Diving deeper into AI storytelling with NLP-generated stories

As I finished my one-month subscription for Midjourney which I used to complete ~300 pieces of illustrations, I turned my attention to the next goal which has been annoying me since I started.

For those who’ve been with me for a while, you should know that I always wanted Hypnagonia to be a story-rich experience. Unfortunately my imagination wrote a check that my brain can’t cash, as I pretty much have 0 storytelling skill. So until now, most fluff has been 1 or 2 sentences only and pretty uninspiring at that.

Unfortunately all my attempts to find a dedicated writing collaborator also failed, so this was going nowhere.

However using AI art also reminded me that there is also a potential for AI text as well. So I decided to give a try to using a NLP AI to help me storywrite.

Initially I attempted to use OpenAI GPT-3 davinci model, but while decent enough, it required quite a bit of effort to wrangle it into the prose I wanted and on top of that, I only had a few dollars as initial budget which were going to run out quite fast at the rate I wanted to work.

So I went looking into something to possibly self-host and run on my GPU or with some other cheaper alternative. Long story short, I discovered KoboldAI which is like the perfect match for my project! The models availablew to it are apparently not as “trained” as the GPT-3 davinci, but they are however trained specifically for writing stories and game-like-adventures, which is exactly what I need.

Fortunately I could get KoboldAI to work without hassle on my desktop and even though I don’t have a particularly beefy GPU, the models that I can run on it (roughly comparable to GPT-2) were good enough to provide me with a good story baseline I could tweak, and thus I have been hard at work generating stories for all my Torments.

This latest release is the first release where I have AI-generated intros and conclusions for all Torments, so I would really like your feedback! Please do tell me if these are great, good enough, or plain cringe. It’s not always easy to make the AI do interesting stories in the writing style I’m using so knowing which ones need further improvement would greatly help.

However, working on this part, gave me a lot of ideas of what I could potentially do with AI-generated text.

One idea I want to explore, once I have finished the NCEs flavour that is, is to create a way for Hypnagonia to utilize dynamically generated text for each encounter. So you run into a torment, you will not anymore get a predefined text that I’ve prepared, but it will instead ask an AI to generate something ad-hoc and display it to you.

I could theoretically design this right now using the GPT-3 APIs, but unfortunately this would be too costly to attempt. Instead I am planning to initially develop it using self-hosted KoboldAI instances and people can switch on that feature if they have a KoboldAI running. If it looks like it’s a success, I might extend it to some hosted solution.

Unfortunately KoboldAI doesn’t currently have an API with which Godot can communicate with. I wasted almost a whole day trying to make this work without success. However some of the developers have volunteered to start work on a REST API implementation so hopefully this will be possible soon.

My ultimate plan it to figure out a way where the text that is given to the player can also be rated by said player. Depending on the ratings, I would then feed this text back to the AI in some way so that it would keep training itself for better story generation, based on what the player find enjoyable reading. Ultimately I want to make it so that the quality of the story generated in Hypnagonia keeps improving infinitely, the more players actually use it. Let’s see if I can get anywhere close to that :D

If anyone finds this potential of video game + NLP AI integration as fascinating as I do, and you A) either have some experience with AI and you want to help me do a Hypnagonia-specific model, or B) you want to help me develop AI-generated stories for the game, do ping me! I am already crafting a whole “Hypnagonia World” in KoboldAI that can be used as a baseline for telling stories.