Good dialogue AI?

[Fauser123]

I've been playing around with tech to implement in games. Eventually, I noticed that there is a lot to do with dialogue AI: chatbots, paraphrasing/spinning tools, etc.

I'm not that interested in dialogue as 2-way communication because current AIs aren't beating the Turing test--machine answers are just uncanny. I'm more interested in generating simple sentences for the user using limited parameters.

Paraphrasing tools, for example, do a great job at cleaning broken sentences that could be generated via algorithms. Getting keywords and generating broken sentences is easy enough.

Some game dialogues are maybe 10% story relevant and 90% of no consequences or plain paraphrasing, so I cannot fathom why that tech is not in games as it would allow a single dev to do the work of tens. It may not be much from a user perspective but from a single dev POV, this changes everything.

Any recommended tool/software that can be operated offline and easy enough to tweak or interesting enough to learn to use?

 

[anne O'nymous]

Some game dialogues are maybe 10% story relevant and 90% of no consequences or plain paraphrasing, so I cannot fathom why that tech is not in games as it would allow a single dev to do the work of tens.

For the same reason that book authors don't use this technology to increase the number of pages of their creations. And this reason is that the start of your sentence is wrong ; all lines are 100% story relevant.

Whatever how bad an author can be, and therefore whatever how stupid, insignificant, and/or out of context, a dialog line can feel. If it's what is wrote at this exact moment, it's because the author thought that is was the words to write.
Of course, some chitchat about the weather, during breakfast by example, will not revolution the story or make the player have a revelation and suddenly understand everything. Yet, it have to match the characters' personality, their current mood, correspond to the reality of the story, and fit in the current context.
It's too much constraint for actual technology. And this not only at an amateur level, even AAA games do not rely on AI for their filling dialogs. Yet, they have way more than any game on the adult gaming scene. The farthest they go is randomly picking the lines for a random PNJ.

 

[shark_inna_hat]

GPT-3 is the only AI that I know of that can generate convincing human-like text. Microsoft owns it now and offers a very limited access to it.
If you want to train your own, sure you can do it, you just need a render farm with a few hundred top end gpus to run for a few months - but if you got a setup like that, you're probably better of using it to mine crypto.
The other thing is, even if you got an AI to generate thousands of lines of text, you still need to manually check if it's any good and that would take about the same amount of time as just writing the text in the first place.
In a few years ('one more paper down the line') we could probably just go 'Hey google, write me a conversation about the weather between two people, and render me some images while you're at it'. We're not quiet there, yet.

 

[fidless]

Some game dialogues are maybe 10% story relevant and 90% of no consequences or plain paraphrasing, so I cannot fathom why that tech is not in games as it would allow a single dev to do the work of tens.

Play better games. The idea of current AI writing for your game is ridiculous.
Maybe it's a viable option for a shit game.

 

[Jofur]

I played around a bit with a simple markov chains to generate sentences. It was a lot of fun to learn about. But most of it turns into

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type of nonsense. Actual realistic sentence and dialog generation requires fairly high knowledge of AI stuff.

If I ever decide to make a text based game I will defiantly play around with some form of text generation however, but I envision it more being a sort of simple grammar/story system that inserts applicable words/sentences that fits with the current context. So most of the writing would still be hand crafted and curated.
A while ago I played around and did a prototype of a thesaurus style word replacement system that would automatically change certain words in a sentence to make things feel less repetitive and copy-pasted. That sort of stuff.

 

[desmosome]

There was some recent controversy over a startup company in Korea. They created a female chatbot called Lee Luda, who used machine learning from 10 billion Kakaotalk (basically korean Line or Viber) conversations between young couples. It was absolutely convincing and could hold a conversation. The controversy was obviously retarded because people got angry that an AI that learned from people said some fucked up stuff against lesbians or was able to be lead into sexual conversations.

The other controversy for which they got fined was that they apparently used the kakaotalk conversations without consent and with no encryption so privacy issues.

Anyways, Isn't there some games that use machine learning to form text based scenarios? I'm sure one got into trouble as well, because it leaked private game info of the players or something?



I read your OP again and you were talking about something else I guess...
Entering in keywords and having some AI create a paragraph, and using that as your story sounds like a retarded idea if I've ever heard one.

 

[anne O'nymous]

The controversy was obviously retarded because people got angry that an AI that learned from people said some fucked up stuff against lesbians or was able to be lead into sexual conversations.

Didn't they learned from the past ?
Under no circumstance do you train an AI with unfiltered information (

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) and once operational, you ensure that the AI stop learning (

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).

 

[Jofur]

Anyways, Isn't there some games that use machine learning to form text based scenarios? I'm sure one got into trouble as well, because it leaked private game info of the players or something?

I don't know about a controversy, but AI Dungeon is basically a fairly advanced AI making up a tabletop RPG as it goes along. It got fairly viral with YouTubers a year or two ago.

If you turn on NSFW content it's actually a surprisingly entertaining porn game since they basically have no limits to the amount of fucked up things you can do. If you can get over the fact that all this is probably getting logged and stored on a server somewhere. Like literally anything that pops in to your head levels of fucked up.
The main issues are just how "random" the AI is in interpreting your commands and trying to push for extreme story changes. For example you write "Punch the man in front of you" and the AI goes "You punch the man and stab him in the chest with a dagger, then run up to a nearby old lady and kick her in the face, laughing as she cries on the ground.". I haven't tried the paywalled improved AI however so it might be a lot better.

 

[Hagatagar]

Anyways, Isn't there some games that use machine learning to form text based scenarios? I'm sure one got into trouble as well, because it leaked private game info of the players or something?

I don't know about a controversy, but AI Dungeon is basically a fairly advanced AI making up a tabletop RPG as it goes along. It got fairly viral with YouTubers a year or two ago.

Ai Dungeon uses Microsoft's OpenAi and was forced by them to use a filter since the beginning of this year (because of Loli, Incest and Bestiality in privat stories).
This filter was extremely inaccurate, especially in the early days, and reported all sorts of unrelated stuff, and since there were so many reports, they outsourced the reviewing to outside companies.
This procedure was directly contrary to their ToS that NOBODY will ever read private stories.
If you are into fairly vanilla porn stuff, AI Dungeon might still work, but everything outside of that, I wouldn't bet on it (it might get reported for no reason).

 

[Jofur]

Ai Dungeon uses Microsoft's OpenAi and was forced by them to use a filter since the beginning of this year

Well that sucks. Seems Microsoft is sticking to their MO of ruining everything they touch.

 

[Fauser123]

*AI Dungeon is certainly impressive IMO it would be better to guide the AI a little more but I understand they are playing the long game and that shit will eventually be working just fine in a few years.
*I might not be able to use GPT-3 but it's worth looking into it to see what this is about and if there's something less fancy I can use.
Thanks for the suggestions, I hope there are more.

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Yeah, about playing better games:

Skyrim NPC: [insert utterly irrelevent dialogue here]

I am not trying to generate human speech for more than a sentence. I certainly have doubts this is even possible without a PhD and a few thousand dollars of spare cash.

I am not trying to convince you it's a good idea because I know it's a good idea. How it's doable in a game and what scope I can reliably use it for is my current issue. Plus, that tech is sure to be improved in the future so knowing now how much I can do would be useful when there will be even more possibilities.

Plus even if it's were a bad idea then I would be sure to first understand what the AI limits are then purposfully make an unholy game that has all its dialogues right in the uncanny valley.