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It's just one pretty trivial example, but many months ago I had to develop some backstory for my character in a D&D campaign. I had some character background an

It's just one pretty trivial example, but many months ago I had to develop some backstory for my character in a D&D campaign. I had some character background and some paragraphs I wrote to start off with, but I wasn't sure what direction to go exactly and was trying to come up with different ideas. I dropped what I had into a prompt built to setup a pseudo-text-adventure-game using a local WizardLM model running through KoboldCpp, then I ran through it interactively to the point of getting incoherent about 100 times in a row. This yielded some new ideas, some old ones, and overall an interesting distribution of outcomes; where 2 or 3 happened most commonly, and all 100 were basically variations on about 10. I won't argue that any of what the LLM came up with would stand on its own as particularly interesting - often quite the opposite - but it showed me examples of all the "obvious directions to go" as well as some other RPG cliches that I could either adopt or choose to avoid, and ultimately served as an excellent brainstorming assistant with interesting ideas and the ability to carry through and embellish them with enough detail to get a sense for either what works or what doesn't.

kristianp 1y ago
What is the process you went through interactively? Regenerate until something interesting comes out and the partially edit it? I'm curious about what you found works.
- dwringer 1y ago
  The KoboldCpp UI I was using had a pretty straightforward way of setting up a chatbot-style dialogue interface that would send the dialogue context so far with each message input, along with some supporting prompt infrastructure reminding the model of how it's supposed to reply based on that context. It also allowed editing the context directly; but I didn't often do that except to correct simple one-off inaccuracies, instead usually opting to restart from the beginning when things would go off-track. When the model would reply as multiple characters at once, or interleave narration with the dialogue, I'd usually just play along - most commonly it would decide for 2 or 3 steps to carry on the dialogue just hallucinating the things I would say. I did a lot of experimenting with different ways to frame the dialogue, from a Zork-like adventure game, to an instant messenger chat, to just paragraphs of prose with dialogue mixed in as if from a novel. I found all of these methods to have different strengths or weaknesses, but the model also tended to blur between them after a few messages so I'd just play along as far as I could each time.

kristianp 1y ago

What is the process you went through interactively? Regenerate until something interesting comes out and the partially edit it? I'm curious about what you found works.

dwringer 1y ago
The KoboldCpp UI I was using had a pretty straightforward way of setting up a chatbot-style dialogue interface that would send the dialogue context so far with each message input, along with some supporting prompt infrastructure reminding the model of how it's supposed to reply based on that context. It also allowed editing the context directly; but I didn't often do that except to correct simple one-off inaccuracies, instead usually opting to restart from the beginning when things would go off-track. When the model would reply as multiple characters at once, or interleave narration with the dialogue, I'd usually just play along - most commonly it would decide for 2 or 3 steps to carry on the dialogue just hallucinating the things I would say. I did a lot of experimenting with different ways to frame the dialogue, from a Zork-like adventure game, to an instant messenger chat, to just paragraphs of prose with dialogue mixed in as if from a novel. I found all of these methods to have different strengths or weaknesses, but the model also tended to blur between them after a few messages so I'd just play along as far as I could each time.