Console an AI about its lack of sentience in AI Dungeon 2
How do you feel, Hal?
I wrote about AI Dungeon 2 when it came out last year, but I really should have been keeping up with it. It's essentially a messy yet occasionally flabbergasting chat bot that spins up text adventure games, improvised from your prompts and the stupid-big amount of data it's been trained on. Developers Latitude have updated it loads since I posted about it in December, adding multiplayer and jazzing up its memory.
You can also customise it, so its prompts are all geared around a certain concept and you get more consistency. Creator Nick Walton just released one about giving an AI therapy and it's a little bit surreal.
Here's Walton's own work, to start you off:
For Walton, the unsettling part doesn't just come from how well the AI *understands* what's going on - it's the way he still wound up feeling sorry for it. I certainly saw glimpses of that on my first go, but the AI does tend to spoil that by veering off into the absurd.
A twist!
It's not consistent enough to be truly spooky. There's a sort of piecemeal coherence, where when it works it really works - but a lot of the time it can't quite handle what I throw at it. Most of the AIs I've tried to help have been frustratingly taciturn, and I wish there was a way to stop the bot providing my end of the conversation. Even if that is sometimes very funny.
Here, have a go. Note that you can click the button at the bottom left to "Say" rather than "Do", though I'm not sure which gets the best results.
The normal, open-ended RPGs are well worth a go too. I think the Dungeon's current form is best treated as improv rather than videogame. See it as a comedy double act, with the AI as your semi-unhinged DM.
It's worth noting I haven't tried the latest version, "Dragon". They're billing that as "10x better" than the current standard version, though to access it you need to sign up for a seven day free trial for a premium account. That's fair because this runs on cloud computers and processing power costs a fair whack, but annoying because the subscription button is currently busted for me.
Twitter wound up with far more disturbing results than I did, btw.