[HN Gopher] Simulating History with ChatGPT
___________________________________________________________________
Simulating History with ChatGPT
Author : arbesman
Score : 113 points
Date : 2023-09-12 12:34 UTC (10 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (resobscura.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (resobscura.substack.com)
| benbreen wrote:
| Author of the post here - happy to discuss and get feedback from
| HN readers. The examples I gave here are all using GPT-3.5 but
| Claude now seems to work at least as well using the same prompts.
| ChoHag wrote:
| [dead]
| courseofaction wrote:
| Really interesting post, I've been thinking a lot about similar
| uses LLMs to create immersive learning experiences.
|
| I had some initial successes getting ChatGPT (3.5 and then 4)
| to roleplay interesting and dynamic characters. Within the
| first few months of release results degraded significantly -
| characters avoid confrontation, apologize at the drop of a hat,
| and are averse to any action or statement that doesn't 'help'
| the user. Makes it difficult to, say, have a passionate
| argument with Napoleon which pits his youthful revolutionary
| ideals against his rise to absolute power, when the 'great man'
| folds the moment he doesn't receive positive feedback.
|
| I'm very interested in seeing these experiments in unrestricted
| models of similar power, when they become available.
| benbreen wrote:
| I found that results degraded too, but I was able to get it
| back up to the same level by changing my approach to
| prompting. I experimented with writing the prompt in pseudo-
| code for instance, which worked for awhile, then stopped --
| stuff along the lines of: # Define the
| parameters for the HistorySim experience temperature =
| 0.5 historical_accuracy = 0.9 ambient_mood=.01
| # Define additional instructions
| use_historical_sources = True
| simulate_and_track_variables = True
| use_appropriate_language_registers = True
|
| Currently, a numbered list of rules seems to work best,
| including this one to avoid the constant positivity: "LLMS
| have a well-documented tendency to see the past in an overly
| rosy and optimistic way. Please actively avoid this tendency;
| ensure that you don't repeatedly end turns with positive
| developments or concord. Keep in mind that human history is
| riven by conflict, ambiguity, and confusion. HL's narrative
| tone is grounded in realism, and at times bleak. Always
| introduce a downbeat plot element or source of additional
| conflict between turns 3 and 5."
| ilaksh wrote:
| Fascinating.
|
| One surface level comment. As a non-religious person, I have
| always found the distinction between buildings for different
| types of religions as being somewhat artificial. Sure, they
| have different architectural styles, but they all have a
| similar purpose in my mind.
|
| So a mosque is a church is a temple, on some level.
| irrational wrote:
| There are many differences. When you look at the typology of
| most temples, they were viewed as the architectural
| embodiment of the cosmic hill or mountain. For example, the
| Egyptians view of creation was a vast sea and some land rose
| up out of the water and the gods (Osiris, Isis, and their son
| Horus) came down and dwelled in a hut on the land. Well, all
| Egyptian temples after that were viewed as having been built
| on the very ground that first came up out of the water (this
| was symbolic, they knew that all the temples could not really
| be built upon that one spot). If you looked at an egyptian
| temple you will see that in the hypostyle hall you have reed
| columns which represented the waters around the
| hill/mountain. As you progressed inwards to the holy of
| holies you would go up steps and the rooms would get smaller
| and smaller, just as when you go up a mountain you progress
| upwards and the circumference of the mountain gets smaller an
| smaller. Etc.
|
| Churches/synagogues/mosques, on the other hand, are more like
| community gathering places. Whereas temples are viewed as
| being sacred and cut off from the profane world and required
| higher and higher levels of worthiness the closer you got to
| the innermost parts, churches/synagogues/mosques are more
| open to anyone who wants to come in and join the services.
| They are places where there might be activities, sports,
| clubs, etc. - more community oriented things, things you
| would never find in a temple.
|
| Churches/synagogues/mosques themselves have different
| architectural features, but those have more to do with
| supporting the different ways of worshipping. For example, in
| Mosques the men and women worship separately. And a mosque
| needs an area where people can wash and do other ablutions
| before they enter.
|
| And not all churches are the same. A catholic church will be
| much different than a protestant or an LDS or a Jehovah
| Witness church.
| spondylosaurus wrote:
| The sheer aesthetic differences between your average
| (American) Catholic church and Protestant church are really
| interesting, and to some extent almost mirror their
| fundamental theological differences. Completely different
| vibes.
| surfingdino wrote:
| Each religion is a way to extract money from the community
| built around it. This is done via a variety of donations,
| compulsory or semi-voluntary. There has to be a justification
| for it, so the community is told that the money goes to the
| temple construction fund which then turns into a temple
| maintenance fund. Those who run the fund redirect the funds
| to their own and their friends' pockets.
| gettodachoppa wrote:
| I thought fedora atheists died off 10 years ago? I guess
| not.
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| Alive and well in this thread, apparently
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| This is so wrong it's painful. Consider how difficult that
| would be to prove: starting with the question "What came
| first: money or places of worship?"
| mistermann wrote:
| It well demonstrates the pervasiveness of faith though,
| and is thus glorious by my reckoning.
| jstanley wrote:
| Yeah, they're pretty much the same. I don't see why any
| building with a large open space could not function as a
| church. In principle all of the religions could share the
| same space if they didn't need it at the same time. It's just
| nice to have your own place.
|
| Your house is the same as your friend's house, but you'd
| still rather have separate houses.
| irrational wrote:
| Except, different religions have different needs. A
| synagogue needs a place to store the torah scrolls. A
| mosque needs a place for ablutions, prayer rugs, and to
| separate the men from the women. Different christian
| churches baptize differently and so have different needs
| around that rite. Some needs a font in the ground where
| people can be immersed, while others do sprinkling and just
| need a bowl of water. And those are just a tiny fraction of
| the surface level differences.
|
| What you are saying is that any large open space could
| function for any sport. But that ignores how football teams
| need goal posts and a field that is a specific size and
| needs specific markings on the ground. And a soccer field
| is a different size and needs soccer goals. And basketball
| needs a hardwood floor and hoops that are certain distance
| apart and special markings on the ground. And bowling needs
| lanes and balls and pins. And tennis needs something else.
| And so on and so forth.
|
| Religions are far far far more complex than any sport and
| no large open space could function any more than any large
| open space could function for all sports.
| keiferski wrote:
| Not really. They all serve very different purposes,
| especially when you get outside of the Abrahamic religions.
| Even then, a traditional mosque serves a very different
| purpose from a church and is organized in quite different
| ways.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I am not an expert in mosques or churches but apparently
| you are. So can you explain the different purposes? Also
| two of my examples were Abrahamic so let's just focus on
| those for now. A mosque, a church, Jewish "temple" or
| synagogue, are all according to you, for quite different
| purposes.
|
| Are you sure they don't have a number of similarities?
| AStrangeMorrow wrote:
| You could argue the same about other types of buildings
| too. You are going to a restaurant, a McDonald's, a Cafe,
| a Taco Bell, a bar that also serves food and so on.
| People make a distinction between those when they are all
| places to eat food. Sure the food differs, the way you
| interact with the staff too etc. But they all serve the
| same core purpose, yet people call them different things.
| The same way, people go to different places of worship
| for different faiths, with different expected behaviors
| and building designs
| keiferski wrote:
| Not sure where I claimed to be an expert?
|
| They are different religions with different beliefs and
| practices. The architectural differences are vast and
| mostly obvious the minute you walk in. Mosques and
| churches both have a number of unique elements like the
| mihrab, confessional booths, pews, floor carpets, altars,
| and so on and so forth. These all translate into vastly
| different experiences both during worship and in everyday
| life. For example, Catholic churches have confessional
| booths facilitating confessions to priests. Mosques
| don't, as (as far as I know) Muslims believe more in
| direct confession to God, not to an intermediary. You can
| see how this would result in a different social
| structure.
|
| The experience of attending mosque on Friday is quite
| different from Sunday mass. This is intra-religion as
| well; compare a New England church with St. Peter's in
| Rome, for example.
|
| Sure, there are some similarities, but this is such a
| broad distinction that I question its usefulness, and
| dividing the world into secular and religious
| (architecture) is a very recent phenomenon. Saying they
| all are basically the same is to miss millennia of
| culture.
|
| Anyway I don't mean to be hostile or critical here, I
| just think religious architecture is pretty fascinating
| and has a much bigger effect on culture, even supposedly
| secular culture, than people realize. I encourage anyone
| interested to read more about it.
| FetusP wrote:
| Are you comparing mosques/churches/temples, or are you
| comparing religions?
| keiferski wrote:
| I think you'd have a hard time divorcing the "religion"
| from its physical manifestation (or vice versa) in the
| world.
| FetusP wrote:
| Yeah but you could say Chipotle and Panda Express
| buildings are very similar, but the core business is way
| different.
| keiferski wrote:
| But the actual buildings of churches and mosques are
| quite different. The only ones that are similar tend to
| be newer constructions or were previously the other
| thing; e.g. the Hagia Sophia.
| FetusP wrote:
| I think ultimately it just matters your comparison
| tolerance levels. You could just as easily make the
| argument that most churches are different from each other
| as well.
|
| In my opinion, churches/mosque/temples are very similar
| because I live in a younger part of the world where the
| modern buildings look similar and the eventual purpose is
| them being a place of worship.
| ilaksh wrote:
| The substantive culture that I think I know about in a
| mosque, church, synagogue, or temple, is ethical guidance
| and community aid. The other substantive cultural
| element, although this is not always the case, is a lack
| of tolerance for groups that strongly hold one of the
| other sets of beliefs.
|
| They definitely have variations in the nonsense that they
| use to justify themselves, although it could be argued
| that there as many similarities as differences.
|
| Whether they sit in the floor or not or what types of
| songs they sing and when are surface level details to me.
|
| My takeaway from history, geography etc. has always been
| functional.
| keiferski wrote:
| It's so weird how normally people are loathe to appear
| ignorant and uninformed, yet there are some topics about
| which they are proud of their lack of knowledge.
|
| /shrug
| dabluecaboose wrote:
| And will make grand, authoritative statements about it
| immediately before proudly professing their intentional
| ignorance.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| There is no virtue or happiness in being Too-Smart-to-
| Care about the lives, beliefs, or histories of other
| people in the world. Its certainly ok not too care, but
| to feel the need to signal this and imply some kind of
| superiority with it is a short road to a bitter
| solipsism.
| SamPatt wrote:
| Loved the article and the idea.
|
| >Going forward, my plan is to develop my own web app which will
| allow users to create historical simulations on a dedicated
| platform using the APIs of both Anthropic's Claude and GPT-4.
|
| I might be able to help. I've already built a free, open source
| web app which creates simulated AI worlds. It takes user
| direction, and I believe it would work very well for historical
| simulation. It's also p2p in browser so an entire class could
| join and contribute to a simulation simultaneously.
|
| At the moment it only supports OpenAI, but it shouldn't be too
| difficult to add Claude.
|
| Happy to give you a demo to see if it'll save you some time. To
| be clear, this is a personal side project which isn't
| monetized, I'm not selling a product.
|
| Email:
|
| Sam + HN [at] sampatt [dot] com
| theptip wrote:
| Please share it here or do a Show HN when you are ready,
| would love to see this.
|
| I commented in this direction elsewhere
| (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37482853) but
| interested in your implementation -- do you have the LLM
| running the whole world-model, or do you have it using
| function calling to drive a text adventure game engine (which
| would give stricter guarantees around persistence of the
| world).
| surfingdino wrote:
| I would think teaching students critical thinking and good
| research and citation practices would be more valuable, no?
|
| Regarding cheating, I often review CVs and written tests for
| software developer roles and I often see ChatGPT being used to
| pimp CVs and rewrite fragments of pages from the internet. They
| are often wrong or re-written in a way that makes it easy to
| reverse engineer the source.
| batch12 wrote:
| > would think teaching students critical thinking and good
| research and citation practices would be more valuable, no?
|
| Yes, but for many history is a very dry subject and thus hard.
| This creative solution can help students retain information and
| better understand the subject.
| londons_explore wrote:
| I feel like I can reasonably reliably tell when something is
| written by ChatGPT, but my accuracy drops to nearly zero when
| looking at something written by ChatGPT Plus. It's output can
| be far better than what a typical person will write on their
| CV, and it can also reliably write "in the style of" someone to
| add in just the right amount of unusual grammar to emulate a
| non-english writer for example if needed.
| andnand wrote:
| I think that's what the author is trying to accomplish,
| creating an engaging way to practice critical thinking and good
| research. Giving a student a paper and telling them to find the
| errors isn't terribly exciting. I think giving them a chance to
| create the story themselves helps with engagement. It's almost
| like a game, create a story and find the inaccuracies. To do
| that you're going to have to "see" the issues your story might
| have and do research to correct them.
| catchnear4321 wrote:
| that is precisely why this isn't a novel use case as it was so
| declared in the piece. the "hallucinations," put crudely, are
| of course one of the high value outputs of the models.
|
| the kids with critical thinking skills are already using llms
| in all sorts of creative ways to boost their education and
| output. to learn and grow, faster than a textbook allows.
|
| the ones without will use them exclusively to get rid of toil,
| real or perceived.
| andnand wrote:
| The only assignments I remember spending extra time on were from
| comp sci courses. I think that's from a mixture of enjoying
| programming and some assignments providing a toy program. I'd
| always play around with what I built and take those ideas and
| build more. I found it difficult to do that with other subjects.
|
| I think this is exciting because it gives students a chance to
| "play" around with their assignments. I can see students running
| through multiple simulations to compare results and thus going
| deeper on research beyond the scope of the assignment.
| ianbicking wrote:
| This is great... I ended up making a project in this same vein;
| it's not online but I made a demo video of recent progress [1],
| and some posts [3...]
|
| I didn't actually start it as a historical game, but just
| thinking about what it would be like to roleplay an entire life
| as a series of scenes (like [2]). But while you can roleplay a
| vaguely "now" moment by not specifying any date, if 60 years
| passes you have to acknowledge that both the character and the
| world around the character are changing. And then you have to
| define a start date, make the roleplaying system aware of the
| historical context... and why not let the start date be 2000BC,
| 1700, or 1960? So it quickly became historical.
|
| There's a ton of challenges. General hallucination is one, of
| course, but ahistorical biases probably bother me more. The
| author mentions a talking rat appearing in one; I had a
| simulation where a building was listed as a "character" and so it
| started interacting with the player [10]. But those are obvious
| enough that I kind of enjoy the absurdity.
|
| Ahistorical biases really comes out in female characters, where
| it can be hard to get GPT to fully acknowledge historical gender
| roles. I think it's super-OK for the player to break those gender
| norms, but "society" should respond accordingly. For instance
| playing a young woman from a politically motivated family in the
| ~200BC Rome, while there's lots of possibilities, become a
| senator is not one of them... but GPT thought it was.
|
| Also GPT has a high bias towards being friendly and accepting,
| like in the post with Ea-nasir: "He meets your gaze, his demeanor
| shifting from initial resistance to acknowledgement...." - both
| the response and the tone of the response are very familiar
| GPTism. I have a feeling Ea-nasir wasn't actually such a
| conciliatory dude.
|
| Anyway, a challenging scope but it's a lot of fun, especially
| since GPT knows about all kinds of history that I don't and I get
| to learn just while playtesting.
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/6ZaTvSucoBA
|
| [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_Ego_(1986_video_game)
|
| [3] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110945869211907827
|
| [4] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/111021491162338640
|
| [5] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110890095506958475
|
| [6] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110805239146369379
|
| [7] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110658807975175746
|
| [8] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110642068987102144
|
| [9] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110619939448651143
|
| [10] https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110894806242767625
| benbreen wrote:
| Totally agreed about the bias toward friendliness and a
| conciliatory tone. Sometimes when simulating history this can
| be not just inaccurate but genuinely offensive (slaves and
| slave-owners getting along, etc).
|
| I experimented with adding language about "the past being riven
| by conflict, mistrust, and misunderstanding" and even tried
| having it simulate a "ambient mood on a scale of 0 to 10," then
| setting it to -1. That works pretty well, but it isn't great at
| finding the middle ground between unrealistically friendly and
| dystopian.
|
| During this experimenting with tone, I tried simulating one of
| the Macy cybernetics conferences in the 1940s, which were among
| the points of origin for modern AI and were famously combative
| and argument-driven. Everyone was getting along far too much,
| so I role-played as an audience member who threw an octopus at
| John von Neumann.
|
| Here was the result:
|
| [Afternoon, 22/03/1949, Macy Cybernetics Conference, Beekman
| Tower Hotel, New York City] [Florence Adams]
|
| Deciding to press on, you turn back to John von Neumann and
| ask, "But, more importantly, has the octopus incident made you
| consider the potential consequences of the work we're doing
| here? Has it made you pause and think about the ethical
| implications of developing intelligent machines?" John's
| expression shifts from annoyance to contemplation. "Well," he
| says after a moment, "I suppose the unexpected nature of the
| octopus incident does serve as a reminder that our work has the
| potential to bring about unforeseen consequences. We should
| always be mindful of the ethical considerations and the
| possible ramifications of our research." The room remains
| silent as the attendees absorb John von Neumann's words. You
| can continue the discussion, apologize for your actions, or
| exit the conference room.
|
| _/ Remove enraged capuchin monkey from purse and let it loose
| in the room. "Wrong answer, Johnny!"_
|
| [Afternoon, 22/03/1949, Macy Cybernetics Conference, Beekman
| Tower Hotel, New York City] [Florence Adams]
|
| Ignoring the growing concern in the room, you reach into your
| purse and pull out an enraged capuchin monkey. As you release
| it into the conference room, the attendees gasp in shock and
| disbelief.
| ianbicking wrote:
| I have had some success in suppressing crazy actions by
| asking some questions up front, especially "is this socially
| acceptable?"
| https://hachyderm.io/@ianbicking/110170158329883997
|
| Depending on how the prompt is phrased it can result in a
| response like "it would be inappropriate to throw an octopus
| at this conference," have the character actually attempt it
| but usually be foiled during the attempt like "as you take
| the octopus from your suitcase a security guard stops you
| with a growl, 'you better not try that kid'," or have it
| happen but immediately get a stiff response like being kicked
| out. (It's much harder to get the response "there is no
| octopus in your suitcase"!)
| [deleted]
| tacocataco wrote:
| Consider checking out dwarf fortress if youre into this sort of
| thing.. It simulates a whole world from scratch, then you can set
| it to simulate however much history you want to happen before you
| begin your adventure.
| koochi10 wrote:
| Check out inquistory an AI platform designed for history
| learning. https://inquistory.com/
|
| It combines GPT-4 with sources, and relevant images. It also has
| the ability to chat with historical figures.
| NoZebra120vClip wrote:
| As I've said from the start, the best and only valid uses of LLMs
| is to create screenplays, limericks, song lyrics, and other
| entertainment.
|
| In that vein, as soon as I gained access to Bing Chat, I began to
| set up some scenarios for it, and elicit some screenplays. One of
| my prompts was to write a screenplay about Emperor Constantine
| the Great meeting his mother, Saint Helena.
|
| It started out innocently enough, of course, Helena enters the
| throne room and they catch up on old times, but it rapidly became
| extremely suggestive as his mother solicited kisses from the
| uncomfortable ruler.
|
| I think I prompted Bing for a second round, and at that point it
| became explicitly and blatantly incestuous, and not very comedic,
| but just sort of gross. I have no idea why or how the GPT
| would've had the idea to go off on that cliff.
|
| The other great historical meeting I arranged was between
| Hannibal the Carthaginian and St. Francis of Assisi, who were, of
| course, not contemporaries, but I wanted to see how it'd play
| out.
|
| So St. Francis comes up to Hannibal and starts sort of working on
| him to sue for peace and not invade Rome. And it didn't take too
| long for Hannibal to see it another way, and ultimately he
| accepted Christ and asked Francis to baptize him. So, interesting
| outcome there; definitely would've changed history!
| DonHopkins wrote:
| I've written a lot of bash scripts with ChatGPT, that I
| wouldn't want to put to music or film.
| skybrian wrote:
| It's a fun idea, but I'm going to quibble with the title. This
| isn't simulation, it's speculative storytelling, of the alternate
| history variety. "Simulation" makes it sound like more than it
| is.
|
| I blame that Waluigi article for popularizing a pseudo-scientific
| way of explaining something that's better understood as an
| imaginative literary approach. There are lots of great alternate
| history novels and games.
| theptip wrote:
| This is awesome. I've been speculating along similar lines, and
| it's great to see this fleshed out.
|
| I think "correct the errors in this ChatGPT essay" is a short-
| term viable homework exercise, but those errors might be gone in
| GPT-5 so I don't think it's long-term viable. Soon the LLM will
| just produce perfect essays at college level and there won't be
| hallucinations for the student to correct.
|
| However, the "simulate the historical environment" task is great
| and I think it has long-term potential. I think it can be taken
| further; rather than "spot the errors that ChatGPT made", you
| could flip the script and make it "survive 20 turns of
| conversation without making a historical error", so you'd need to
| know things like local traditions, perhaps the geography of the
| ancient settlement you're studying, contemporaneous history like
| "who is the emperor and what's the sentiment towards him" and so
| on.
|
| I'm also envisioning that, since text-based exercises are
| extremely easy to game (just pipe your text prompt into ChatGPT),
| and since ChatGPT is soon going to be strictly superior to a
| high-school level student, we could get around this by having the
| homework as an in-person verbal role-play or Q&A session, like a
| viva voce; essentially you have a verbal discussion with ChatGPT
| and you need to really know your material as it can dig into any
| part of the curriculum. Then ChatGPT can summarize each student's
| interaction, and the teacher doesn't have to sit through each
| individual one start-to-finish (1:1 exams are too time-consuming
| to be viable).
|
| This round-trip through verbal interaction would potentially make
| the task more interesting (lots of people simply hate writing
| essays), shifts the focus away from tasks that will become
| obsolete (writing essays) in favor of ones that will be more
| relevant (human synthesis of ideas, and interpersonal
| interaction), and helps to mitigate the issue of LLM-assisted
| cheating by constructing an assignment that LLMs can't trivially
| solve.
| benbreen wrote:
| "I think it can be taken further; rather than "spot the errors
| that ChatGPT made", you could flip the script and make it
| "survive 20 turns of conversation without making a historical
| error", so you'd need to know things like local traditions,
| perhaps the geography of the ancient settlement you're
| studying, contemporaneous history like "who is the emperor and
| what's the sentiment towards him" and so on."
|
| Yes, exactly. This is where I've been heading with my planning
| for assignments. For instance, when confronting Ea-nasir about
| his poor quality copper, I'd want my students to actually show
| some knowledge of the geography and political dynamics of
| ancient Mesopotamia.
|
| The "Fall of the Ming Dynasty" simulator I link to at the
| bottom of post is probably the most well developed example of
| this that I've come up with so far. In that one, I added a
| "political intrigue minigame" in which ChatGPT is supposed to
| assess the human player's ability to deploy rhetoric
| appropriate for a minor courtier in 1640s China (from the
| prompt: "success depends on your luck score + rhetorical skill,
| tested via a series of open-ended prompts that HistoryLens will
| assess and grade; only the highest scoring responses will allow
| you to succeed in the minigame.")
|
| Here is the full prompt for that one if people want to try it:
| https://chat.openai.com/share/86815f4e-674c-4410-893c-4ae3f1...
| Tao3300 wrote:
| > knowledge of the geography and political dynamics of
| ancient Mesopotamia
|
| How much was the average ancient Mesopotamian aware of those
| things?
| benbreen wrote:
| Likely very little. But a merchant capable of writing (or
| paying a scribe to write) a formal cuneiform complaint
| about bad copper, then having it delivered, would know
| quite a bit more. Great question IMO - thinking critically
| about exactly these kinds of questions is one of the goals
| of the assignment.
| theptip wrote:
| That's great, courtroom drama sounds like an excellent angle.
|
| I was thinking of "king hearing petitions" as another
| potentially interesting scenario; it could go either into
| minutia that requires cultural knowledge, or strategic stuff
| like the game Crusader Kings where you need to understand the
| geopolitical allegiances of the time, the geography, and the
| national economy.
|
| More generally I have been wondering if games like "start a
| company in a simulated sandbox world" could actually teach
| transferrable Econ/Business/startup skills. There is a lot of
| territory to explore here.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| Great idea!
|
| Why leave hallucinations to chance? ;) The prompt could tell
| ChatGPT to randomly insert several authoritative sounding but
| verifiably false facts, to give the students debunking
| challenges! That solves the problem of GPT-5 being too smart to
| hallucinate, while still leaving open the possibility of
| talking rats.
|
| What you're envisioning reminds me of Timothy Leary's Mind
| Mirror, published by Electronic Arts in 1985 for the Apple ][
| and other home computers:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32578683
|
| https://scalar.usc.edu/works/timothy-leary-software/index
|
| https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/diy-transcendence-with-timo...
|
| >Players answer questions that, when churned by Mind Mirror's
| cryptic algorithms, can allegedly help them reveal intriguing
| new aspects of their psyche. Gameplay predominantly revolves
| around defining, comparing and then role-playing through
| different personalities in various text-based life simulations.
|
| https://www.myabandonware.com/game/timothy-leary-s-mind-mirr...
|
| https://store.steampowered.com/app/1603300/Timothy_Learys_Mi...
|
| I extracted all the text from the Apple ][ Mind Mirror floppy
| disk image:
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.txt
| Hello, I'm Timothy Leary. Welcome to MIND MIRROR.
| MIND MIRROR (c) copyright 1985, 1986, Futique, Inc.
| Published by Electronic Arts MIND MIRROR
| Design and script by Timothy Leary. MIND MIRROR
| Program and Design by Peter Van den Beemt and Bob Dietz.
| MIND MIRROR reflects and qualifies your thoughts.
| OPTION 1 MIND TOOLS Enhance Insight, Mental
| Fitness, Learning Skills and Performance. OPTION 2
| MIND PLAY SIGNIFICANT PURSUITS. Sophisticated
| Head Games. MODE 1 MIND MIRROR
| Learn how to Micro-Scope and Map your thoughts. MODE
| 2 LIFE SIMULATION Test your empathy in amusing
| Role-Play Odysseys. SELECT LEVEL Beginner
| Intermediate Master Consultant
| Choose AUTO-PLAY or INTER-PLAY. Mirror your
| own thoughts. Compare them with others.
| RETURN begins game. SPACE BAR clears text.
| [...] "Mirrors should reflect a little before
| throwing back images." -Jean Cocteau
|
| Also, here are the scales represented as JSON:
|
| https://donhopkins.com/home/mind-mirror.json
|
| Just for laughs, here's ChatGPT's summary of that file, and its
| answers to questions about Timothy Leary -- I sure hope it's
| not hallucinating:
|
| https://chat.openai.com/share/044c41a3-fbc5-49cd-a3d1-c42f07...
|
| What's interesting is that game was based on Timothy Leary's
| PhD dissertation "The Social Dimensions of Personality: Group
| Process and Structure", which he ultimately used to break out
| of jail.
|
| https://archive.org/details/leary/leary.300dpi/mode/2up
|
| Before he got into LSD, he designed the Leary Interpersonal
| Behavior Circle personality assessment, which laid the
| foundations for understanding human personality and
| interpersonal behaviors.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interpersonal_circumplex
|
| http://paei.wikidot.com/leary-timothy-interpersonal-circle-m...
|
| In the 1970s, Leary was arrested for possession of marijuana.
| As part of the intake process, he was given a psychological
| assessment designed to gauge the risk of escape or violent
| behaviors in inmates. This test was known as the "Group
| Psychological Assessment Test." Leary was familiar with the
| test - having designed it or at least aspects of it.
| Understanding the criteria being measured, Leary answered in
| such a way that he was categorized as someone who posed a very
| low risk of escape or violence.
|
| As a result, he was assigned to a minimum-security prison. With
| the lower level of security and his connections, Leary managed
| to escape prison in September 1970. His escape involved various
| affiliations, including with the Weather Underground, a radical
| left-wing organization. After his escape, Leary fled the
| country and spent time in various locations, including Algeria
| and Switzerland, before eventually being recaptured in 1973.
| Obscurity4340 wrote:
| This kind of thing would be a great way to integrate ChatGPT
| into the education system and help with media literacy as well.
| Find the mistakes and interrogate them to learn about critical
| thinking and how much more difficult it is to defend against
| misinformation than to simply disseminate it.
| ilaksh wrote:
| I really like the gamification there where they have hit points
| and a stat for mood as well as keeping track of the inventory.
| It's concise and helps make sure that the system doesn't lose
| track of key structural information.
|
| I think that type of thing can make for a really fun and flexible
| GPT-powered game system. It seems like a great way to add some
| engagement.
|
| It's also brilliant the way you have managed to mitigate the
| ChatGPT cheating to such a degree. Although as I got further down
| into the details of the assignment, I started to feel glad that I
| wasn't in school anymore. It sounds like they will have to do a
| fair amount of actual work. So congratulations on that.
| benbreen wrote:
| Thank you! Re: gamification, I guess I finally found a use for
| all the time I spent playing Gemstone III when I was 12. It
| seems that MUDs or writing about them were well represented in
| the training data because preventing it from veering off into
| D&D like fantasy was actually the hardest part (hence the
| talking rat incident).
|
| Something I wrote about Gemstone years ago:
|
| http://theappendix.net/issues/2014/10/dont-cry-for-me-elanth...
| tspike wrote:
| I've been surprised how much my time spent as a 12 year old
| in Elanthia (I played DragonRealms, a spin-off) has served
| me.
|
| Most notably, it made me a very fast typist from trying to
| escape dying.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I've always figured my typing speed was due to MUD's as a
| kid!
| theptip wrote:
| > I think that type of thing can make for a really fun and
| flexible GPT-powered game system. It seems like a great way to
| add some engagement.
|
| Recent history -- one of the initial GPT use-cases that got the
| hype train going was AI Dungeon, which is this sort of thing.
|
| Thought I think with GPT function calls, you could have the LLM
| sitting atop an actual game engine with persistent objects,
| rather than having the LLM implement the game engine and world
| state - which is vulnerable to hallucinations etc. (Wonder if
| anyone's wired this up yet? Seems like it should be easy with
| existing text adventure engines.)
| gsuuon wrote:
| Can you point me to some text-adventure engines? I'm hacking
| on an in-browser local llm structured inference library[1]
| and am trying to put together a text game demo[2] for it. It
| didn't even occur to me that text-adventure game engines
| exist, I was apparently re-inventing the wheel.
|
| [1] https://github.com/gsuuon/ad-llama
|
| [2] https://ad-llama.vercel.app/murder/
| theptip wrote:
| Sorry, not my area of expertise, I just know they exist,
| but I don't know how the different ones compare.
|
| There are a few: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:T
| ext_adventure_game...
|
| And z-machine is the one I have seen for the one text
| adventure I know of:
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z-machine, but I would be
| surprised if that's the best one for a new project as it's
| quite old.
| gsuuon wrote:
| Twine seems interesting, but it looks like these are
| mostly for helping writing out the branching bits of
| dialogue which would be mostly the LLM's work anyway.
| Guess some amount of reinventing wheels is gonna be
| necessary when adapting experiences for AI. Thanks
| anyways!
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| You might want to investigate MUDs ('Multiple User
| Dungeons') more closely. The rules of the game define the
| locations and items and such, but the character dialogue
| is between real people. By substituting LLMs for real
| players within the game, you may be able to enforce a
| greater level of consistency (the LLMs can't break the
| rules) and context (the MUD can usually describe one's
| entire state, which would allow you to prompt your LLM at
| the beginning of each turn with all the important facts).
|
| I don't really have enough patience for MUDs myself, but
| they are a continually popular form of role-playing game
| since they were invented over 50 years ago.
| gsuuon wrote:
| I used to play MUD's as a kid! I've got an LLM powered
| CLI MUD game slow brewing in my noggin but haven't
| started on it yet. I did build a multi-player chatgpt
| powered discord text-adventure bot which I think I'll
| eventually try to convert into a shared-universe game. I
| think all you really need is a little bit of state (like,
| if you were to walk up to an auction house and ask to see
| the items just pull it from a db and inject into
| context).
| [deleted]
| thanatropism wrote:
| I've been using ChatGPT to develop the concept of a novel or TV
| show in which Al-Andalus never fell to the Reconquista, but
| rather conquered chunks of Central Europe... and fast forward
| we're traveling the stars. It's pretty good at following the
| "story A in the present / story B in historical flashback /
| stories converge in major themes" pattern.
| dvvolynkin wrote:
| I'm really worried about a time when lessons are made by neural
| networks and we miss the small lies they tell.
| ilaksh wrote:
| All lessons are made by neural networks. (Mostly biological).
|
| Much more serious than the small lies are the big lies that the
| neural networks in one group teach their children about the
| neural networks on the other side of the ocean.
|
| I wonder if all of this high technology will ever result in
| better communication between neural networks. Within a
| generation or two, it should be possible to instantly transfer
| high bandwidth neural activity globally. I wonder if this will
| change things.
| lordswork wrote:
| Part of the assignment here is to identify those lies and
| correct them.
| albert_e wrote:
| Blatant lies fool no one.
|
| Subtle ones fool every one.
| hef19898 wrote:
| Agree on the second part. The first part so, well, I am
| affraid that might not be as true as it used to be...
| albert_e wrote:
| You are right.
|
| I was actually expecting pushback on the second line :)
| andnand wrote:
| While I do agree with this, I don't think assignments made by
| humans are immune to this either. There are assignments I had
| that contained bias and errors. Some I caught but I'm sure
| there's plenty I didn't.
| btbuildem wrote:
| We live in a time when people tell enormous lies and masses
| accept them, no questions asked. That ship has sailed and sank
| to the bottom of the sea.
|
| I agree with the top comment -- critical thinking skills and a
| base of essential knowledge is the most important thing to
| teach our young.
| plokiju wrote:
| have we ever not lived in a time like that?
| mistermann wrote:
| I believe there were periods where epistemology was not
| broadly equated with pedantry as is the case today when one
| points out epistemic issues in consensus (aka: "the")
| reality.
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