The image is called "Latitude Midieval Problems."
The startup behind the text game is branching out into a game platform. The closed alpha was announced on Friday and will open a waitlist for current users. It is the next step for a company that began with a university Hackathon project and hopes to help other people create their own games.
The GPT-2 and GPT-3 text generation algorithms are used in the AI Dungeon. You can start by writing your own adventure setup. You can enter any command you want and the virtual game master will give you a text description of the outcome. It is very weird and a lot of fun, but it is light on traditional game mechanics.
There are more structured games in Voyage. Medieval Problems is an experiment where you're the ruler of a kingdom and you enter freeform text commands for your advisors, then see the outcome reflected in success ratings. It is still a lot like the other game, but with a better system for evaluating success and a clearer framing for what you are supposed to do.
An image from a game.
A party game called "Pixel This" is a game where one person enters a phrase, the computer creates a picture of it, and another player guesses it. It is similar to the art app Dream and a Pictionary-style mechanic.
Nick Walton describes Voyage as a natural evolution of the company. Text adventures reminiscent of Zork or Colossal Cave Adventure are what the company likes to call the start of their artificial intelligence games. We are moving into 2D images where you have some level of visuals in. The pictures created with the Pixray image generator have been added to the AI dungeon.
The goal is to add game creation tools to Voyage. The long-term vision of the company is to enable creators to make things that are dynamic and alive in a way that existing experiences aren't and also be able to create things that would have taken studios of a hundred people in the past. The first half of next year will be used to work on the system.
Adding game creation tools is what Latitude hopes to do.
Creative tools can help find a long-term business plan. For a set of features powered by GPT-2 and subscription-based access to the higher-quality GPT 3, the game is free. The subscription for the Voyage will be introduced after the alpha.
The new games from Voyage don't yet have the replayability of the previous games, but they are still the products of a company trying to crack games based on machine learning. One of the things that I think is going to be really beneficial is being able to find out what people enjoy about a project. You can take existing models and create a game that people will like. It is hard to know what this space is like. How much people will pay to be part of that process is questionable.
As the mission expands, it will likely need to exercise caution with Openai's application programming interface. The organization approves GPT-3 projects on a case by case basis, and projects must adhere to guidelines intended to prevent misuse. Some users created disturbing sexual scenarios that alarmed OpenAI because of the freedom they had to shape their own stories. Security issues around user commands are also dealt with. The startup spent months working on filter systems that accidentally blocked more innocuous fictional content before striking a deal where some user commands would be sent to a non-Openai algorithm.
It will have a hard time if you try and make something serious with it.
The Medieval Problems are more closed systems with less obvious moderation risks, but creative tools may pose its own set of issues. Over time, the company hopes to shift more of its games onto other programs. We will have more structure and systems so that it is not just consuming the [Openai] API in the same way. Most of our models will probably be ones that we host ourselves, he says. The models based on emerging open source projects have had trouble competing with OpenAI, but have advanced since their early days. The gap will not be around that long.
A lot of games use procedural generation to create huge quantities of content, and most video game instructions are relatively simple. A company like Latitude uses trained software to produce text or images that fit a pattern from a data set. Think of them as advanced autocomplete systems. Novelai has harnessed text generation for creative work, and right now that can make the resulting experiences highly unpredictable, and their absurdity is part of their charm.
There are still ways to make systems where players can expect fair outcomes. Text generation systems don't have a built-in sense of whether an action succeeds or fails, and systems for making those judgments may not agree with normal human intuition. In a game like Pixel This, players can't predict how a picture will look, but image generation is great for weird art.
The solution is to lean into the chaos. It will have a hard time if you try and make something serious with the technology because people are going to expect a high level of coherence. If you embrace that aspect of it and let it be crazy and wacky, then you make a fun experience and people will enjoy it.
