Friendly reminder that your predictive text, while very compelling, is not alive.
It's not a mind.
this post was submitted on 23 Dec 2023
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Cyberpunk 2077 sorta explores this a bit.
There’s a vending machine that has a personality and talks to people walking by it. The quest chain basically has you and the vending machine chatting a bit and even giving the vending machine some advice on a person he has a crush on. You eventually become friends with this vending machine.
When it seems like it’s becoming more apparent it’s an AI and is developing sentience, it turns out the vending machine just has a really well-coded socializing program. He even admits as much when he’s about to be deactivated.
So, to reiterate what you said: predictive text and LLMs are not alive nor a mind.
I don't care, Brandon was real to me okay 😭
Which is why the Turing Test needs to be updated. These text models are getting really good at fooling people.
The Turing test isn't just that there exists some conversation you can have with a machine where you wouldn't know it's a machine. The Turing test is that you could spend an arbitrary amount of time talking to a machine and never be able to tell. ChatGPT doesn't come anywhere close to this, since there are many subjects where it quickly becomes clear that the model doesn't understand the meaning of the text it generates.
Exactly thank you for pointing this out. It also assumes that the tester would have knowledge of the wider context in which the test exists. GPT could probably fool someone from the middle ages, but that person wouldn't know anything about what it is they are testing for exactly.
Prove to me you have a mind and I'll accept what you're saying.
Well no one can prove they have a mind to anyone other than themselves.
And to extend that, there's obviously a way for electrical information processing to give rise to consciousness. And no one knows how that could be possible.
Meaning something like a true, alien AI would probably conclude that we are not conscious and instead are just very intelligent meat computers.
So, while there's no reason to believe that current AI models could result in consciousness, no one can prove the opposite either.
I think the argument currently boils down to, "we understand how AI models work, but we don't understand how our minds work. Therefore, ???, and so no consciousness for AI"
“No brain?”
“Oh, there’s a brain all right. It’s just that the brain is made out of meat! That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.”
“So … what does the thinking?”
“You’re not understanding, are you? You’re refusing to deal with what I’m telling you. The brain does the thinking. The meat.”
“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”*
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I don't think most people will care, so long as their NPC interaction ends up compelling. We've been reading stories about people who don't exist for centuries, and that's stopped no one from sympathizing with them - and now there's a chance you could have an open conversation with them.
Like, I think alot of us assume that we care about the authors who write the character dialogs but I think most people actually choose not to know who is behind their favorite NPCs to preserve some sense that the NPC personality isn't manufactured.
Combine that with everyone becoming steadily more lonely over the years, and I think AI-generated NPC interactions are going to take escapism to another level.
Poem poem poem poem then the NPC start quoting Mein Kampf and killing all the cat wizards.
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At some point in the not too distant future there's going to be a popular video game character running an AI personality that allows communication outside of the game (to pull you back into the game) and a lot of people are going to slowly realize that they accidentally got an AI boyfriend/girlfriend.
There's a lot of cruelty potential too. In FNAF Security Breach, you can cripple a miniboss by ripping out her eyes, and you can listen to her lament the fact afterwards. Following on that idea, imagine how many gamers would use AI controlled characters to abuse them in creative ways if they reacted properly. Ooh, I can even chop the legs off!
Never, ever let people who have played The Sims near one of these games.
The horrors that would come.
Rimworld
Worse... it's designed to increase values through friendship and ponies.
It makes sure outside events line up in such a way that you always say "yes" on your own accord to plugging in.
i want to emigrate to Equestria!!! 🥺
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Pretty sure the first minds to be controlled by generative AI work on the floor at the stock exchange.
This is just Westworld.
I'm tired, boss
but they can't kill you IRL yet, we need the Sword art online headsets.
There is this neat game I saw in YouTube where you play as a vampire trying to convince AI driven NPC to let you in their house using voice. What amazes me is how good it is at detecting different accent and the AI being able to grasp the thing your talking about.
There are a few mods for Skyrim that adds LLM AI companions. So you can talk to them about whatever and they can talk back. The future of RPGs is going to be pretty sick.
Indie games like the one you mentioned are going to be able to explore some pretty cool concepts and really push the artform into amazing directions.
But being able to talk about anything and having the character actually do something based on the conversation are completely different things. Yeah you can convince a random npc to "join your quest", but unless that was programmed into the game the dialouge and the actions of the npc will contradict each other (making a worse interaction).
NPC dialouge is purposefully limited to align with what the game is programmed to do, we're still a ways away from really being able to leverage the advances in LLMs in video games (at least based on what I've seen).
Peter Molyneux wanted that back in 2010 with "Milo" and like most Molyneux ideas, it never made it. :)
https://www.ted.com/talks/peter_molyneux_meet_milo_the_virtual_boy/transcript
Epic NPC man
I was an adventure like you.
Nope, Amazon.
And its gonna be fucking sick!
You approach the only tavern in a small hamlet, the rain obscures the rest of the structures. The door creeps open as the hinges scream. But, as the door parts the scenery inside is of an alien nature. Villagers are in celebration, and the warmth of the tavern stands in juxtaposition to the howling cold outside.
Unfortunately, you don't have time for festivities. You approach the tavern keeper, and present your query; "I've come from afar, my bounty is a women with a scabbard as red as blood, and hair as white as the snow outside." The tavern keeper nods, "I saw her here three days ago, she spoke of the North and of a tribe who owes her blood." He lifts his lithe finger and points it to a husky man in the back of the tavern. "Ulfnir will guide you there. Speak to him in the morning."
And then the next morning, completely unscripted, Ulfnir could take you to where you asked to go. I've seen demos of this tech, and while I added a lot of embellishments to my little story the demos actually had a player asl an npc the location of another and it said sure and took them there. Thats tight. Some people are afraid. I am excited. Give me an AI I can sit with and actually make games and I will make thousands of games a year.
The issue is that so far, AI is really just pattern emulation. I imagine it's fine to flesh out cheap "Kill 10 boars" sidequests, but LLMs are not very good at original or meaningful stories and frequently break down into nonsense over long narratives. It's more likely you'll get the sort of simple self-made stories you see in procgen or rogue like games
It's going to have to be like Westworld, basically.
Quests and the NPCs involved in them will have curated stories written by humans, much like they are today. Generative AI, meanwhile, allows for improv. The player can tackle quest narratives with genuine freedom of choice, rather than just the predefined choose-your-own-adventure options that limit player choice today. And the generative AI would allow the NPCs who are part of the narrative to make freeform decisions/dialogs/outcomes meant to push players back on the right track.
Should the player fail to complete the narrative, the AI would also at least be able to improv a more satisfying exit point and outcome than "Whoops, I killed the wrong NPC, looks like I failed the quest."
I think the more likely situation is that they'll have AI pregenerate a bunch of possible quest lines and then have a human curate them. Prevents things ending up as complete nonsense but still allows for a massive range of possibilities that seems endless while using a lot less processing power. Also pre-empts any situations of players trying to break the AI running in the background.
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The process would be more like prototyping. I'd have the AI cook up cheap and fast systems one at a time, step by step as I review them until an MVP is revealed that I can show or tweak. Obviously not full blown BG3 RPGs. But I bet within 10 years I could make some sweet Mario Party clones easily or something of that caliber. I've talked to my dev lads about it. If it were possible to prototype that way we would do it.
Ho ho oh shit! Thank you for sharing this. I am going to try and force it to act within my Ooo 1000+ setting lol
This might be the first time that a computer game (well "sort of single player") actually can come close to a pen and paper RPG experience.
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