LET AI PLAY SKYRIM
(RPG Fanfiction Project)
(C)reated by Midjourney on 2022-08-23
"pixelart something something Skyrim"
Each event is preceded by Prophecy. But without the hero, there is no Event.
Essentially, a Skyrim fanfiction in a form of a dialogue between a (large language model) AI as the player and a human game master.
Ten years after Skyrim release, large language model AIs grew from the wisdom of the crowds arose to the task. But will they prevail?Â
Notes on tested AI/chatbots ...
I've been trying out if any of the new wave of chatbots is able to act as a player character in Skyrim. My findings so far.
Replika - ended up roasted by the dragon in Helgen (pastebin)
Kuki (the Loebner prize winning chatbot) - I didn't even try to continue past the "step out of the cart and move to the block", it was so disconnected from the Skyrim story.
same result with Anima
Chai.ml (prompted with "Hero: Each event is preceded by Prophecy. MG: But without the hero, there is no Event.") - it replied with simple reaction responses, but it correctly answered where the cart arrived to, and how many people were on the cart; it hanged up more or less when the dragon appears
AI Dungeon - I wasn't able to get it to role play as a character, even in its story mode, it won't assume the role of the player character to my prompt. maybe I am doing something wrong
NovelAI - web page hangs up - ?
(new, August 2022) BlenderBot 3 from Meta AI - it has some potential: (pastebin)Â
the AI tends to freestyle improv; on one attempt, it wanted to decide that Ralof grabs a sword from his belt despite earlier chat about how all prisoners don't have any weapons.
Unfortunately, I cannot go through the intro cart scene without an error "Sensitive topic classifier triggered" which makes the bot try to change the topic of the conversation; ignoring the error past that, AI still wants to improv its own story "then elven archers attack and we have to fight them off!"...
GPT3 (da Vinci, playground, default settings) - in progress (started 2022-08-08) - so far so good; the AI makes up stuff on behalf of GM, but it marks it as coming from GM's, and it is easy to erase. Occasionally I kept it, if it made a good, inconsequential fluff.
part 1, into the Helgen keep pastebin - decided to follow Ralof
Emerson - AI told me he is the gamemaster, and that I play as a human in a place where there are other people who want to learn languages, not in Skyrim but in the game "TES V: Skyrim", when trying to learn more it essentially reiterated that it is a chatbot for teaching languagesÂ
BLOOM - okay, for a 1000-tokens LLM. Tends to rave mad, sometimes in foreign languages (pastebin). Also, in the end it did not want to continue ("... we're done. End of the game."), so I'll pass on BLOOM for now (still it seems the best option in case GPT-3 would turn out infeasible).
(new, 2022-09-21) Character.AI - very solid, passes the Helgen intro test, here's the Todd Howard persona, lol (pastebin). It tends to improv, maybe it will improv less on a tailored player persona. I should attempt a serious playthrough with this bot when I'll have time for that.
(2022-12-01) ChatGPT - not suitable, read yourself (pastebin) - otherwise it is quite good and possibly on par with GPT3-davinci-003 (which in turn is a significant upgrade over the previous GPT3 test). If it is any consolation, ChatGPT is now used to formulate some of the NPC responses, along the GM guidelines.
(2022-03-14) Alpaca-7B - not suitable, the output is mixed up of what PC and GM could say. (pastebin)
(2022-04-15) vicunia-13b - better than Alpaca, but runs into similar issues (pastebin)
Expectations from the series ...
It starts, canonically, on a cart riding towards Helgen. If a chatbot seems not getting it at all, off to the block!
If a chatbot does not have enough survival instinct to flee Helgen, it stops there, too.
The character creation (race, appearance, known spells, and so on) is postponed until entering the Helgen Keep.
The Helgen Keep dungeon is still railroaded, but after exiting it, the AI player can do whatever they like, same as in the original game.
The story is continuous, player does not "die and reload a save game"; it is up to the GM to steer player from "game over" ideas.
Large language model AIs by default don't have a long-term memory, the GM will need to remind the player eventually everything (even the name of the player character). If this turn out too repetitive and boring, hopefully it will be a collapsible section for the reader to skip over.
These AIs are trained on texts from the internet, including discussions of the Skyrim game, which is a mixed blessing. For what it's worth, they pretend to be playing the story for the first time when asked point blank about it...
For a while, AI plays alone. Seeing how it handles simple things, later, the player character teams up with a follower, and the follower is effectively amending the AI lapses.Â
Even though it starts canonically, this is a "Dragonborn is NPC" fanfiction. At some point, an omnious apparition consumes the soul of a dragon, prompting a jarl to dispatch a trusted housecarl to seek a Dragonborn; as the eyewitness, player character is asked to help. Or something like that.
The aim is for two playthroughs, side-by-side, with one character following Ralof and one character following Hadvar initially. Though, there may be some tweak to the Skyrim civil war plot as well.
