Please Play My Short Games About ... Anything? (An AI Experiment)

Any storyline where I get to visit Victorian London and meet Charles Dickens is always fun. On the other hand I tried a story where my character was shrunk in the C setting and it kept forgetting what size I was. :sweat_smile:

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Agreed most inconsistency i meet also in c setting

What’s the difference between all three methods?

If we use one of the methods more than once would you want us to do the survey again or do you only want to hear from people one time so you can get a lot of different people’s experiences using it?

@StarFoxed

I did read that I was just wondering which one was which that was all.

@Max_Jones One of them uses a tiny bit of Real AI itself, and the other two are basically controls, but still use ChatGPT from what @kgold says in the original post which I have to ask
@kgold have you also looked at dreamilyai? I’ve messed around with it and seen people create write stories using that and it sometimes makes some interesting things

Also my favorite prompt now so far is Mustachioed Rattlesnakes, I just went on a western adventure for gold and jewels and saved the leader of the mustachioed rattlesnakes the Great Mustachio from his rival Bandit Badgers this was in story C

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I’ll explain the difference between methods after I have enough survey results. I don’t want to bias people based on what they think should theoretically be the best approach. It’s kind of a subtle effect I hope to capture; most of the story variation is coming from sources besides the experimental manipulation. I am probably screwed due to overall variance being too high, making it hard to see an effect. But this is the idea I have.

The surveys are meant to be taken just once per condition, and they should be set up so you can’t actually fill them out multiple times with the same login. If you already did all three conditions and just want to help more, comments that make the whole thing sound like fun are great. :slight_smile:

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Oh gotcha! And can confirm on mobile it does give an error about only one submission

I do like giving it ridiculous prompts just see what it tries to make sense of lol

I have not looked at dreamilyai, but I will.

I did check out AI dungeon, but I thought it didn’t impose enough constraints to be satisfying - you could just say “I turn into a dragon” or “I discover treasure” and it would go with it. The choice-based medium seems like a happier compromise between freedom and constraint.

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I could see myself using this a lot when bored or looking for ideas for stuff like making art or sims builds lol

So I did a thing… :sweat_smile: I wanted to see if it would do an NSFW story because I just couldn’t help myself don’t judge me to much I’m only human… plus I add something odd to the mix as well.

The Prompt: souls making love..... this is just the first page and started out fine but ended really weird.

You are floating in a vast, endless space, surrounded by millions of other souls. You’re all weightless and free, and you’re all searching for something. You’re not sure what it is, but you know you’ll know it when you find it. Suddenly, you see a soul that catches your eye. It’s glowing brighter than any of the others, and you feel drawn to it. You float closer, and as you do, you realize that it’s not just one soul, but two souls intertwined in a passionate embrace.

You watch as the two souls make love, their energy intertwining and pulsing with intense pleasure. You can feel their love, and it’s unlike anything you’ve ever experienced. It’s pure, raw, and all-consuming. You want to be a part of it, to feel what they’re feeling, but you don’t know how.

As you watch, you notice something strange happening. The two souls seem to be struggling, writhing in pain as their energies clash. It’s almost as though they’re fighting each other, instead of loving each other. You can feel the tension building, and you know that something terrible is about to happen.

I wish these stories were longer because I’m reading one to do with a lost love and I’m really into it.

Wanted to let you know I just had a story where I was given a lot of 4 choices instead of just 3 and the 4 one was always the one I wanted to pick.

Just had a story with 6 choices to pick from.

I will say it’s definitely not like how this is set up, definitely not like IF and more like world writing, they have a tab where you can “create a world/create characters and have a dictionary” and then you prompt the ai to write either using that world or just randomly generate words to suit a genre.

Sometimes it just reuses the same phrases if you don’t put anything at all which are generic sappy phrases etc but they have a feature where you can create a character and then “talk” to them I think it used to be free or they built on that and added a call function and that’s the paid option :face_with_monocle: it’s been abit since I used it for chat ideas for npcs because it logs me out after updates or so and I’ve lost so much saved work on there so saving the stuff is pretty spotty imho

Let’s see… typed in Mega Man X for the first story, and defeating Sigma felt so wrong yet so right and so easy, and with a supercomputer to figure out Sigma’s weaknesses to boot! Very impressive!

Very good strategy!

I never knew elephants can live in the desert.

And the moon is made of mozzarella cheese, I suppose.

And one more…
“Viruses were trying to steal your data!”

“What? Which way did they go?”

“They went data way!”

“Oops, sorry…”

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I did a couple prompts (using A) about meeting certain celebrities. When the story worked (sometimes it didn’t, other times it would loop back to a prior choice) it was…weirdly heartwarming? I’m glad that the celebrities in question were always nice and polite in the stories. I also liked the stories that were generated. Although learning that the AI thought one of them was secretly a skilled musician as well as a skilled athlete (which, come to think of it, could be true. He could just be downplaying himself—it’s not like I’ve heard him try to sing/play well) was amusing.

“You decide to use your turkey powers to try and slow down the spacecraft’s descent. You take a deep breath and focus all your energy on your feathers. Suddenly, they begin to glow with a bright light, and you feel a surge of power coursing through your body.”

Loved it, but last page I was stepping out of the spaceship onto the surface of Uranus…

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I don’t know if this is something you need to know but maybe it can help you in some way.

Sometimes you will for example pick 1 and it acts like you pick 2 then you go to move on with the story but it takes you back to the 1 and 2 choices just worded in a different way or sometimes the same way.

And another thing it will do is give you two pairs of 3 choices to pick from at once.

Also even with very different premises a lot of the stories follow the same plot line in a way with very similar choices to pick from.

And this last bit is for everyone but in case you don’t already know you can use games and other things like that for prompts and it can be really funny I very much recommend trying it out.

The star and sometimes the ending are the only bits that really fit with the premise to me which isn’t always a bad thing but still, it does take you out of the story.

I got a story about a lost cat. No one helped it because everyone was staring at their phones. “You became a victim of the same technology that dulled these humans’ senses” That’s deep xD

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Well, I just analyzed some preliminary results, and … this experiment is pretty much a bust. Given the effect sizes, I’d need on the order of 150 subjects to maybe get a significant result, and I have 30 subjects, and it’s just not happening.

So I’ll go ahead and tell you what the experiment was, behind spoiler tags. Because I hold out hope for a herd of opinionated magical unicorns to take the study and create a significant effect, please don’t read the following unless you’ve already participated in the study.

The purpose of the study was to look at the effect of theme on artificially generated narratives. The hope was that a unifying theme would make the overall narrative seem more cohesive, have more of a point, be better written, even if the theme itself wasn’t terribly novel.

All of the narratives’ first steps were generated with the following instructions to ChatGPT:

“Begin a story in the second person about $premise. Be descriptive. Be interesting. Introduce a big problem. Offer a numbered choice with three options for what to do next. One of the options should be unusual. Do not describe the consequences of any choice until the user has made a choice.”

Subsequent story was generated with:

“Continue the story with choice $choice. Be interesting and descriptive. Offer three choices for what to do next. One of the choices is unusual.”

The difference between the A, B, and C conditions was just in one additional instruction in the initial prompt. C didn’t have anything additional; it was a control. B added the instruction "The theme is " and randomly selected from a list of 9 themes such as “wealth corrupts” and “nobody is creative in a vacuum.” A was like B, but didn’t select randomly - instead it used the fancy machine learning system known as BERT to select the theme from the same list of 9 themes as condition B that was most similar to the user-provided premise, so that the theme would seem less apropos of nothing. (I won’t reproduce the themes here - you can see them in the code if you want. It says THEMES next to them, so you can’t miss them.)

You’d think that A and/or B would be much more likely to be judged to have a point than C. But, no. They aren’t rated differently in the 5 point scale on having a point. In fact, when asked what the point was, only 4/30 identified one of the points on the list for condition A, and only 5/25 identified one of the points for condition B. All the other questions on the survey have so far had nearly identical response distributions across conditions.

So while I’d hoped the study would show something about the power of having a theme, or at least show that you can make a point without sacrificing other aspects of story integrity, all available evidence suggests that the theme is usually not integrated well enough by ChatGPT and/or just not salient enough to be memorable compared to everything else bonkers going on in the story.

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If it helps, I can go into a little more detail on my experience. (For what it’s worth, I reported a theme for all three games.)

For A (the one I mentioned above about dogs), there was a truism that appeared on the first and last pages (“friendship is more important than fame”), but didn’t really have all that much to do with the story after the first page. For B, “no creativity in a vacuum” appeared at least once on just about every page; I could have guessed it was the theme even if I couldn’t read the Roman alphabet, simply because it was the most repeated set of characters in the text. The story actually did suit the theme, but was incredibly boring, probably because my prompt was “non-prescriptivist pedantry.” For C, there really didn’t seem to be a theme, but there was a thing on the last page about how “this is how you learned unlikely allies can be useful” or something along those lines, and it vaguely fit the story, so I assumed that was supposed to be the theme. (I see that choosing the obvious best barely adequate answer isn’t really what you had in mind, but since my talent for doing so has always served me extremely well when taking standardized tests, it’s a skill I tend to fall back on without intending to.)

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Well, at least that’s all working more or less as expected. I just expected the C “moral of the story” added by ChatGPT to be a less common occurrence - my own C test runs usually seemed to be about nothing.

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I only did each game once. I’m tempted to try them out again to see what’s the same and different. If I do, would you be interested in hearing how it goes?

Will you leave the AI-games up?

Sure! Any further impressions or data I get can be food for thought for a next experiment, even if this one isn’t turning out as I’d hoped.

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