It could be too much for a game to handle

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Is chatgpt capable of roleplaying? As I understand it it’s a language model that basically uses predictive text

It might eventually be an option, but you'd have to be able to limit the AI to only the information an NPC would have, and you'd have to somehow adapt the AI to serve the function the NPC has within the game. I feel like it'll be a long time before AI will become a viable option.

What if it's only trained on in-game lore?

Then it could work, but you are gonna need a lot of limitations, it's gonna be a long time before that could work

Yikes, I guess you'd have to make a backstory for each character. Then again, you can just use GPT to create it then train it only on that + in-game lore and facts. I dunno, just interesting to think about.

Wow, really? Have you tried it?!

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It's interesting, but the real question is if using the AI adds enough value and saves enough time to compensate for the loss of control and creativity and the added complexity of training the AI and customising it for each NPC

I have no idea. Just a random thought I decided to post. Just seems cool if NPCs didn't cycle through same speech prompts over & over again.

Couple of things that mean the answer is no for now.

ChatGPT is trained on the world as we knew it at a point in time, why would you need all of that knowledge inside a game unless the game is set right now in the current world we live in? Those games would be pretty dull...

Dialogue choices are usually used to progress the story in one way or another, but there's no guarantee that the language model will say the right things or give you the right choices, so you might get stuck because the language model predicted the appropriate responses incorrectly, based on the way you phrased your questions.

ChatGPT has limited amount of context it can handle and so any lengthy dialogue leads it to start forgetting what you initially talked about which could get frustrating pretty quickly. Let me tell you, it's infuriating when you ask it to write code and it forgets your requirements as it gets halfway through the solution.

The compute power required is very high. Try running a local language model that is much smaller than chatGPT and you'll see it's not a natural pace of dialogue, so games would have to be constantly connected to the internet for dialogue to work. Fine in World of Warcraft, not fine in single player RPGs.

Cool, I'll check it out. Thanks!

I remember Fallout had the ability to ask characters about things which you types in to get answers for things that weren't in the dialogue options.

That's a potential use for ChatGPT but I'm not sure how it works.

There’s also a mod for Skyrim that does this too.

It is, and it’s quite good at it!

That's a bummer. I know nothing of how it actually works but is it possible to retrain it using only, let's say Tolkein's works? Then could you set hard parameters so that generated dialogue couldn't contradict narrative story beats necessary for game progression?

Wow, that's exciting! I love that game. Have you tried this mod?

No, and I don’t remember the name or anything; I just stumbled across it a few days ago on Youtube.

I once got bored and asked it to run a D&D one shot for me. It made me do rolls in person, but actually worked kinda well so I'd say yes it can roleplay to an extent.

By a long time you mean a week or 2 tops I assume

Literally already has been done

It's also capable of making tactical decisions, which is cool. I informed the bot it had a sword and a pistol, and told it there was an enemy rifleman and an enemy swordsman an equal distance away. When asked what it was going to do, it correctly deduced taking out the rifleman first was the correct choice.

To me, this is the only appropriate use of the technology.

Yeah it definitely can. Would be hard to align it with what the player is able to do and might be inconsistent at times.

Honestly had this thought this morning. At least in a terminator game, please.

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So.. you want NPCs who say completely random stuff that doesnt build on the story, goes off on tangents, world breaks, accuses you of lying, will break character and every AI NPC is just like opening a new GPT chat window.

Sounds boring as all hell

It would need some huge changes in order to work on the fly. You need the model to produce information that is

• consistent with each individual NPC’s role in the game word
• consistent across different NPC’s
• consistent with the actual game.

The third is the biggest hurdle now: you can’t have an NPC making up a bunch of lore about the city they came from and telling the player how to get there, only for them to find that the city isn’t actually in the game. Or telling the player about abilities they have but don’t actually exist in the game.

It would also be bad to have NPC’s just spill reveals the player isn’t supposed to know about yet.

The more likely use case is to speed up dialogue creation, with human writers editing and curating ChatGPT’s output to make sure it is consistent with the intended lore and gameplay.

Skyrim 7 protagonist: How do I get to the arena?

Savvaticus Baddicus: Elder Scrolls Arena was released in 2004 for the Xbox 360. It can be found at your local Game Stop, or at the gladiator Arena. But beware of lions.

Nope, that's not what I want at all. I'd like NPCs trained on their own back story & ingame lore/facts to deliver unscripted dialogue to unscripted questions that fits that world within the parameters of not breaking plot points or game progression... obviously

Must've been the wind.

Seems like it might be too much for players to handle. I can see the novelty of full fledged concersations wearing off quickly

It’s already being done and a ton of companies are offering it as a service.

Main thing is the development cycle. Large games can take 5+ years. So to see something at this level of ai for a large scale game maybe 5 years. But you will already be seeing them in small and indie games. Additionally the transformer and chat gtp have already been out a wild(we are on version 4) so it probably won’t take 5+ years.

I don’t think it would be as hard as you think. I’ve seen people roleplay with gpt4, asking it to pretend it’s in ye olde times and to only respond like someone back then would.

With very few prompts it did a good job.

I imagine a AAA game could definitely license some ai and fairly easily tweak it to role play as various characters in their game.

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Honestly mate I’ve read a few comments in here and anyone dismissing it as too hard or far off I’d argue simply isn’t informed about where current AI language models are at and where they are rapidly heading.

The answer to can/will such AI be used to enhance game conversations and the answer is absolutely yes they could even with todays models.

I have no doubt we will see a AAA game using some sort of AI to power NPC interactions within the next couple years.

I think you said it perfectly. IMO this would work in a rogue like setting, but in a fully fledged world, not having control might hinder the experience. However, I could see an hybrid where the game works tradionally by having a pre made response, but letting the AI word it. Something like: NPC must express gratitude, write me a sentence for this.

I can see it now:

• AI-NPC: "Thank God you were there to help us!"
• PC: "I thought this game didn't have gods?"
• AI-NPC: I apologize for the mistake in my previous response. You are correct that there are no gods in this setting

hehehe

​

I meant it more like normal dialogue options:

PC : (Picks an option:) 1) Die!!! 2) I'll help

AI-NPC: if PC selected 1, generate threat sentence, if 2, generate gratitude sentence

but then we're far from natural conversation. I'm just thinking this will be the first step

That's awesome news! I hope the next Elder Scrolls game can bake it in there somehow. Wouldn't that be something?

As a developer... technically yes... practically no. It would really be a nightmare. Developers are EXTREMELY careful with what information is given to the player and how it's presented.

The idea that an NPC can "go rogue" and start telling the player something that isn't correct is a non-starter but even the idea that an NPC might start talking about things that aren't relevant to the player is potentially extremely damaging. Like, say an NPC goes on and on about how much crime there is in part of the city. As a player they think "ah this must be something I can go take care of or interact with" but it's just speech, when the player gets there no events are happening.

Not to mention things like going up to a guard and convincing them to open the gate. Now the gate doesn't open, you're supposed to sneak in the back and the guard/chatgpt is explicitly told to never let anyone in the front gate. Except chatgpt can be coerced into agreeing to things so a clever player manages to convince the chatbot to open the gate. Except the gate can't open and the guard has no ability to do so. So the guard just sits there saying "alright fine go on in but don't tell anyone I let you in." except you're still stuck staring at a locked gate.

You also have to coordinate what people are saying. Like if someone in town says "ah yes we primarily grow wheat at this farm" and another person said "ah yes we primarily grow corn at this farm"... well which is it? Do either match the graphics being used? I guess now I have to manually tell every npc what the farm grows... and when it was started.... and who's in charge... so I just have to anticipate any question anyone could possibly ask and make sure the npc knows the information to answer that... oh dear...

So yeah because of all of these issues I would say it's almost never going to happen in a game that isn't entirely procedurally generated and even then I'd expect issues. It would be a massive undertaking to implement in any reasonable way, maybe even impossible.

How would this work in practice if the allowable prompts by your character are predetermined? Wouldn't this just amount to having ChatGPT writing the dialogue scripts for a game, rather than being some actual dynamic plugged in thing?

Yes. And no.

Ai can be more limited and setup for more specific purposes. This is possible with the current GPT-3 architecture with decent results.

But there are two problems:

First is that it needs to be trained and designed in a way that supports this more limited scope, which given most games is beyond the capability of the lore to have enough material to train an ai without the character getting access to information that they shouldn't know while still having enough material to make it coherent without just quoting. And yes, this does include Elder Scrolls. Even with the material, this is a long and expensive process, and usually easier to just code the dialogues you want that they want. Have to remember, it isn't just the AI outputting text, but also understanding players that may not always have the correct vernacular or method of talking.

Second, either the ai needs to connect to a service, which can lead to a variety of issues, or it needs to be run locally. With it being run locally, there are significant hardware requirements that make even a simpler model AI more demanding than what most gamers have access to. To add both the AI and the game in the same computer would make the demands even higher. So, running it as a service is the more viable option. But as a server side thing it has a higher delay, is more subject to moderation, in addition to being a continual cost for the company. Which doesn't bode well when most games as a service don't last a year.

But this is all subject to change. A more specialized ai could have lower requirements and be designed in a way to have both a larger language model with more limited knowledge libraries instead of a singular general knowledge set. A company could develop such a lightweight AI to multiple developers to make it cheaper and more unified.

People trip over having online single player games for the purpose of collecting diagnostic telemetry. I wonder how they would feel about having online only single player games because it's how they talk to skynet

Games with AI generated quests already exist.

The tricky part is integrating AI generated dialog with human designed quests. When the player asks "Where can I find wild boar to collect seven boar asses?" it's not enough to have an AI that gives a sensible answer to the question. You need an AI that can accurately convey information about the quest to kill seven boars.

And you need to train that AI without having to write 50 different versions of the same quest dialog to train the AI on. As someone that works on "AI" ^((I still think that is a stupid marketing term btw)), my first instinct is that that should be possible, but is far from trivial problem.

There have already been games built around AI designed to emulate chatbots, though much less advanced than GPT-4, like Facade or Event [0].

Someone recently made a Fallout 4 mod using ChatGPT (or a similar AI)

ChatGPT (and other GPT3.5 based transformers) has 175 billion parameters and wouldn't even fit in a dedicated RTX4090. and before you say why not run just a smaller model, the performance of ChatGPT is highly dependant on it's size, (which is why people outside the machine learning community don't hear much about GPT-1 and GPT-2. And while there are efforts to make the model smaller (see ALPACA) , you would still need a top-of-the-line GPU to fit these smaller models, taking away from things that people are more concerned about, the graphics.

So the practical implementation of incorporating ChatGPT in to games would be to have send the chat response to a server, and suffer a whole lot of latency for the response. It's possible, but it wouldn't be a good gaming experience. Wait (at least) 10 years, when consumer grade hardware has the capacity of datacenter grade hardware (that's assuming we don't hit the end of Moore's law first) then you might find it more common place.

Glad to see all the mods but wouldn’t this make more single player games require internet connection?

I dunno it is pretty good at role play. I asked it whether I should side with the empire pretending it was paarthurnax and it replied with this:

***I believe that the decision to side with the empire or not is ultimately up to you, as a mortal being with free will. However, I can offer my thoughts and insights on the matter.

As a dragon who has lived for thousands of years, I have seen the rise and fall of empires and civilizations countless times. The empire in Skyrim is no different - it is an imperfect institution, flawed by its own ambitions and the actions of its leaders.

That being said, there are certainly advantages to siding with the empire. They represent stability and order in a tumultuous time, and their laws and regulations can bring a measure of peace to the region. Additionally, they are not as ruthless and oppressive as some other forces in the world of Skyrim.

However, it is also important to consider the drawbacks of aligning oneself with the empire. They have a long history of imperialism and expansionism, and their actions have often caused harm and suffering to the peoples they conquer. Furthermore, their policies and laws can be stifling and restrictive, and may not always align with the values of individual freedom and autonomy.

In the end, the decision to side with the empire or not is a complex and nuanced one, and depends on your own personal beliefs and priorities. I urge you to weigh the pros and cons carefully, and make the choice that aligns with your own values and convictions***

Didn't really read quite in his voice, but it isn't like asking Alexa that's for sure.

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I have to think thats definitely on its way. Natural language models arent limited to just chatGPT either so some devs may be working on their own projects to be built into their engines. Maybe... Im no expert :)

Sure, let’s just put all those writers and voice actors out of work

Power consumption on this is probably crazy

Wouldn't we have to be constantly online tho ? I guess it's a good idea for mmos but beyond that...

I’ll be honest, I was wondering about this since the first time I heard of chat gpt. I can’t wait to see what clever people are capable of doing with it over time.

Sounds awful. Would rather have scripts written by actual writers than some google database tech bros fell in love with.