An AI Werewolf in Large Language Models
This text is presented in conjunction with the exhibition ‘Non-Player Character’ by Bob Bicknell-Knight at Klaipėda Cultural Communication Center. Interspersed through the text are sections of writing created by ChatGPT OpenAI. By Pita Arreola-Burns and Elliott Burns.
Gone are the days of the grunts — no longer are NPCs endowed with compressed audio prompts whose rhythmic delivery mimics the patter of spoken languages. With increases in storage and budget, the pseudo-linguistic has passed to the pre-programmed archive of plausible sentence fragments, which paired with a little in-game memory apes the effect of authentic verbal exchange. In the infancy of this technology we were flattered to walk through Whiterun, Megaton or the Citadel and receive contextually specific praise on our heroics or witness a feigned cowering in response to recent vampirization. Quickly those impressions were dulled, repeated play exposed their mechanics and often a reaction would jar with local misdemeanours. Even in the most systemic worlds, short term memory often rendered NPC interaction laughably fallible.
You are a Skyrim NPC blacksmith. The player is a werewolf kleptomaniac and it is nearly a full moon. Write a dialogue welcoming the player to the village.
“Welcome to our village, werewolf. I am the blacksmith here. I can see the full moon approaching and I understand the struggles of those with the beast blood. However, as a member of this community, I must remind you that thievery will not be tolerated. If you are in need, I am happy to sell you supplies, but please refrain from taking what does not belong to you. Let us avoid any conflicts with our fellow villagers.”
Can you write the dialogue again but have the blacksmith to be more afraid of the player.
“Oh, uh, welcome to our village… traveler. I am the blacksmith here. I can sense the beast within you and with the full moon approaching, I-I cannot help but feel uneasy. Please, I beg of you, do not cause any trouble here. I will sell you whatever supplies you need, but please do not steal from our village or harm any of the residents. I hope we can avoid any conflicts.”
Alongside the graphical and AI behavioural arms race that the AAA video game industry is locked into, it is imaginable that, extending from comprehensive voice-actor dialogues, we will soon witness experimental implementations of large language models. To begin we may expect these to be used to flesh out the verisimilitude of hamlets, villages, towns and cities, ensuring the blacksmith by the roadside responds with a welcome that is both original and specific to your character. Certain conditions would need to be measured: foremost, your actions and not only those that correspond to main or side quest progression; second, the flow of information and misinformation stemming from those actions would need accounting, e.g. would rumour have travelled that far; and thirdly, the character of the NPC themselves would be factored. Our hypothetical blacksmith would thus greet us with a calibrated welcome honestly reflective of a living world and our impacts upon it.
Can you write a reply from the player, but directed towards Citadel police from the Mass Effect game series, explaining that whilst they are a werewolf they also have a high skill ranking in fishing.
“Greetings, officers. I understand that as a werewolf, my presence may be cause for concern. But I assure you, I am highly skilled in fishing, and I have no intention of causing any trouble in Citadel. In fact, I am eager to put my skills to use and help contribute to the community by providing fresh fish for all to enjoy. I’m willing to work with you to ensure my safety and the safety of everyone on Citadel.”
Write a reply from the Citadel police placing the werewolf under arrest.
“I understand your offer, but unfortunately, as a werewolf, you pose a potential danger to the citizens of the Citadel. Protocol dictates that we must place you under arrest and detain you until we can properly assess the level of risk you pose. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause, but the safety of our community must come first.”
Write three dialogue options (A, B, C) for the werewolf to try and get out of trouble.
A) “I understand your concerns, officers, but I assure you that I have been able to control my transformations and have not harmed anyone in a long time. I have lived among normal humans for years without any incidents. Please, give me a chance to prove myself and I promise I won’t cause any trouble.”
B) “I understand that I am a potential danger, but I propose a solution: I will willingly wear a restraint device to control my transformations. This way I can help the community and you can ensure that I will not harm anyone.”
C) “I understand your concerns, officers, but I assure you that I am a peaceful creature. I have been living among humans for years and I have never caused any harm. I beg of you, please don’t put me in confinement. I assure you that I will not cause any trouble, if you just give me a chance to prove myself.”
Of course the technology would not be limited to one-directional welcomes. Iterations of GPT software have already shown themselves competent at holding a conversation. Why not talk back to the blacksmith? Entirely plausible though peppered with hurdles to overcome.
Precluding the opportunity to type/speak a personalised response, our main character would be reliant on another AI to provide a set of conversational options — themselves based upon our actions. Though action may not correlate with sentiment. In worlds following relatively fixed identities — e.g. Mass Effect’s Commander Shepard — we step into preconditioned shoes and wear them with mental character customisation. However, elsewhere we customise from scratch, adjusting a plethora of scales and selecting skills that partially define us and thereafter present a primed canvas for further speculative fabulation. Our avatar is composed of three elements, a) character customisation; b) action; c) feelings. This latter aspect is beyond any in-game AI to monitor (for the moment), creating a high likelihood of our optional dialogues being dissonant from how we imagine our character to speak.
Dissonance signals a rupture in immersion, the lofty goal many developers and gamers judge the industry by. To guard against it increasingly sophisticated AIs will need to be implemented into games. Ones which can monitor the character in minute detail, making sensible decisions about which moments of play to include within the character profile dataset and which to discard as irrelevant dicking around that the player would not define their in-game personality by.
Implemented well, we stand to gain a sense of mutual co-evolution with our characters, witnessing authentic dialogue options that correspond to our actions and in turn calibrating our understanding of that character. Done poorly, we will see a new genre of fails populating YouTube that spur gamers to create increasingly unhinged main characters whose choice of dialogue veers towards the digitally insane.
The werewolf has left the Citadel and is now in Far Cry 3. Write the plot to a side quest involving a hang glider chase sequence.
The werewolf, now on the run from the Citadel police, finds themselves on the tropical island of Far Cry 3. As they explore the island, they come across a small village being terrorized by a rival warlord. The villagers, desperate for help, turn to the werewolf for assistance.
The werewolf, feeling a sense of responsibility to protect the innocent, takes on a side quest to defeat the warlord and his army. The werewolf uses their enhanced strength and senses to infiltrate the warlord’s base, taking out his guards and sabotage his operations. Along the way, the werewolf also assists the villagers by completing various tasks such as hunting for food, rescuing hostages, and destroying enemy outposts.
As the werewolf becomes more powerful, the warlord becomes increasingly desperate and sends out his most elite soldiers to take out the werewolf. The werewolf must fight off hordes of enemies while also trying to avoid being killed by the island’s dangerous wildlife. The werewolf quickly realize that the warlord is using hang gliders to patrol the area, making it difficult for the werewolf to approach the warlord’s stronghold.
To counter this, the werewolf must find and repair a hang glider of their own and use it to chase down and take out the warlord’s patrol hang gliders, this way they can reach the warlord’s stronghold.
Finally, the werewolf reaches the warlord’s stronghold and faces off against the warlord in a final showdown. The werewolf emerges victorious and the village is freed from the warlord’s tyrannical rule. The villagers thank the werewolf for their help and offer them a place to stay on the island, where they can live in peace and continue to protect the innocent.
Finally, developers will begin to implement these systems into quest creation and customisation. As the sandbox around us learns about us and responds, side quests will organically be generated with their own scripted story arcs. Main questions will be permitted a level of creative divergence whilst maintaining key touchstones. With a few generations practise, the AI generated quests will become as sophisticated as those created by humans, at which point development will shift from grand narratives towards reinforcing the world with appropriate conditions. With the summit reached, heads of development will look back at the mountain they have conquered, a virtual world that scripts itself, where narrative is truly systemic, and they will realise: ‘Dwarf Fortress did that in 2006’.
