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Role-playing with AI will be a powerful tool for writers and educators
- ongytenes 3y agoQuestion is... would using an AI as a muse lead to more creativity or dulling a personal creativity? It is one thing where people would hang out and spitball ideas that led to inspiration. But I wonder if people in the future will become too dependent on AI muses. Don't forget how we now have generations of math illiterates since the dawning of calculators.
- vyrotek 3y agoWe're working on AI role-playing for sales training and coaching. But as we've been validating it we've been learning about a lot of other industries that could use something similar. https://quick.live https://quick.live
- tudorw 3y ago[flagged]
- Loughla 3y agoThe author sort of hints at this in a roundabout way, but the problem for education - until the systems stop lying about things they don't actually know, or using "facts" that are wildly inaccurate or out-of-date, they are not reputable/reliable enough to use at all. Right now it's like we're in 2001-2005 for wikipedia. It's probably a good tool for basic, basic, basic beginnings of your work in the classroom, but you're going to get things wrong in surprising ways if you use it without verifying.
- bannedbybros 3y ago[dead]
- pixl97 3y agoSchoolbooks for example have wildly out of date facts, or are brief to the point of inaccuracy. Much less watching any history channel show as those tend to suck badly. One of the things AI's commonly allow is for people to ask questions without fear of judgement. I've not seen one scowl and call a kid an idiot yet (though I'm sure someone has a jailbreak for that). Having an AI trained to take these kids off the wall (and often based on historical inaccuracies) questions would be a really interesting tool. Just not the only tool, and not really one that should be fully authoritative in itself.
- lobsterthief 3y agoRight, but when a schoolbook-writer doesn’t know something, they don’t just make up an outrageous lie. Not saying LLMs don’t have a place in education, but they have a long way to go.
- pixl97 3y agoFeynman would have disagreed with you https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html https://www.rangevoting.org/FeynTexts.html >The reason was that the books were so lousy. They were false. They were hurried. They would try to be rigorous, but they would use examples (like automobiles in the street for "sets") which were almost OK, but in which there were always some subtleties. The definitions weren't accurate. Everything was a little bit ambiguous – they weren't smart enough to understand what was meant by "rigor." They were faking it. They were teaching something they didn't understand, and which was, in fact, useless, at that time, for the child.
- dinvlad 3y agoGonna adopt this paragraph for describing LLMs
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- pavel_lishin 3y agoAI as a tool to kickstart your own imagination is fine; but despite the author's claims that he's not excited about AI-as-author, it seems like they're mostly just reading fan-fiction and fan-art created by an AI. Even the old timey doctor sections, the author immediately admits are mostly factually wrong. What good does that do?
- benbreen 3y agoNot factually wrong at all - the dosages, ingredients, diagnosis and even the language are all strikingly accurate. Naturally, the "fake" 1680s doctor didn't write the same prescription as the real one (Sydenham). But a different real life doctor would've disagreed with Sydenham, too. In other words, if you had 100 physicians in the 1680s write out a prescription for hysteria and "hypochondriacal passion," this would be (IMO) indistinguishable from the real ones. What's different is that this is interactive, so you can change elements at will. Again, this isn't reflective of historical fact. It also isn't simply fan fiction. This text isn't an end point, but a starting point for jumpstarting your own thinking about the affordances of a past world. In other words, I think this is a new method for thinking creatively about history -- one among many that already existed, like historical fiction, historical re-enactment, various forms of experiential learning like debates and roleplaying, etc. But it's cool that there's a new one!
- Racing0461 3y agoAnd video game creators. True open world games with infinite choices that affect things down the line.
- duskwuff 3y agoDefinitely not -- at least, not yet. Current generation language models are spectacularly bad in this application. It's very difficult to get them to role-play a character in a universe which differs substantially from the real world (since that's where all their training data came from), and they're overly credulous when responding to player input. As a result, they're likely to rapidly go "off the rails" when interacting with players -- they're likely to act unaware of details about the world they're in, to fabricate details about that world or mix in details from other fantasy universes or the real world, or to allow the player to introduce incongruous elements without being challenged.
- Racing0461 3y agoYeah, i mean't infinite figuratively. LLMs should at least enable some middle ground between selecting between A,B,C,D and anything goes.
- tstrimple 3y agoMaybe not for live interaction with a player, but for seeding otherwise procedurally generated content absolutely. I look at what a game like Dwarf Fortress does with their procedurally generated world history and narrative and see so many ways it could be enhanced with an LLM. And this would only be during world generation or potentially for major world events, but not in a real-time user triggered response.
- black_13 3y ago[dead]
- ramboldio 3y agoThis is a cool project that implements role-playing AI: https://github.com/joonspk-research/generative_agents https://github.com/joonspk-research/generative_agents
- aaronscott 3y agoThis is amazing, thanks for sharing it! I’ve been thinking about building something along these lines, so it’s great to see a working model.
- tetris11 3y agoAnother one (inspired by the above) that doesn't rely on OpenAI servers: https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town https://github.com/a16z-infra/ai-town
- airstrike 3y ago> Setting Up the Environment > To set up your environment, you will need to generate a utils.py file that contains your OpenAI API key and download the necessary packages. > Step 1. Generate Utils File > In the reverie/backend_server folder (where reverie.py is located), create a new file titled utils.py and copy and paste the content below into the file: # Copy and paste your OpenAI API Key openai_api_key = "<Your OpenAI API>" I guess it still relies on OpenAI
- tetris11 3y agoRight, sorry I forgot to add you can override the url with `OPENAI_API_BASE` and point it to a text-generation-ui OpenAI API[0] compliant model. 0: https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/discussions/1446 https://github.com/oobabooga/text-generation-webui/discussio...
- xena 3y agoHonestly as a writer I agree that it could be a useful tool, but it would require a lot of UX and UI work to make it truly usable. I don't know if it's worth the effort with the technology as it is. Maybe in 2 months it will be.
- yborg 3y agoAt some point the Danielle Steels of the world will use models trained on their body of work to generate new novels from whole cloth to pump out content with little effort. The only constraint would be not releasing them too quickly for human-written books.
- aprilthird2021 3y agoI don't think this will be a viable option. After the first 4-5 of books created like that they'll get stale. The AI won't get any new training data (as Ms. Steel is presumably not writing a book while the AI writes a book for her), and even if the prompts vary, the outputs will feel more similar to each other than an average author's latest 4-5 books
- antifa 3y agoI've tried a few things in ChatGPT, it's going to be a real uphill battle to get a story >1,000 words that's not bizarrely generic. What you can get now is more like madlibs 2.0 than actual story generation.
- 0xDEADFED5 3y agoI dunno man, I've seen some uncensored LLMs come up with some pretty wild shit. This timeline is about to get a lot weirder.
- aprilthird2021 3y agoBut that wild stuff will become bland after the gold rush I think. You still need to do something different with the same AI that all the other artists / authors have.
- haolez 3y agoI've been a little disappointed with role playing with ChatGPT 4. The AI starts out really close to the behavior that you would expect for the proposed role, but as the conversation gets longer, it starts to forget the role and becomes more generic, like you'd expect normal ChatGPT to be. I hope this is an implementation detail and that the technology can, in the future, maintain the role playing across really long conversations.
- atemerev 3y agoLook at MemGPT
- benbreen 3y agoForgetting context is a problem, for sure. One thing I've found that works fairly well is to include a request for a "status bar" in your prompt. I.e. you ask it to remind itself with each response 1) who it is pretending to be 2) what the date is 3) what the setting is 4) what is in their NPCs "inventory" (which it intuitively understands because LLMs seem to have a natural affinity with MUDs). You can even have it track its mood and variables like weather. As the context windows of Claude/GPT-4 etc increase, I think this will be less of an issue, but for now it's a pretty effective workaround. Here's an example of the prompts I'm using (from an activity I just did with my world history class): https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sLRsUVJ_KSPtjrO83ko2MSFfeNlOnghbuw3AFxzTFDY https://docs.google.com/document/d/1sLRsUVJ_KSPtjrO83ko2MSFf... And my writeup of an earlier version: https://resobscura.substack.com/p/simulating-history-with-chatgpt https://resobscura.substack.com/p/simulating-history-with-ch...
- jstarfish 3y agoA useful 1a for ChatGPT specifically is BabyAGI-style "what their current/next objective is." There are vector database solutions that address the forgetting of context. Oobabooga has superbooga (chromadb), SillyTavern requires the headache of the Extras service but will let you use chromadb, Google or OpenAI. Koboldcpp doesn't do vectorization, but does have a clunky autogenerate-summary feature that injects a summary of events so far into the prompt.
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- wolverine876 3y agoAs the pendulum has shifted way (way) over to art as commerce, as a product, then AIs are plausibly useful. Why not make the 'product' more efficiently and cheaply. But art for me is self-expression; I'm encountering another human being or I'm expressing myself. AI creating that art (really the only "art" IMHO) is a useful as an AI writing memoirs or a love letter or a condolence note. In general perception, art always has been some mix of those two and people seem to unconsciously conflate them, to slip from one to the other. If AI - plus the current socio-political madness of dismissing all humanities, all compassion, and all humans as anything but economic devices - effectively wipes out art, what have we wrought? What has the IT revolution, what has Silicon Valley wrought? Look at the world we are creating. And for what? So a few people can make lots of money?
- aprilthird2021 3y agoAI generation is like any tool. Once it's available to everyone, you have to do something unique with it to have something worth grabbing people's attention. If AI can illustrate and flesh out the plot of a comic book on a simple prompt, then we'll quickly get bored of those comic books. When someone takes the energy and time to create a unique plot, setting, rich characters, timely themes, etc. and then feeds that to the AI, the result will be interesting to people. People who put less effort in, will get bland, unsellable output out of an AI
- pjfin 3y agoI’m actually building a role play training tool at the moment - https://Solidroad.com https://Solidroad.com . The AI plays the part of a fake customer so sales and support reps can practice before talking to real customers. We’ve built a pretty low latency voice to voice conversation simulator. It helps people build confidence on the phone etc. and we’ve found that accuracy isn’t as important in this context (ie. It’s ok if the AI says something weird every once in a while) as long as the results are by and large believable. Have a demo in our website where you can try and sell a smart phone to Michael Scott from the office.
- pjfin 3y agoDemo here: https://app.solidroad.com/public/office https://app.solidroad.com/public/office
- crooked-v 3y ago> It’s ok if the AI says something weird every once in a while If anything, I think having the occasional 'complete weirdo' interaction would be good training for the real world. Most people never get to practice how to handle the truly strange cases before the first time they have to deal with a customer who wants to return a case of half-eaten chocolate bars.
- happytiger 3y agoThis is merely another way in which AI will be cast as a co-creator. Especially given the limitations in copyright law in the US I think many early systems will operate like this, just to secure the output as intellectual property…
- 66yatman 3y agoThat has been a thing long before now.
- spiritplumber 3y agoCan confirm, here's a 600 page story written with it starting in 2015. https://archiveofourown.org/works/46518058/chapters/117135472 https://archiveofourown.org/works/46518058/chapters/11713547...
- jtap 3y agoI've tried something similar with a little side project, https://catchingkillers.com https://catchingkillers.com. The witnesses, chatgpt chat bots, wouldn't have much of an attention span and start making things up. I think this added to the fun of the game. You had to question each witness to get verification on what another chat bot said.
- mark_l_watson 3y agoWhen I write now, I will sometimes load a page or two into a LLM and ask for an ‘opinion’, and also suggestions for more sub-topics. This is sort-of like bouncing ideas off a human collaborator but also very different. More to the point of this article, I have a few test prompts that define a bizarre remote planet and culture and ask for a story to be written using this context as a kick-off point. GPT-4 and Claude 2 generally do a good job of ‘creatively’ generating a story. Some smaller LLMs that I run locally on a 32G Mac Mini to a poor job and others are OK. Related: when using smaller local LLMs, I find it important to have many models installed and keep notes on which smaller models are good or bad at specific tasks.
- leeeeeepw 3y agoNetwrck. Com it's crazy good AI and image generation right now. If you say "appears" it will generate art that's like midjourney level it's crazy. But the art is described by the AI first.