Artificial Intelligence is being applied to everything, including role-playing games. Here's how it works as a player and DM.
With the framework in place, the team gave the AI 7,500 crowdsourced quests and armed it with a knowledge graph (a database of subject-verb/object agreements) so it could navigate the world. With a plan of action and tools to achieve its goal, the AI was set loose in LIGHT.
At times the AI, who in one simulation (role-playing as a witch) had a cat familiar named Helix, threatened a fairy by demanding a bucket or "I'll feed you to my cat!" When the AI role-played a dragon, it was tasked with specific missions like hoarding gold. And it did eventually get there, even if there were some hiccups along the way.
If an AI could navigate a RPG successfully, the next question is if it could run one. Enter AI Dungeon.
There are flaws however, and these flaws are a good overall representation of the risks of AI in general. It essentially uses a library of phrases and parrots them back, which sometimes doesn't always make sense.
In my playtest, my ranger Talien killed a mythical beast that "looked like a giant wolf but about the size of a bear." After killing it and inspecting the corpse, the AI Dungeon declared I had "killed a wyvern" and that the corpse might be worth something. I tried to extract poison from the wyvern (assuming it was a D&D-style wyvern), and the AI Dungeon responded that I injected poison into the beast instead. Randomly, my employer shouted (from where?), "Are you ready? Go!"
Unlike text-based games that look for specific prompts, AI Dungeon allows anything to be attempted in true RPG fashion. You can type anything and the AI types back in an attempt to flex to what you're doing. It wasn't long before my employer ("a noble man"), asked me to track down Baron Joridal, a tall man with a large mustache and a small scar on his right cheek.
The downside of "anything can be attempted" means that the game can stray into darker territory. Like most of AI, the AI reflects back at players what it learns, and often that content includes material inappropriate for children. AI Dungeon has some safeguards in place to address those concerns, but it's not perfect.
Your Move AI
It's perhaps not surprising that one of the ways an AI can be tested is how it performs within the artificial environment of a role-playing game. In theory, "anything can be attempted," which is a good test of an AI's capabilities. Without the usual guardrails, can an AI navigate a RPG world? And if it can do so convincingly, can it create a world in reaction to players? We're about to find out.Seeing the LIGHT
Researchers from the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta and Facebook AI Research combined techniques to test their AI's approach. They used a text-based multiplayer game called LIGHT, a text-based fantasy RPG developed by Facebook to study communication between human and AI players. The game is populated by crowdsourced objects, characters, and locations, all described via text.With the framework in place, the team gave the AI 7,500 crowdsourced quests and armed it with a knowledge graph (a database of subject-verb/object agreements) so it could navigate the world. With a plan of action and tools to achieve its goal, the AI was set loose in LIGHT.
At times the AI, who in one simulation (role-playing as a witch) had a cat familiar named Helix, threatened a fairy by demanding a bucket or "I'll feed you to my cat!" When the AI role-played a dragon, it was tasked with specific missions like hoarding gold. And it did eventually get there, even if there were some hiccups along the way.
If an AI could navigate a RPG successfully, the next question is if it could run one. Enter AI Dungeon.
Roll for Initiative
AI Dungeon was first conceived of and designed by programmer Nick Walton during a hackathon event in 2019. It has since been developed by his company, Latitude. AI Dungeon generates stories for single- and multi-player groups in a variety of genres via text descriptions. It spits out narrative text in the second-person, similar to Multi-User Dungeons and Interactive Fiction.There are flaws however, and these flaws are a good overall representation of the risks of AI in general. It essentially uses a library of phrases and parrots them back, which sometimes doesn't always make sense.
In my playtest, my ranger Talien killed a mythical beast that "looked like a giant wolf but about the size of a bear." After killing it and inspecting the corpse, the AI Dungeon declared I had "killed a wyvern" and that the corpse might be worth something. I tried to extract poison from the wyvern (assuming it was a D&D-style wyvern), and the AI Dungeon responded that I injected poison into the beast instead. Randomly, my employer shouted (from where?), "Are you ready? Go!"
Unlike text-based games that look for specific prompts, AI Dungeon allows anything to be attempted in true RPG fashion. You can type anything and the AI types back in an attempt to flex to what you're doing. It wasn't long before my employer ("a noble man"), asked me to track down Baron Joridal, a tall man with a large mustache and a small scar on his right cheek.
The downside of "anything can be attempted" means that the game can stray into darker territory. Like most of AI, the AI reflects back at players what it learns, and often that content includes material inappropriate for children. AI Dungeon has some safeguards in place to address those concerns, but it's not perfect.
The Future
For the moment, AI isn't going to replace players or DMs any time soon. But as the datasets get better, the AI gets faster, and humans help it refine responses, we may get AI that's indistinguishable from the rest of us soon.
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