3 ms·

Having had an LLM tell me a story, my answer would be that this is a dumb idea. LLMs have no concept of realistic cause and effect.

ninetyninenine 2y ago
Nah I think not considering this idea at all is the extremely dumb and brain dead opinion. LLMs can tell stories. Realistic causes and effects aren’t even consistent in human stories. A good story isn’t 100 percent dependent on this. The LLM walks the line between hallucinating too much and sometimes not. Either way you can pretty much guarantee that almost all stories made in games now are already mostly written by an LLM. It’s just the writing is edited and curated by a human.
- woolion 2y ago
  I've done a short LLM-powered VN, and LLM actions were restricted to local interactions only because of how weak it is at making up the story. It's great at removing the parser-based interactions, but I think that's it. There's a second technical problem that such stories are represented by a form of state-machine and that you would need to recompile it on the fly, making many checks very difficult (you would need to be able to check reachability on the fly, chunk transitions, etc). I think it would take years to get to the level of some of the great IF games with an LLM, and not just a cool PoC.
- usrusr 2y ago
  As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and then use the results of that for prompting an LLM. But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice" in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade". If I'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be something more meaningful than just a game state. But to those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually be the holy grail of game building.

ninetyninenine 2y ago

Nah I think not considering this idea at all is the extremely dumb and brain dead opinion. LLMs can tell stories. Realistic causes and effects aren’t even consistent in human stories. A good story isn’t 100 percent dependent on this. The LLM walks the line between hallucinating too much and sometimes not. Either way you can pretty much guarantee that almost all stories made in games now are already mostly written by an LLM. It’s just the writing is edited and curated by a human.

woolion 2y ago
I've done a short LLM-powered VN, and LLM actions were restricted to local interactions only because of how weak it is at making up the story. It's great at removing the parser-based interactions, but I think that's it. There's a second technical problem that such stories are represented by a form of state-machine and that you would need to recompile it on the fly, making many checks very difficult (you would need to be able to check reachability on the fly, chunk transitions, etc). I think it would take years to get to the level of some of the great IF games with an LLM, and not just a cool PoC.
usrusr 2y ago
As a grumpy old symbolic ai hand I do wonder if it was possible to build a (perhaps crude) ontology based simulation with consistency, cause and effect and so on and then use the results of that for prompting an LLM. But as a consumer, I lean far to the side of "give me a handcrafted tunnel experience with the illusion of choice" in the divide between consequences yes or no. I don't think I'd actually want this "simulation behind an LLM facade". If I'm in the mood for reading (or for listening to voice actors reading to me), I'd rather have it be something more meaningful than just a game state. But to those on the other end of the spectrum, this might actually be the holy grail of game building.