Hypercinema Week #3

For my synthetic media I chose AI Dungeon, which is a single or multiplayer free-to-play role playing game entirely created by interacting with an AI. It's similar in concept to games like D&D where you create a character and immerse yourself in a fictional universe. There are several free scenarios to pick from. I didn't dive into the multiplayer side of things but you can basically create a campaign with friends. How it works is you pick a scenario or location, create a character (optional, you can take a randomly generated one), and start the campaign. The AI generates the basic setup of the story and from there you have a chatbox at the bottom of the screen. You can choose between 3 actions: Do, Say, Story. Do is imputing an action you want to take. Say is what you want your character to say next. Story is writing out a detail that you want to happen right then. You can also choose to enter nothing in the textbox and just press Enter and the AI will generate the next block of text on its own. Sometimes this is more beneficial because the story has a good flow going and you want to see where it goes.

I consider this synthetic media because it is using artificial intelligence to generate new media. From what I can find, the original idea behind AI Dungeon was inspired by OpenAI's GPT-2, which is an open source AI that processes and generates text. The creator, Nick Walton, was inspired by this and his memories of D&D. He thought what if you could make an AI that acted as the DM (dungeon master) and ran the campaign for humans. The game has progressed quite a lot from it's initial release, when you had finite options to choose from that resulted in nonsensical answers sometimes. For the newer versions, they used genre specific media to train the AI. For example, they had it read multiple D&D rulebooks and adventures, as well as 30 megabytes of stories from chooseyourstory.com.

I don't particularly see any ethical ramifications with this synthetic media, unlike a lot of other forms of AI content. The major downside that I see to this technology is how expensive it is. The cost to run the AI is astronomical so to counteract this, the company had to introduce optional currencies that you can buy with real money that support the developers and a limit on playtime by capping your typing after a certain point, although it takes a while to get to that. I managed to play through a few scenarios before I even encountered this problem. I also want to point out that I didn't run into any grammatical errors or awkward phrasings while playing. It was pretty coherent most of the time.

Overall, I found this addictive. It's captivating that AI is not only capable of quantitative processes, but creative ones as well. To do what feels like co-writing a story with an AI is a bizarre, unpredictable, and often humorous experience. Yes, sometimes the story takes an unexpected, perhaps illogical, turn but that's one of the reasons it's so entertaining because it really is unpredictable, while at the same time taking into consideration your input and weaving it into the story. I'm excited to see how the gaming industry continues to prove that AI is capable of creative expression.