You’ve never intuited that two characters are friends? Or perhaps that guy holding a ton of cheese is the cheese guy? Or that an event was emotionally meaningful to them?
I don’t know what you’re hoping to talk to these dwarves about.
I’m not saying I would be “upset” if the head canon wasn’t actualized. I’m saying I would be underwhelmed because the generic LLM content is nearly guaranteed by this other thing that I stated as a premise I found interesting or amusing.
If you intuit that two characters are friends, and then something happens that makes it seem like they're not friends, you'll say "Hey, I thought you two were friends", and the LLM will realize what you're going for, and then come up with something like "Oh we were but now we're fighting".
The LLM's role will very much a "yes, and" improv role that will let you guide your own personal story. Or have it push back on you if you want. "What? You thought we were friends? No, I was just doing my duties".
What I want to talk about with the dwarves is everything, and LLMs will deliver in spades. I want to ask the lowly NPC what life is like working hard in the mines. Then I want to decide to recruit him on my quest because I like his backstory and personality. Then I'll watch as he levels up with me, in a way that could never be scripted by the game creators. That's just one small way that LLMs will provide a far superior gameplay experience.
> If you intuit that two characters are friends, and then something happens that makes it seem like they're not friends, you'll say "Hey, I thought you two were friends", and the LLM will realize what you're going for, and then come up with something like "Oh we were but now we're fighting".
That’s the opposite of what I’m saying. Asking the LLM to justify something is possible but, imo, very boring.
What I’m complaining about is asking about their friend and they don’t believe they have a friend. They just fail to capture the apparent narrative that you’ve enjoyed because it’s not really close to whatever game logic they’re scripted to utilize
There's no game logic they're scripted to utilize that limits what you're looking for.
I'm not sure why you think they'd say they have no friends. You'd say "Tell me about your friend", and the NPC would respond with something like "I have many friends, which one do you mean?". Then you could say "The one I saw you walking into town with yesterday", and the NPC might say, "Oh Rolf, him and I go way back!".
Maybe he says that because the LLM has instructions that him and Rolf are friends explicitly, put there by the game devs. Maybe it's not there explicitly, but the LLM sees what you mean and writes the backstory dynamically. Maybe a little bit of both.
LLMs are great at picking up narratives like that. It's kind of their whole thing.
Does that really sound fun to you? Why would a player want to grill an NPC about their friend Rolf if all that they're going to get from it is improvised LLM-generated anecdotes?
Players don't talk to NPCs simply because they want to see text on the screen. They're hoping for well-written and interesting dialogue. If the devs couldn't be bothered to write lines for this guy, why would I want to talk to him? He clearly has nothing to say worth listening to.
Have you actually tried asking ChatGPT to tell you a story? It's boring. It's not a good writer. I don't know why you think players would want to spend time reading that stuff.
I think you just don't get it, and maybe this genre wouldn't be for you, which is fine. It's not about the devs bothering to write lines, it's about the devs enabling you to create your own world. I don't want some shitty NPCs slapped in there by a dev trying to hit a deadline. I want to experience my own story, freed from the shackles of the on-rails experience that game devs must currently provide.
> Have you actually tried asking ChatGPT to tell you a story?
What you're not getting is that the storytelling will be cooperative. You'll still be able to consume content to your heart's content. Some of that content will soon be people creating compelling stories in cooperation with LLMs. LLMs will also be great at storytelling too, but the best stories are ones that you can help write yourself.
Then why not write your own story? An LLM can't write your story for you. They're very bad writers. It can't even help much—its contributions are going to be dull and uninspired.
> the best stories are ones that you can help write yourself
If you're trying to co-create a story with someone in a play environment, the best analogy would be D&D or another role-playing game. And playing D&D with ChatGPT would be boring and unfun. It's just not a good storyteller. It's going to give you shit material. You'd be better-off cutting it out of the equation and just writing a story alone.
> LLMs will also be great at storytelling too
Will they? They're godawful at it right now, and they're not showing much sign of improving. Let's discuss the tech as it currently exists, rather than some speculative future version of it with imaginary capabilities.
> What you're not getting is that the storytelling will be cooperative.
No, I get that. But why would I want to cooperatively tell a story with a bad storyteller? I'd rather tell a story alone.
A bot that always affirms your assertions is boring as hell to talk to.
If the dwarf bot does not know that the character he represents spent the last 24 hours in combat alongside another specific dwarf without you communicating this in text then it might as well not be attached to any character. Liked what would the point be??? That’s just an out of game bot.
Your example conversation of leading the bot to say specific things is… awful in my opinion. Who would want to talk to an NPC like this?
So don't use an LLM that always affirms your assertions. Easy peasy.
I don't understand your beef. My awkward dialogue was just to demonstrate that the LLM can pick up on all of these things you claim it can't. The LLM wouldn't "believe it didn't have a friend", why would you think that?
It's also fine to just enjoy on-rails games with a prewritten story, those will still exist. You might even enjoy the epic stories that people create in these new sandboxes and share with the world.
Because your mental model of how this would work is handwaving the impossibly difficult task of converging the LLM state with the narrative and game state.
Your crappy awkward dialogue is probably a very realistic example of a stupid bot that doesn’t even know what actor it represents in game.
You’re asking why if would think that? You tell me how it would come to the conclusion correctly by using the game logic. And don’t give an answer that requires a hard coded dev interface between specific game elements and the LLM because that is on its own a more complex task than the LLM itself. It’s incredibly difficult. Shitty home assistants that can’t actually do anything being the prime example. The language processing is not the hard part. It’s the mapping of language to data and capabilities that’s extremely hard.
Synthesizing an agent that can form an identity based on its experiences and leverage game mechanics to pursue goals and convey all of this logic in flexible natural language is basically asking for a general intelligence. It’s an incredibly different thing from the shitty dialogue example you wrote
I don’t know what you’re hoping to talk to these dwarves about.
I’m not saying I would be “upset” if the head canon wasn’t actualized. I’m saying I would be underwhelmed because the generic LLM content is nearly guaranteed by this other thing that I stated as a premise I found interesting or amusing.