| AI Dungeon | |
|---|---|
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| Developer(s) | Latitude |
| Designer(s) | Nick Walton |
| Platform(s) | |
| Release |
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| Genre(s) | Interactive fiction |
| Mode(s) | Single-player,multiplayer |
AI Dungeon is a single-player/multiplayertext adventure game which usesartificial intelligence (AI) to generate content and allows players to create and share adventures and custom prompts. The game's first version was made available in May 2019, and its second version (initially calledAI Dungeon 2) was released onGoogle Colaboratory in December 2019. It was later ported that same month to its current cross-platformweb application. The AI model was then reformed in July 2020.
AI Dungeon is a text adventure game that uses artificial intelligence to generate random storylines in response to player-submitted stimuli.[1][2][3][4]
In the game, players are prompted to choose a setting for their adventure (e.g.fantasy,mystery,apocalyptic,cyberpunk,zombies),[5][6] followed by other options relevant to the setting (such ascharacter class for fantasy settings).[7]
After beginning an adventure, four main interaction methods can be chosen for the player's text input:[8]
The game adapts and responds to most actions the player enters.[9] Providing blank inputs can be used to prompt the AI to generate further content, and the game also provides players with options toundo or redo or modify recent events to improve the game's narrative.[10] Players can also tell the AI what elements to "remember" for reference in future parts of their playthrough.[11]
In addition toAI Dungeon's pre-configured settings, players can create custom "adventures" from scratch by describing the setting in text format, which the AI will then generate a setting from.[8][5]
These custom adventures can be published for others to play, with an interface for browsing published adventures and leaving comments under them.
AI Dungeon includes amultiplayer mode in which different players each have their own character and take turns interacting with the AI within the same game session. Multiplayer supports both online play across multiple devices or local play using a shared device.[12][13]
The game's hosts are able to supervise the AI and modify its output.[12][13]
Unlike the single-player game, in which actions and stories usesecond person narration, multiplayer game stories are presented usingthird-person narration.[13]
AI Dungeon allows players to set their adventures within specific "Worlds" that give context to the broader environment where the adventure takes place.[14] This feature was first released with two different worlds available for selection: Xaxas, a "world of peace and prosperity"; and Kedar, a "world ofdragons,demons, andmonsters".[14]
The first version ofAI Dungeon (sometimes referred to asAI Dungeon Classic[15][16]) was designed and created by Nick Walton ofBrigham Young University's "Perception, Control, and Cognition"deep learning laboratory[9] in March 2019[8] during ahackathon.[17][18] Before this, Walton had been working as anintern for several companies in the field ofautonomous vehicles.[9]
This creation used an early version of theGPT-2 natural-language-generatingneural network, created byOpenAI,[19][20] allowing it to generate its original adventure narratives.[21] During his first interactions with GPT-2, Walton was partly inspired by the tabletop gameDungeons & Dragons (D&D), which he had played for the first time with his family a few months earlier:[17][13][15]
"I realized that there were no games available that gave you the same freedom to do anything that I found in [Dungeons & Dragons][13] ... You can be so creative compared to other games."[17]
This led him to wonder if an AI could function as adungeon master.[13]
Unlike later versions ofAI Dungeon, the original did not allow players to specify any action they wanted. Instead, it generated a finite list of possible actions to choose from.[16]
This first version of the game was released to the public in May 2019.[15][9] It is not to be confused with another GPT-2-based adventure game,GPT Adventure, created byNorthwestern University neurosciencepostgraduate student Nathan Whitmore, also released on Google Colab several months after the public release ofAI Dungeon.[22][23]
In November 2019, a new, "full" version of GPT-2 was released by OpenAI. This new model included support for 1.5 billion parameters (which determine the accuracy with which amachine learning model can perform a task[24]), compared with the 126 million parameter version used in the earliest stages ofAI Dungeon's development.[25][19] The game was recreated by Walton, leveraging this new version of the model, and temporarily rebranded asAI Dungeon 2.[19][26]
AI Dungeon 2's AI was given more focusedtraining compared to its predecessor, using genre-specific text.[15] This training material included approximately 30megabytes of contentweb-scraped from chooseyourstory.com (an online community website of content inspired byinteractive gamebooks, written by contributors of multiple skill levels, using logic of differing complexity[27]) and multiple D&D rulebooks andadventures.[28]
The new version was released in December 2019 asopen-source software available onGitHub.[29] It was accessible viaGoogle Colab, an online tool fordata scientists and AI researchers that allows for free execution of code on Google-hosted machines.[30][9] It could also be run locally on a PC, but in both cases, it required players to download the full model, around 5gigabytes of data.[9] Within days of the initial release, this mandatory download resulted inbandwidth charges of over $20,000, forcing the temporary shut-down of the game until apeer-to-peer alternative solution was established.[9] Due to the game's sudden and explosive growth that same month, however, it became closed-source,proprietary software and was relaunched by Walton's start-up development team, Latitude (with Walton taking on the role ofCTO).[20][31] This relaunch constitutedmobile apps foriOS andAndroid (built by app developer Braydon Batungbacal) on December 17.[32][33][9] Other members of this team included Thorsten Kreutz for the game's long-term strategy and the creator's brother, Alan Walton, for hosting infrastructure.[9]
At this time, Nick Walton also established aPatreon campaign to support the game's further growth (such as the addition of multiplayer and voice support,[9] along with longer-term plans to include music and image content[9]) and turn the game into a commercial endeavor, which Walton felt was necessary to cover the costs of delivering a higher-quality version of the game.[17][9]AI Dungeon was one of the only known commercial applications to be based upon GPT-2.[6]
Following its first announcement in December 2019, a multiplayer mode was added to the game in April 2020.[34] Hosting a game in this mode was originally restricted to premium subscribers, although any players could join a hosted game.[12][13]
In July 2020, the developers introduced a premium-exclusive version of the AI model, namedDragon, which usesOpenAI's newAPI for leveraging theGPT-3 model without maintaining a local copy (released on June 11, 2020).[35][18][28] GPT-3 was trained with 570 gigabytes of text content (approximately onetrillion words, with a $12 million development cost[6]) and can support 175 billion parameters, compared to the 40 gigabytes of training content and 1.5 billion parameters of GPT-2.[36][20]
The free model was also upgraded to a less advanced version of GPT-3 and was namedGriffin.[18]
Speaking shortly after this release, on the differences between GPT-2 and GPT-3, Walton stated:
"[GPT-3 is] one of the most powerful AI models in the world...[1] It's just much more coherent in terms of understanding who the characters are, what they're saying, what's going on in the story and just being able to write an interesting and believable story."[6]
In the latter half of 2020, the "Worlds" feature was added toAI Dungeon, providing players with a selection of overarching worlds in which their adventures can take place.[14] In February 2021, it was announced thatAI Dungeon's developers, Latitude, had raised $3.3 million inseed funding (led by NFX, with participation from Album VC and Griffin Gaming Partners) to "build games with 'infinite' story possibilities."[37] this funding intended to move AI content creation beyond the purely text-based nature ofAI Dungeon as it existed at the time.
After its announcement on August 20, a new 'See' interaction mode was made available for all players and added to the game on August 30, 2022.
AI Dungeon was retired from Steam on March 12, 2024.[38]
Approximately two thousand people played the original version of the game within the first month of its May 2019 release.[15][9] Within a week of its December 2019 relaunch, the game reached over 100,000 players and over 500,000 play-throughs,[19] and reached 1.5 million players by June 2020.[25]
As of December 2019, the game's corresponding Patreon campaign had raised approximately $15,000 per month.[8]
In his January 2020 review of the GPT-2-powered version ofAI Dungeon (known at the time asAI Dungeon 2), Craig Grannell ofStuff Magazine named it "App of the Week" and awarded it 4 out of 5 stars. Grannell praised the game's flexibility and its custom story feature, but criticized the abrupt shifts in content that were common in the GPT-2 edition of the game:[4]
"[AI Dungeon is] an endless world of dreamlike storytelling, and a fascinating glimpse into the future of AI."[4]
Campbell Bird of148Apps also awarded this edition of the game 4 out of 5 stars in his review, also praising its creativity whilst criticizing the lack of memory for previous content:[39]
"AI Dungeon is like doingimprov with a partner who is equal parts enthusiastic and drunk... [It] is a game that's charming, occasionally frustrating, but mostly just impressive in its raw creativity and spirit."[39]
Jon Mundy ofTapSmart awarded it a 3 out of 5-star rating, similarly, praising its variety and the "magical" custom adventure option, but described its adventure narratives as "often too passive and vague" and lacking in resolution.[5]
The AI's tendency to create graphic and sexual content despite not being prompted by players was noted by reviewers, including Lindsay Bicknell. LatitudeCEO Nick Walton and researcher Suchin Gururangan responded to such concerns, stating that the behavior was unexpected and reasoning that such a thing occurs due to a lack of strict constraints placed on the GPT-3 model. They stated that they did not do enough to prevent it from behaving this way "in the wild".[40][41][42]
In addition to those who usedAI Dungeon for its primary purpose as a game, other users experimented with using its language generation interface to create other forms of content that would not be found in traditional games (primarily via the custom adventure option). Although the game was primarily trained using text adventures, training content for the GPT models themselves included large amounts of web content (including the entirety of the English-languageWikipedia), thereby allowing the game to adapt to areas outside of this core focus.[6][43] Examples ofAI Dungeon being used in this way include:
In April 2021,AI Dungeon implemented a new algorithm forcontent moderation to prevent instances of text-basedsimulated child pornography created by users. The moderation process involved a human moderator reading through private stories.[49][41][50][51] The filter frequently flaggedfalse positives due to wording (terms like "eight-year-old laptop" misinterpreted as the age of a child), affecting both pornographic and non-pornographic stories. Controversy andreview bombing ofAI Dungeon occurred as a result of the moderation system, citing false positives and a lack of communication between Latitude and its user base following the change.[40]
In June 2022,AI Dungeon addedadvertisements to replace the past "energy" system, in which users would need to wait for energy to refill to generate more content.[52] The advertisement system would allow for infinite tries of AI output, but would occasionally interrupt gameplay with advertisements. This addition received backlash from users, and Latitude would add a beta system in response, allowing storing of actions through watching advertisements.[53] The advertisement system was removed by the end of 2022.[54]
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