AI Storytelling. An introduction to AIDungeon, Dreamily and KoboldAI.

Arika · November 5, 2021

I've spent most of the day fiddling around with the 3 main free AI story-telling games/services/whateveryouwanttocallthem

AIDungeon (been using for about a year)
Dreamily
koboldAI

and i think i can give a pretty good impression of all of them. I gave each one the same generic fantasy world prompt since it's what a lot of the GPT-2 (and GPT-neo), GPT-3 and GPT-J models were trained with. So here's what i've come up with

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AIDungeon

Has the most mature model of everything i've tested thus far. The free "griffin" model recently got updated to a GPT-J model instead of the previous GPT-3 they were running. I feel like this update has put it in the best state AID has ever been in. I did pay for the dragon model for about 2 months to see what it's like, and holy shit is it good, but it's not free, so i'll skip over that for now.

The biggest "con" with AID is it's "energy" system in the free tiers. it was only introduced fairly recently, but came about because of a massive influx of people joining and absolutely hammering the free model that it just wasn't sustainable. but the 2000 actions you get (and 1 free retry on every single AI generated prompt) is still a LOT of stuff. i think my longest story was around 700 actions and that was over 4-5 days. it's not exactly a game you can just sit down and "play" for hours and hours all day everyday. Though with that said, it is the most game-like.

If you've looked into AID before, you may have seen that there was a massive controversy around 7 months ago where Latitude started implementing filters and penalties to things happening in-game. Partly bought about because of OpenAIs ToS which AID uses for their models. it got so bad to the point that the Filters were flagging so many false positives and even the AI prompts themselves were triggering the flags (of which the user gets punished for) that there was a mas exodus from AID, to mainly the other 2 listed here and NovelAI. But back in September they rolled back quite a bit. they no longer filter or penalize anything in private single-player stories, much like it was prior to the introduction of the filter in April 2021 and that private stories will be (or are as of now, i can't find the update again) fully encrypted.

Yes i did say "single-player" which means there is also multi-player games that can be done.

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Dreamily

This one is hard to describe, it's not really a game, it's kind of like an AI story writing assistant. While you can do normal text-based game commands like "pick up bucket", it's much more geared towards you providing it with novel like sentences like "You look around the abandoned cottage, the creaking floorboards putting you on edge. You walk over to one of the corners and pick up the bucket" or entire paragraphs. It seems to prefer the second person perspective, but is able to function in first and third person sufficiently well

The AI will then give you 3 options to chose from, kind of like a chose your own adventure book, of which you can request another 3 if you don't like them, or go in and edit it yourself.

It really wants to keep adding new characters into the story or creating tense situations, i would say 60% of the prompts it generated for me was along the lines of "you hear approaching footsteps" or your character speaking to someone as if they've been there since the start. It's less consistent than AID, so it does require a bitof hand-holding to guide it in the right Direction

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KoboldAI

This one actually had me the most excited because it's the only one that can be downloaded and run locally on your computer, no internet access required. Unfortunately it also happens to have the worst models out of the 3. I tested 3 of their models, GPT-2 - XL, GPT Neo 2.7B and GPT-J 6b JAX

I could get the first 2 running on my hardware with relative ease, but the JAX model is waaaay to large for my 8GB VRAM GPU. splitting the load between GPU and CPU allowed it to "function" but at the expense of very long generation times, sometimes up to 2 minutes.

This can be alleviated by running KoboldAI through the Google Colab workspaces, but it's not a great experience needing to wait 15-30 minutes to start each time you wish to "play".

Kobold claims that their JAX model is their equivalent of AID's Griffin model, but i can say this is not the case. it required much more hand holding that Dreamily and the prompts were all over the place. the GPT-2 and GPT-Neo's prompts were very repetitive even within the same prompt. I got the following generation after leaving an NPCs house after returning their lost daughter

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"thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you."

You nod and wave goodbye as you close the door "thank you."

"thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you."

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Kobold is the least accessible and usable, but it's saving grace is that it can be used offline if you have a decent enough GPU. i would say minimum 8GB of VRAM for GPT-neo 2,7b and it's derivatives and 16GB for the JAX model. So if you have a GPU that has a lot of VRAM it can't hurt to just try it out, it is free after all.

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There's also NovelAI, but that is only a paid service, but if i was going to pay for one, i'd go with an AIDungeon subscription again. it's cheaper and even though the $5 tier doesn't give you access to the dragon model, you get infinite access to Griffin (no energy required), which from everything i've seen, people say Novel is about griffin level, if not slightly lower.

So why AI driven story-telling?

There's something nostalgic about text-based adventure games, and in these you can be and do literally what ever you like and the AI will roll with it. You can behave like a god, don't like the situation you're in? "you turn into a dragon and burn everyone around you" and the AI will go "ok", or you can treat the AI like a dungeon master, taking what ever it gives you and seeing what happens. It doesn't even have to be fantasy, or even action oriented. Want to play a story in your favorite scifi universe (like W40k) or even your favorite anime? chances are the AI will be able to pull something together to have some fun with.

I'm willing to answer any questions you might have about any of the 3 AIs listed above, or even just about AI story-telling in general. I'm not someone that can fully understand HOW these things work, but i've been using AID at least for about a year so i know a couple of tricks to make things better.

jaslion · November 5, 2021

I love AI dungeon and it's such a neat concept. I'm not bound to the limited scope of adventure games and can just mess around with whatever I want. Hell I was going on a grand quest but ended up being a gourmet pie baker after I discovered great control over water and fire magic :p. Especially fun when my party kept going on and arriving multiple times for a piebreak after a grand adventure.

I wasn't the main character but a person in the world and it just felt so nice to be in a story like that.