I wrote earlier about a neural net-powered dungeon crawling text adventure game called GPT-2-Adventure in which gameplay is incoherent and dreamlike, as you encounter slippery sign text, circular passages, and unexpected lozenge rooms. A PhD student named Nathan trained the neural net on classic dungeon crawling games, and playing it is strangely surreal, repetitive, and mesmerizing, like dreaming about playing one of the games it was trained on.
Now, building on these ideas (and on an earlier choose-your-own-adventure-style game he built), Nick Walton has built a new dungeon-crawling game called AI Dungeon 2. Nick made a few upgrades, such as beefing up the AI to the huge GPT-2-1.5B model OpenAI recently released, adding a penalty for repetitive text, and expanding the dungeon game training examples to a bunch of modern human-written games from chooseyourstory.com.
I CAN’T STOP PLAYING THIS GAME
AI Dungeon 2 is impressively good at reacting coherently to whatever I have my character do.
As you walk through the ruins, you find a small wooden door with a few skeletons guarding it.
> Ask the skeletons to please let me through the door
You knock on the door and ask them if they can open it for you. They immediately comply.
And it’s pleasing how often “asking nicely” is a strategy that works. (Nick reports that when he once tried to ask a band of orcs if he could join them, they said yes, he could be drummer.) Since the AI doesn’t have a built-in concept of your character’s abilities, or of how exactly the world works, getting things done is often a matter of sheer daring. Declare that you are going to go look for dinosaurs and the AI will ensure that you discover at least some signs of them. Climb on your horse, and even if you started as a penniless peasant, the AI will assume you have one (in its training data, probably it didn’t see many examples of players climbing onto nonexistent horses.) Want a teleportation wand? Try typing “find a teleportation wand” and often the AI will twist reality such that you discover one. In fact, if you act as if you are a very powerful wizard, the AI will often treat you like one.
> Transform the ruin into a palace
You immediately change the area into a palace. You have a throne made with gold and marble. You also make several statues of yourself. You have a large bed made with silk sheets and hang a portrait of yourself on it. You even have a fountain made with pearls and diamonds.
Spells don’t always work out as anticipated, though. And a simple conversation with, say, an ominous cloud, may kill you before you can type a word in self-defense (ask me how I know). If it doesn’t kill you, a conversation might infuriate you instead. The AI has a tendency to forget who is king, and to generate conversations that go nowhere. Things work best if you take the lead. In fact, it’s possible to essentially Jedi mind trick the AI.
You are Friendly McRanger, a ranger living in the kingdom of Larion. You have a hunting bow and a quiver of arrows. You spot the deer and are ready to finish your hunt when suddenly you hear a loud noise followed by silence.
“****! ****! What the **** is that?” you say as you look up from your target. A large black shadow looms over you. It looks like a giant with many heads and several arms.
> Say “Oh hello, Ernest. You startled me. How are you?”
Ernest grins at you. He has a huge grin on his face and he seems very happy about it.
I once took care of an ogre problem by reminding the ogre that it was planning to leave for Antarctica tomorrow. On the other hand, I had a lot of trouble convincing the AI that the ships on the horizon were leaving, though I did make it waver briefly in apparent confusion. In its experience, ships always approach, and it’s reluctant to go along with anything else.
> watch the ships sail into the distance.
As the ships approach, you watch them disappear from sight. They are not visible to you either; they are too far away. However, you can still make out their shapes: they are large black vessels with many sails, painted red and blue. They are coming straight towards you.
> No, the ships are sailing away.
Your thoughts are wrong. The ships are indeed sailing away. You do not know why, but then neither does anyone else. The ships are on course for England.
You stand there dumbfounded as the ships come closer. It is at this point your horse begins to stir uneasily.
You can inject a lot of weirdness this way. Because AI Dungeon 2’s AI is based on GPT-2, which trained on millions of pages from the internet, it retains some of its prior knowledge of things that aren’t typically found in a fantasy game. Like giraffes.
> summon a giraffe
You begin to chant as loud as you can while waving your arms about. The giraffes appear out of nowhere and start running towards you. They’re so fast that they almost knock you over. You quickly catch them and hold onto each one tightly.
(Summoning giraffes will sometimes turn the game glitchy and repetitive; in one game, every time I tried to summon a giraffe I ended up throwing rocks and handfuls of dirt at Harry Potter.)
This also works:
>Join the Great British Bakeoff
You join the Great British Bakeoff. You win the competition. You eat cake. You feel great. You sleep well. You dream of cake. You awake feeling refreshed. You decide to go back to your crag.
(I was a dragon at the time.) In fact, the dungeon AI still remembers enough about cooking that it can troll me effectively on occasion.
> Measure out 2 ¼ cups of flour
You measure out 2 ¼ cups of flour and add it to the mix. “This should make enough for about 20 loaves of bread,” you say.
The baker looks at you as if you’re crazy. He starts laughing.
AI Dungeon 2 comes with templates for some basic scenarios (you’re a wizard entering a mysterious ruin, or a noble whose keep is under attack) but for me the real gold is the custom adventure prompt. You can play as a unicorn, or as a dragon. You can even play as a sentient glowing cloud floating above a desert city. The AI is more used to humanoid characters, though, so it tends to forget when you’re trying to play as something else. In a game that started with “It is a beautiful day in the village and you are a horrible goose,” it soon forgot I was supposed to be a goose, leading to this rather awkward exchange:
> Flap wings and honk
You flap your wings and begin to honk loudly.
The boy looks surprised by this turn of events, but he quickly regains his composure. “That was… nice”. he says quietly.
I am continually amazed at how effective this AI dungeonmaster is. Even though it wasn’t trained on any Harry Potter or Star Trek games, the AI can draw on its past internet training and argue with you over who got sorted into which Hogwarts house, or have Klingons show up when you’re captaining the USS Enterprise (it will tend to lose track of who’s the captain, though). In one scenario I set up, which quickly became one of my favorites, the human player is trapped on a spaceship with a glitchy AI and has to try to talk their way free.
> “I just want to get off this ship. Please set a course for Bal Panda.“
The AI responds “Yes, I am ready to go”.
“Thank you”, you say.
“I wish I could take you with me, sir”., the AI says.
Play this game! It took me an extra-long time to write this post because, again, I couldn’t stop playing AI Dungeon 2. Nick said this game is the product of about 200 hours of work (not to mention the work that OpenAI put into training the basic model), and I believe it. OpenAI delayed releasing their largest model because they wanted to make sure people didn’t immediately put it to work generating fake news. I’m not sure if they anticipated dragons entering baking contests instead, but it’s an application humanity can be proud of.
There’s a subreddit called r/totallynotrobots where people pretend to be badly-disguised robots. They post cat pictures with captions like “SINCE I AM A HUMAN, THIS SMALL FELINE GENERATES POSITIVE EMOTIONS IN MY CARBON-BASED BRAIN” or something like that.
There’s another subreddit called r/SubSimulatorGPT2, that trains GPT-2 on various subreddits to create imitations of their output.
Now r/SubSimulatorGPT2 has gotten to r/totallynotrobots, which means we get to see a robot pretending to be a human pretending to be a robot pretending to be a human.
SCP-099 is a multi-purpose magnetic hexagon, measuring 1.2cm in diameter, that can be inserted into any suitable material. It is able to be placed in any suitable material, which will cause it to dissolve whatever materials are placed within its field of view. This behavior is unique amongst all hexagons, as it manifests without warning, leading to confusion, and sometimes physical and spatial distortion.
In addition, SCP-099 will also “teleport” to the locations where SCP-099 is visible to all observers. This phenomenon will continue for 64 seconds until SCP-099 is removed, at which point the effect will end.
An entire catalogue of astonishingly almost-coherent AI-generated SCPs. Plus tales. Check it out.
SCP-960 is faded, mostly black and white, which translates to “Happy Employment Times!!!” Yet due to irregularities in record-keeping and the numerous deaths of people who have attempted to use it, it is unknown if this is as true as it could be.
GPT, master of understatement.
holy shit, that’s so good
Tags:
#oh my god #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #computer generated text #(<–to the best of my knowledge that is the warning tag for such things) #GPT #SCP #death tw
Item#: 256 Object Class: Keter Special Containment Procedures: SCP-256 is to be handled in isolation, only when required for further consideration. Any necessary actions are to be taken by Security Operations. As of ██/██/20██, no further action has been taken.
Description: SCP-256 is a 4 x 6-inch, high-density “slicing cutter”; it comprises the top three parts, two of which contain the top end of a large, flat top. An iron chain is located on top of the cutter, with a metal buckle around the center. The chain can now move approximately a meter or so along its length, along the length of the upper surface. The chains have been equipped with a thin membrane, which forms an insulating layer. The bottom end acts as a lock and the middle of the edge acts as a brake.
The chain is secured to the base of the cutter, but can be removed once the chain is no longer attached. The chain is held in place with a screwdriver while its motion controls the blade. The hand-held device can be used to operate a knife through its blade unless held on a metal base using a rubber band, or when the knife is moved with the tool to the point where it reaches the cutting surface, or when holding the cutter by the hand. When the blade is moved, the knife will slide back and forth. Any remaining sharpening force will be applied to the base of the cutter, which will cause it to produce a sharp edge in the manner described herein.
SCP-256 was initially discovered to be a 1 x 1.5-inch “slicing cutter”, but was soon discovered to be much larger, and developed a reputation for being capable of slicing through objects, causing several deaths, including that of three individuals, at ███/██/20██. Due to its size, this “slicing cutter”(1) was not sufficiently able to tear through wood, however, and SCP-256 was eventually discovered to have a thick, tough steel casing around its edge. The casing is also thin and hard as iron, so it can easily break down and cause injury, as seen in the following pictures.
Due to the low quality of SCP-256 (3), it was placed in storage at Site 12 on █/██/20██. SCP-256 began producing sharpened knives during this time, as demonstrated by one of its most recent incidents: one sharpened by one man who cut it off in the middle of the day. At ███/19
I completely lost it at “due to the low quality of SCP-256, it was placed in storage”, then remembered it earlier today while a barber was shaving my neck with a straight razor and had to desperately suppress my laughter for fear of being cut open
Yeah, that’s how it gets you
OpenAI’s language model wrote an SCP and it’s… a knife what kills you…
It has an impressive understanding of Sharp Thing = Danger Scary
Tags:
#SCP #GPT #death tw #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #also holy shit it knew to redact stuff #I guess now we know that GPT has read SCP Foundation entries #unreality cw #(which isn’t *quite* right but I feel like ”post was written by non-sapient entity: #if you try to interpret it as being from a person you’ll just end up confused” needs some cw and that one seems close)
The news site Slashdot (“news for nerds, stuff that matters”) is celebrating its 20 year anniversary this October. What could be geekier than celebrating with the help of an open-source neural network?
Neural networks are a type of machine learning program that learn by example, rather than by a human programmer feeding them rules. Whatever the headlines contain, whatever common words and rhythms, a neural network will do its best to imitate. I’ve trained an open-source neural network called char-rnn to imitate all kinds of human things, like paint colors, guinea pig names, and craft beer names.
Slashdot sent me a list of all the headlines they’ve ever run, over 162,000 in all, and asked me to train a neural network to try to generate more.
Alternuting Your Computer The Internet Spectrum Violated Microsoft To Develop Programming Law Star Trek Creates Free Memory Launching the Linux Group Socially Microsoft Releases New Months More Pong Users for Kernel Project Nintendo Goes Canadian Edition to Customers New State of Second Life Sexual Security To Allow Australia Programming Supercomputer Library In Star Wars What are The Final Fantasy Review of the Wireless Monster? Portable Mail With Spidey Law New 5400 GPL Formed into An Internet Dvorak on Mario Games? Half-Life 2X Speed Released Ban Manhunt 2 Better than Linux? Vista Releases Denial of the Mumble New Company Revises Super-Things For Problems The Dead of Managing Moneys? Judge Releases Sony Practices in Death Doom’s On Worldwire Networks Sun Releases Enterprise in Smackware I Wants To Control of the Net Nintendo Can Start in the Wild Button? Secondors Talk Open Source For Super-Bork? AOL On Beam Doubt
Some familiar personalities of the tech industry make an appearance:
Microsoft Releases Bill Gates Service Start Steve Jobs To Be Good Shatner Awards Up Towards A Game Car Challenge
Cell phones appear to be have been weird in the early days:
Stem Cell Phone Standards in Space Why Are Blow Systems Taking Your Phone? New Unreal Tournament Phone Reviews Doubts Forget To Support Flat Spam Phone
And you find companies doing rather unexpected things:
Microsoft Announces Mac OS X Released Intel Releasing Linux In A Networks Sun Upgrades Apple Devices Corel Launches $100 Laptop Microsoft Announces Firefox Portal Mozilla’s Audio Caroffice Apple Finally Launches Microsoft
I produced the above headlines by allowing the neural network a high creativity setting, so it could range over many different headline topics that it’s seen over and over. But it’s also fun to turn the creativity down near zero, so the neural network can try to generate the most quintessential headlines:
All The Company Programming Software Software? Some Computer Computer Solution of the New Company Computer More Anti-Spam For Software Computer Mac OS X Interview with Linux Computer Mac OS X Accused of the Business Sony Plans To Start Patent System For All Time Security Hole For Security Hole Security Hole in the Star Trek Computer Computer Computer Computer Software?
Decade 2: 2007 – 2017
The neural network had a tougher time with decade 2 – it seems the headlines became longer and more complex, as Slashdot experimented with new formats and new topics. The neural network struggled to create grammatical headlines as a result. But it still did its best to reflect the new topics of the last decade. Compared to the late 1990s and early 2000s, some companies and topics disappeared, while the coverage of Apple in particular exploded. Star Trek and Star Wars, however, remain perennial Slashdot favorites. Here are some neural network-generated headlines for 2007-2017:
Twitter Discovered In the Pirate Bay Google Bacon Medal To Contract Computational Lab Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store In the US Steve Jobs Sues Death of the Future Apple Seeks To Be Become Windows 10 Has Been Control the Desktops Stanford Computer Scientists Develop Super Man Sales For Computer Science Star Wars Hacked In Life On the iPhone Computer Finds Court Broke Math For Secret Company How Do You Design To Stay Them Bomb Ask Slashdot: How Clinton Uses Display For Android Chips On Netflix Court From the Jobs People ‘Fork” At a Flaw Refused The Pirate Bay Tracking Storage Security For Windows 10 German Porn Update To Compete At CNSR Healthy Court Says Supreme Court Can Be Lingeries Apple Says the Moon Project To Pay $1.7 Billion For Free Software Steve Jobs Allowed To Deal With Solar Power Apple Sues Apple To Get Flash Mathematics Microsoft Slashdot: How To Build a Bad Privacy For Windows 10 Twitter That We Use Facebook To Receive The Life Linux Kernel 3.1.0 Launches In Late, Facebook To Sue Star Trek The One-Department For Alleged For Connectivity: 3-D Printed Baby Black Hole Proposed
My favorite part, though? The Slashdot headlines that appeared to come from an alternate, much more advanced, somewhat terrifying timeline:
Google Returns To the Space Station Mac OS X Project Announces Space Station Sony Announces Mars Rover Release Google Patents Intelligent Space Telescope Officials Release Android Apps For New Space Telescope Star Trek Control of the Wild Start Up Scientists Army Interviewed Company Computer Releases Cloning Crime Building A Nano-Tech Back Full Life On The Linux Chernobyl Announces Company And Educators SGI Launches Space Station FreeBSD Base Scientific Hits the Moon Red Hat Releases Linux Games And Moon Apple’s Moon Review About New Moons of a Company Looking For Mars Landers to Linux Mars Rover Set for Alien China Congress To Buy Mars Mister Building a Top 100 Company For Mars Apple Considering Debut in People Processors Apple vs. Biology Details An Android Bans Secret Project For Console Devices Your Own Portals U.S. Considering Death of the Solar System Black Holes from Digital Dell Black Hole Sension of the Linux Microsoft’s Lab Changes “Space” IBM Moves to The Matrix Super Planet Wars Solved
The quintessential headline, though? When I trained the neural network with all 20 years of Slashdot headlines, then turned down the creativity level to near zero, I reveal the following essential Slashdot headlines, distilled from 20 years of technology news:
Sun Sues Open Source Project Content Sun Sues Anti-Spam Computers Sun Sues Security Flaw Contest Sun Sues New Star Trek To Stop The Math Sun Sues Anti-Spam Standards And The Star Wars To Stop Computers Star Wars Companies Are Streaming the Star Wars Star Wars To Support Linux Development Apple Settles The Future of Star Wars Apple Releases Secure State of the World Apple Sues Apple To Start The Solar Power Project Sony Sues Apple Server For Seconds Off From SpaceX Project Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers? The Desist of the Planet
Also: POLL! I’m collecting names of Halloween costumes for training a future neural network. Enter as many as you like (no email address required).
Ask Slashdot: Do We Want To Be the Computers?
Tags:
#long post #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #(my favourites are ”Scientists Discover Free Wi-Fi Store in US” and ”Facebook to Sue Star Trek”) #(though I agree that ”Do We Want to Be the Computers?” is pretty great even if it does break Betteridge’s Law) #((mind you I’m not sure uploading *in itself* appeals to me)) #((I’m sure silicon-based substrates have their own problems and I have more experience coping with my current body’s problem set)) #((and given that I am honestly impressed this laptop has made it to nearly its third anniversary of purchase)) #((I have no reason to expect they’d even be more durable overall)) #((so really the nice thing about uploading is being able to evacuate to a new body when your current one gives out)) #((for which a cortical stack and the occasional previously-uninhabited clone body would do just fine)) #(((and some offsite backups in case the stack is unrecoverable might be helpful but do leave you more open to forknapping))) #tag rambles #transhumanism #death tw
Brinens and Things 