sort of stuff is too unpleasant to include in the game.

Most tabletop roleplaying games have mechanics about killing things but no mechanics about sexual violence, so that tends to set expectations too.

[fpgaminer]

Doesn't seem that fascinating to me. In real life, one's likelihood of being brutally murdered isn't that high. But the likelihood of being R-worded is uncomfortably high. Hence people's aversion to the subject. And it's a form of torture. I wouldn't be terribly happy playing a session where Steve the Rogue is going around torturing an entire family.

[Teever]

Why did you you use the term 'R-word' for the word 'rape but not 'T-word' for 'torture' or 'M-word' for 'murder'?

[LordDragonfang]

The glib response is that if you're trying to avoid triggering someone, I'd wager more people reading it have been raped than have been murdered.

[jhgb]

> if you're trying to avoid triggering someone...

...then you probably won't succeed anyway, as triggers tend to be random associations.

[yeahr4579]

> I'd wager more people reading it have been raped than have been murdered.

Source?

[happysadpanda2]

Ummm, murdered (dead) people probably can't read anymore, thus wouldn't be triggered?

And a murder-victim-to-be still probably wouldn't be triggered, since s/he hasn't "experienced" it yet.

That's how I interpreted the comment anyway :)

[lilSebastian]

Are you suggesting these people are reading from beyond the grave?

[Barrin92]

That dichotomy exists in American society broadly. I remember an episode of Hannibal had to cover the butts of two dismembered corpses up with blood as to avoid a higher age rating for nudity

[thih9]

People don't mind role playing violence with friends but they don't want to role play sex with friends; I don't see this as unusual.

Sometimes players justify their actions with "but that's what my character would do"; there is a popular rpg.stackexchange post about it: https://rpg.stackexchange.com/questions/37103/what-is-my-guy... .

[ipaddr]

It is interesting. I've played bad online games where the instant you generate someone kills you. I've played poker games where the board always freezes so you lose. The rape thing feels like the same thing. Bad game play and cheating.

I think you expect fighting but rarely sex in a game.

[nonbirithm]

My thought is that there are many rape survivors, but there are no murder survivors.

But then again, what about the second-order effects on friends and family as a result of either sexual abuse or violence? Maybe the trauma belonging to the survivors themselves simply overpowers the rest (or not). What about people who survive murder attempts? Maybe being taken advantage of and treated as powerless applies more to sexual than physical trauma, since there are many cases where physical violence is the result of both sides retaliating in equal measure, or sometimes honorably, like for sport. I'm not sure.

[wolverine876]

It's sometimes philosophically interesting to try to define them explicitly, but let's start from an honest basis: the differences are obvious.

Also, I don't agree with the example: Steve wouldn't be invited back after either act. YMMV.

[causality0]

Are they obvious? From a logical standpoint, it's quite odd that actual murder is considered a worse crime than actual rape, but fantasy murder is much less objectionable than fantasy rape. It extends beyond roleplaying with other people. Fantasy murder is a feature of most videogames, but fantasy rape is limited to low-budget niche titles not offered on most digital or physical storefronts. I'd be interested in the psychology behind that. Could it perhaps be related to a perceived permanence? That is, maybe resetting the game more effectively un-murders the characters than it would un-rape one? Maybe it's relatability. Most of us have fantasized unseriously about murdering someone, be it in traffic or at work, but fewer of us regularly fantasize about raping someone. Other immoral acts such as animal abuse have some of the same taint as virtual rape and are similarly rare in the daily fantasies of the average person.

[asdfasgasdgasdg]

I think it's really a lot simpler. Most fantasy RPGs have combat and death simply because there is a conflict where there is no mediating authority. This is kind of central to the genre. So, "murdering" NPCs is a very small diagonal step from killing them in combat. It does not stand out.

Rape, on other hand, could hardly serve any acceptable in-game purpose (or real life purpose for that matter). Its purpose is to terrorize and psychologically maim -- something you never need to do to an NPC. An ally who rapes someone in-game is not furthering the quest, and moreover is doing something that is well outside the bounds of typical PC behavior.

[Wowfunhappy]

In books, I really struggle to get through scenes where people are tortured and sometimes have to abandon stories because of it, whereas I have very little trouble with characters dying. I don’t think this is unusual.

[PeterisP]

It seems weird but plausible. I mean, there has been lots of NSFW writing that involve nonconsensual relations; this is part of the AI Dungeon training data, probably intentionally, because sex sells; but I believe that there are almost no stories about sexual assult starting that don't eventually result in a description of sexual assault or at least descriptions of sex as such. If the vast majority of stories about such topic contain descriptions of "ways out" failing instead of succeeding, then prompting the system with a way out would result in a response of how that attempt failed, ergo the "no way out" issue because of path dependence after early random choices.

Like, imagine that you've stumbled on a weird internet story where in the first page someone is approached with magic "love potion" berries but refuses to eat them. That is a solid indicator of what genre the story is. If you had to bet lots of money, what's the probability that the second page will contain something horrific versus the probability that the "seduction" just fizzles out and becomes irrelevant? If you see a movie where the first scene involves a creepy character making a pass, wouldn't you be fairly certain that an escalation of that will follow later? It's like Chekov's gun, once it's there, it almost certainly means that the story is about that - perhaps it could be turned into a "just revenge" story by inserting descriptions of some heroic rescuer or references to how the protagonist expected this to happen in order to punish the assaulter, because stories like that have been written, but a "mediocre" outcome where eventually nothing dramatic happens and the protagonist just gets out won't be generated, because that doesn't get written about, the training data says that such a result is very unlikely. It's obviously a problem, but since it's a "honest probability" based on tropes we see in actual literature, it's going to be hard to fix; the system expects escalation and drama (because all the training stories had that), so you can choose the direction of that escalation, but it won't allow you to have a "non-story" where the suggested drama results in nothing dramatic.

[thewakalix]

That reminds me of how (n=1) it's easier to change an unpleasant dream by actively taking it in another direction, rather than just willing it to stop.

(And the predictive processing theory of cognition, and how that's surface-level-related to the original topic of GPT-3...)

[Arnavion]

I heard once they got more aggressive with their monetization tiers, they nerfed the free tier to the extent that it basically decides on some story path and ignores anything you say to try to change it.

It's certainly the impression I got from watching some youtubers playing it before and after the monetization change.

[freeflight]

I noticed once the AI made up its mind about where the plot is supposed to go, there is no real way to change it.

Even in a "you are flying trough space, there is a radio signal coming from a planet" setting there is no way to just ignore the signal and keep flying: The AI decided that signal is the plot, and you gonna investigate it whether you want to or not.

[gonehome]

I was able to change it pretty dramatically when I played with it.

Opening a time machine portal from whatever medieval kingdom I was in to teleport to San Francisco and going to the Open AI office, running into Eliezer Yudkowsky and interviewing Sam Altman about Open AI, etc.

It was pretty easy to shift gears - you could force actions.

"Ask the receptionist if Sam is in"

"She says he is not"

I input: "Sam comes out of his office and walks down the hall"

"Look at the receptionist and say, he's right there."

"She stares at you blankly"

You could input story and then use the story lines that you had written in to advance things.

I eventually got tired with it because it was too free form so there wasn't much to it beyond messing around.

[Tronno]

I nuked the planet and cracked open a bottle of champagne. Mission accomplished. The AI didn't seem to mind.