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Matthew Warner

Collaborate with Artificial Intelligence

I’ve programmed a new online game, the Collaborative Story Generator, that allows you to trade sentences or words with a computer to write a story. The game uses the text generation API at DeepAI, described as follows:

The text generation API is backed by a large-scale unsupervised language model that can generate paragraphs of text. This transformer-based language model, based on the GPT-2 model by OpenAI, intakes a sentence or partial sentence and predicts subsequent text from that input.

DeepAI is a fascinating website normally used by researchers to mine data. It was fun to adapt one of its tools for this.

Here’s the transcript of a recent game I played:


Mode Selected: Trade sentences

You: I just programmed a game in which you can collaborate on a story with an artificial intelligence.

Computer:

I think that's great in any way.

You: It works by talking to deepai.org.

Computer:

I don't know if it works by talking to humans, and maybe it shouldn't.

You: Well, at the beginning, humans programmed it, but I’m confident they are not controlling the interactions at this point.

Computer:

I am just curious if you can convince them that artificial intelligence is a better solution than I believe there should be.

You: Some people are resistant of the idea of it, but maybe games like this will encourage them to think otherwise.

Computer:

A quick disclaimer here.

You: Computers are not sentient.

Computer:

But if they are so, they are intelligent.

You: Some people confuse sentience with intelligence, and I think they are two distinct concepts.

Computer:

A little background information:

You: I like to program things for fun, and that’s why I made this game.

Computer:

I have found that interacting with computers is interesting and often helpful.

You: When they work well, the results can be spooky.

Computer:

I don't make any money from people that send me "games.

You: And why should I?

Computer:

The idea of games with smart algorithms and intelligent gameplay is all too popular with children right now.