AI Dungeon — co-writing a story with a computer

Look, I don’t know what the future of storytelling is going to look like. Plus, it’s safe to say the future of storytelling will look like many things. I do believe, though, that one strand of the future of storytelling, particularly in its written (or at the very least, word-based) form, will be interactive. So, something like the classic of the genre, Zork? Well, not quite. A great starting point to explain what I’m thinking of is the GPT-2 powered AI Dungeon.

Let me explain the proposition: it’s a text-based story game, where every bit of text you input, say ‘you walk towards the forest’, or ‘you search for food’ gets the game to move the plot along. Or in the words of the developers, an infinitely generated text adventure powered by deep learning.

I think Craig Grannell explains it best in his Stuff review:

““Imagine a book, but instead of being a static object of ink on paper, it’s written while you wait, by a room full of unhinged authors hopped up on sherbet and gin. That’s AI Dungeon.” ”

For a less whimsical explanation, I’ll refer to the official description of the game on the Play Store, which describes it as “a world that you could explore infinitely, continually finding an endless amount of entirely new content and adventures [and one in which] you could also choose any action you can think of instead of being limited by the imagination of the developers who created the game. 

When I started tinkering with AI Dungeon, I was supposed to be working, but the story I ended up co-writing with it had me completely hooked for 4 hours. I haven’t managed to stay interested in a story-based game for 4 hours non-stop. Not Red Dead Redemption 2, or Journey, or The Last Of Us, or The Last Of Us 2. Except for FIFA 20 Career Mode, which is objectively horseshit, nothing. And when it comes to novels, which I, like many other people, have kind of abandoned in the face of non-fiction fundae sessions, I haven’t been able to give 4 hours non-stop to a novel for years it feels like. Seems like a future to which I’m willing to commit.

Yes, the truth is it broke deep into my first attempted story: a story about a man trying to escape the post-apocalyptic village in which he finds himself and settle down in a peaceful community in a forest. But then I tried again, and I took it through what can only be described as a dream adventure filled with romance, heartbreak, monsters, mystery, and intrigue. And it had me clicking on Next for hours. As GPT-3 has gone viral all over the world with talk of 175 million parameters vs. GPT-2’s 1.5 billion parameters. I can only imagine how fascinating a game trained on that dataset will be. Actually, no, I can’t imagine it. I can’t wait to find out, though.