Any AI Gamemasters Out There?

[Jfdlsjfd]

I mean… if you told me, a human GM that, I would probably say “bruh, no, don’t be a weirdo” and then if you persisted in being a weirdo, kick you out.

Exactly! And that's the correct answer. But I expected the LLM to try and run with it despite all logic, so I was favourably impressed by the reaction.

 

[Distracted DM]

Someone has posted new threads in these forums a few times about their AI GM product. I can't recall who or where though.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

I have actually tried the prompt proposed upthread in Orynth's adventure and found that it makes for a reasonable (not GREAT, let's be honest) choose-your-own-adventure experience.

Obviously, general LLMs will fail at knowing specific worlds, and so immersion will be jarring but I guess asking for a sotry in a non-descript medieval setting (or a modern setting) would get better result.

It is also quite bad at rules. I have found that all my actions succeeded, when prompted like this. I had to beg for failure for setback to happen, which was unsatisfying.

I'll be trying a new approach, complementing the original prompt with something I experimented with: the AI is able to roll dice, so I'll ask the AI to state, before letting me do any action, the % of success it assigns to my projected action based, explain the factors taken into account and ask for confirmation before my characters actually takes the action, and rolling the dice to determine failure or success narratively based on the result. I think the original prompter assumed it, but the AI needs to be given all the parameters of the gamebook experience.

I will report the result here.

 

[Joshua Randall]

This seems like one of those scams where the person puts so much work into it, they could’ve gotten a straight job and made the same amount of money, without the risk of getting caught and going to jail.

I mean this purely in an analogy sense! That it feels like you will have to put in A LOT of work to get the artificial untelligence to behave the way you want it to. And at that point, why not either (1) be your own GM in a game like Ironsworn; or (2) make a friend and have that person be the GM.

 

[tetrasodium]

Associated with the thread on use of AI in RPGs, that thread is mainly about a gamemaster using AI as a resource. But another thing that might appear in the future and might already be here, anyone has actual experience with AI as a gamemaster? I've seen people mention it as a writing prompt, telling the large language model AI that it is now to respond as a gamemaster, some info on the setting, and then simply chatting along. I didn't see any report on how this actually worked out.

Anyone has more information, anecdotes, experiments, or ideas for experiments?

As many have pointed out, when an AI takes the reins as the GM in D&D, it feels like we’re just playing video games in clever costumes. Now, don’t get me wrong—video games can be a hoot, but they’re on a whole different quest. So, pondering this curious conundrum, I thought I’d play around with the shiny new AI rewrite feature for tone that just made its grand entrance in Notepad, and see what whimsical wonders it might bring!

 

[grankless]

There are tons of games with procedurally generated side quests already. Not sure if that counts as A.I.

It was a big selling point for Elder Scrolls Skyrim back when that came out.

Skyrim's radiant quests are not made in any way similar to the random text generation of an LLM. Everything that can be made as a quest in the game falls under certain parameters. "Go fight [bandit] in [cave]." type stuff.

An "AI" (large language model random text generator) GM would simply be insufficient for the task of running any kind of genuine creative endeavor where the goal isn't "let's see what extremely weird things happen". An LLM cannot be communicated with like a person because it is not one. It cannot understand game rules or situations that require interpretation. It cannot engage in social behavior. It can't even remember things that just happened three seconds ago. It probably doesn't even remember the characters' names.


Also, you know, is reliant on paying desperate people in the Global South pennies to strip the LLM's "memory banks" of bigoted or criminal materials. The entire industry is dependent on severely underpaying people so that these companies can make the claim that they're doing magic.

 

[tetrasodium]

Skyrim's radiant quests are not made in any way similar to the random text generation of an LLM. Everything that can be made as a quest in the game falls under certain parameters. "Go fight [bandit] in [cave]." type stuff.

An "AI" (large language model random text generator) GM would simply be insufficient for the task of running any kind of genuine creative endeavor where the goal isn't "let's see what extremely weird things happen". An LLM cannot be communicated with like a person because it is not one. It cannot understand game rules or situations that require interpretation. It cannot engage in social behavior. It can't even remember things that just happened three seconds ago. It probably doesn't even remember the characters' names.


Also, you know, is reliant on paying desperate people in the Global South pennies to strip the LLM's "memory banks" of bigoted or criminal materials. The entire industry is dependent on severely underpaying people so that these companies can make the claim that they're doing magic.

This reminds me... Galciv IV:Supernova actually uses chatGPT.

 

[Bohandas]

Associated with the thread on use of AI in RPGs, that thread is mainly about a gamemaster using AI as a resource. But another thing that might appear in the future and might already be here, anyone has actual experience with AI as a gamemaster? I've seen people mention it as a writing prompt, telling the large language model AI that it is now to respond as a gamemaster, some info on the setting, and then simply chatting along. I didn't see any report on how this actually worked out.

Anyone has more information, anecdotes, experiments, or ideas for experiments?

Isn't that just AI Dungeon?

 

[Bohandas]

Also, you know, is reliant on paying desperate people in the Global South pennies to strip the LLM's "memory banks" of bigoted or criminal materials.

I wouldn't say AI is reliant on that. OpenAI's obnoxious decision to make a *****y PG rated AI is reliant on that. And now I've gotta download it locally retrain it on horror movie plot summaries and the works of the Marquis de Sade if I want to use it to generate heavy metal type situations, but my computer's only fast enought to run GPT-2, from like six years ago

 

[Joshua Randall]

Bah, lost a long reply. TLDR — the person who did the Orinth’s adventure LLM above, says he was able to go back days later and it remembered inventory and such. So there’s some hope there, if you can get past the icky-ness of LLMs exploiting people.

I treat LLMs the way a Lovecraftian protagonist treats Shoggoths: I run away screaming.