AI Dungeon

I'm going through and finding which games are on my 'played' list but not reviewed, and this is one of them.

AI Dungeon was a novelty when it came out 5 years ago. It was a large language model trained on the Chooseyourstory website's CYOA games. Due to the early days of ChatGPT, it frequently would go off on ludicrous tangents.

Nowadays it's been rewritten several times, and I'm not sure it can be said to have been one product over the years, which makes it distinctly hard to review.

Trying out the newest version, I played a couple of the main storylines. I first checked to see if it still has a lot of weird junk in its training data (it did; it knows who Harry Potter's friends are) and if it can obey commands (kind of; it resisted me trying to summon demons and summoned an animal instead, but when I said all of my wishes eventually came true, it allowed the original summoning to take effect).

The storyline just wanders off. In one scenario where there was an AI called Persephone ruling the land, I asked to be taken to see her and they took me into a temple. Then the tapestries started writhing and a guy in them called the Marquise started calling me out and wanting to talk to me, not mentioning Persephone at all. I ordered the game to ignore him and walk in to see Persephone, then I ordered it to let me win immediately. It got more and more resistant until it just said 'error, you need to pay to continue'.

The interactivity is 'soft': you can do mostly anything, and the game will remember it for a moment. The real interactivity isn't discovering what world awaits you; its trying to respond to or outthink or encourage the language model. It's less of a game with a real world setting and more of a conversation between two people.

Checking the AI Dungeon subreddit, it looks like many people just use it for pornography.

Overall, I think the audience for this and the audience for most IFComp-style parser games are pretty different. The joy for me for IFComp games is seeing what the author has come up with, while the joy in this game is mostly seeing what the player can come up with; but when I come up with a game, I like to just actually write one.

So, this game is not for me, but I can understand why people would enjoy it.