gpt game dialogue first draft

blogs/2022/12/17/gpt-game-dialogue.md

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+# Game dialogue with ChatGPT
+
+[ChatGPT](https://chat.openai.com/chat) has become the latest AI application to enjoy viral popularity.
+At time of writing it's a closed-source research tool developed by OpenAI, with the only access being via their web portal.
+Users have to create an account to interact with the bot, and have no API access, though they no doubt have one internally.
+I think given its capbilities, this is probably a good idea for now, but I'd like to outline the impact it can already have in game development, even in its fairly limited form.
+
+However, it can already be made immensely useful for content generation, without any kind of API access.
+Generally, characters come in two flavours: main characters, whose motivations and actions shape the story; and generic NPCs, who exist to fill out the world for the player.
+
+For the story to carry the author's intent (which they might not necessarily care about), it would probably be best not to leave ChatGPT to generate a plotline on its own.
+Its susceptibilty to bias is a problem - try generating men or women and count how often they're describing as petite, as having chiseled jaws or as wearing form-fitting dresses.
+It can be coaxed out of this with enough description, but lots of manual intervention defeats any content generation technique.
+
+The other group of characters, though, I think represents ripe pickings.
+Often in a game world, background dialogue quickly becomes stale, as lines are reused.
+ChatGPT can already easily be used as a supporting writer to generate a huge amount of less-than-critical dialogue.
+Take, for example, a merchant.
+
+![generating merchant dialogue](merchant_prompt.png)
+
+This psuedo-format is instantly combatible with a simple templating system.
+It would be trivial to generate variations using perfectly traditional programming techniques.
+This prompt took a minute to write, and includes specific about the character's context, as well as a slightly more than default personality.
+
+We've instantly generated 8 perfectly workable dialogue options for our character, from some basic and mostly templated information about their context.
+However, we notice that our item choices weren't included in the output, though we described them.
+So we ask:
+
+![merchant items](merchant_items.png)
+
+And, instantly, another 8 lines.
+We now have, after a modicum of input, 16 possible lines for a background merchant character to respond with when interacted with.
+With some templated prompt generation, this could be made even faster than the description given here.
+
+It's also capable of going beyond just lines dialogue.
+[Ibralogue](https://github.com/Ibralogue/Ibralogue)'s developer taught it the syntax, had it generate an example and then taught it a new feature:
+
+![sprite prompt](sprite_prompt.png)
+![sprite response](sprite_prompt.png)
+
+All that's left is to copy the output and paste it into a text file for a game to use.
+
+---
+
+This is barely even a scratch on what ChatGPT or systems like it are already capable of.
+At present, the website gets overloaded, you can't save and reload conversations, and its content filtering is very much evolving problem. 
+However, even with those limitations it's an extraordinarily powerful tool, and this is just one very minor example of an application.
+
+That's it from me, but I'd love to read more discussion about use cases and the ethical issues at play.
+If you have anything interesting, please [get in touch](mailto:me@ktyl.dev)!
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