[everforward]

I think any NPC with dialogue important to a goal (a quest, a tutorial, etc) is going to be hard to use generative AI for. It not only needs to be coherent with the story, but it needs to correctly include certain ideas. I.e. if the NPC gives a quest to go find some item at some location, it needs to say what the item is and where it is.

I think we're currently stuck in a local minima where AI isn't up to the task of making a coherent player-interactable world, but an incoherent or fragmented and non-interactable world isn't impressive enough (like No Man's Sky).

[reaperman]

Agreed for current systems. I’m sure we’ll get models in the future which will facilitate this but for now LLMs don’t really stay on task like a professional human would.

And even in AI Dungeon the AI plays so fast and loose that it breaks immersion. Like if I’m doing a space trading roleplay, it doesn’t consider things like making sure the product I’m buying selling meets a specific spec, and often a vendor will start offering to buy Product X from me while I’m negotiating purchasing Product X from them. This "type" of continuity problem happens constantly in AI dungeon.

We’re just not there yet, but I have confidence we’ll get there. I think it’s possible even with our current model/training paradigms but we aren’t using RLHF for game applications yet.

[everforward]

I totally think we'll get there, I just don't think we're there yet.

I really think the next step is a heavily AI-integrated version of D&D where the DM can serve as a "filter" for some of the more unhinged output (where appropriate; an intentionally incoherent goblin with some text-to-speech could be phenomenal).

I think that's about where we're at, and I'm expecting a wave of "AI-enhanced" D&D apps any day now. They probably already exist and I just haven't seen them. I would imagine there are still occasional issues with the AI utterly choking; I see it every once in a while on some of my more "fantasy" prompts where I get too specific and it just ignores what I asked.

[professoretc]

> I think any NPC with dialogue important to a goal (a quest, a tutorial, etc) is going to be hard to use generative AI for. It not only needs to be coherent with the story, but it needs to correctly include certain ideas. I.e. if the NPC gives a quest to go find some item at some location, it needs to say what the item is and where it is.

That was my experience when I was experimenting with using current LLMs to generate quests. You can of course ask for both a human-readable quest description and also a JSON object (according to some schema) describing the important quest elements, but the failure rate of the results was too high. Maybe 10% of quests would have some important mismatch between the description and the JSON; the description would mention an important object but it would be left out of the JSON, or the JSON would mention an important NPC but the description wouldn't, etc.

As a player, I think it would get frustrating quickly if 10% of quests were unsolvable, especially since, as a player, you don't know when a quest is unsolvable; maybe you just haven't found the item/NPC yet.

[everforward]

Yeah, 10% about jives with what I would expect under the assumption that the generated text needs to be non-deterministic (I.e. no careful prompt tuning and turning the temperature down to basically 0).

An interesting flip side I was just thinking about is the AI saying too much. NPCs keeping secrets until the player gets enough reputation or does a favor or whatever is pretty common. I wonder how good they are at keeping those secrets.

Prompt injection is one thing, and vaguely equivalent to cheat codes which is fine, but what is the likelihood that a player just asking for more info ends with the AI spitting out the secret without completing the quest? Will the AI know to unlock the next area or whatever, because there's no reason for the player to do that NPCs quest?

Should be neat stuff, I'm looking forward to how this all works together when the kinks get ironed out.

[IXCoach]

To some degree, yes. But, theres a low value to cost ratio in that exact UX.

Take a single character in the game, and enable that character the depth and nuance of a true experience between a Zen Master / Inquiry facilitator, powered by AI. IXCoach.com can do a phenomenal job powering this, so literally the only code needed for an MPV is the mod + character api.

Then, the cost benefit ratio is 400x, and in a day of coding you have taken a game that is mostly pure entertainment, and provided a means for depth, nuance and personal development that literally leads the market.

I pinged the executive producer of CD Project Red on this, it's viable.

https://www.linkedin.com/in/danhernberg/