Consider me a non-believer, I guess. Turns out a game/toy/tool that is mostly dependent on an AI churning out long strings of interesting and/or logically consistent text is a tad underwhelming. I purchased one of the turbo big-boy cool-kid tiers for a month just to see what the "real" versions of AID were capable of and I'm sorry to say I'm not reporting back on some mind-blowing main attraction.
It's probably a pretty neat tool to have if you're 1. stuck in a creative rut and want to throw some ideas at the wall, 2. just trying to create little vignettes, or 3. using it for shitposting, but I still think NovelAI has it beat on the first two. It's simply too easy to get this thing stuck going in circles or spitting out completely incoherent text, even with their "best" AI models. If you're trying to use it seriously to generate chunks of text more than a handful of sentences long, you're still going to be doing most of the legwork trying to wrangle the AI so it stays on course and editing it so it gives the right attributes to the right people.
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I do think the developers have started to realize, though, that there's something good here, because there are AI Dungeon-related toys (The "Voyage" feature, only available to Premium tier 2 and higher) that are... actually kinda fun? The common theme here is taking advantage of 1. the AI models' ability to generate SHORT bits of text, and 2. its ability to take any situation and make it do a hard left out of nowhere.
"Medieval Problems" is overtly a clone of Reigns - you are presented with a short, simple problem, except in this circumstance you can type whatever you want in response. The AI here is designed to put up a little more resistance than the standard AID2 models, but the completely open-ended responses offer you plenty of opportunity to have some childish fun in the style of "insisting that you win rock, paper, scissors because you played 'gun'". Corrupt magistrate embezzling tax money? Send my 200 strong adult sons to beat the soul out of him.
"Loom" takes advantage of the wild derailments the AI model is capable of producing by taking your input and offering you several responses to choose from. Continue picking responses to advance the story, or return to an earlier prompt to create a sort of parallel timeline. These are all stored in a map on the left side of the screen and you can hop between them freely, moving these stories forward and abandoning them in equal measure until you've generated tens of increasingly erratic plotlines. It's classic AI Dungeon in a format that makes non sequiturs fun instead of frustrating.
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Not really a review of AI Dungeon proper, of course, but I think it's worth pointing out the other things Latitude's doing that make the most of the AI's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses. These are still just toys and tools instead of full-fledged games at the moment, but it looks like they're planning on opening this up to third-party creators eventually and I'd be interested to see what people produce. With such a steep entry fee for this playground I don't think we're going to see any kind of viral success for anything hosted on Latitude's platform, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see something in this vein crop up as an app (at a cheaper price point) and spread like wildfire.
It's probably a pretty neat tool to have if you're 1. stuck in a creative rut and want to throw some ideas at the wall, 2. just trying to create little vignettes, or 3. using it for shitposting, but I still think NovelAI has it beat on the first two. It's simply too easy to get this thing stuck going in circles or spitting out completely incoherent text, even with their "best" AI models. If you're trying to use it seriously to generate chunks of text more than a handful of sentences long, you're still going to be doing most of the legwork trying to wrangle the AI so it stays on course and editing it so it gives the right attributes to the right people.
--
I do think the developers have started to realize, though, that there's something good here, because there are AI Dungeon-related toys (The "Voyage" feature, only available to Premium tier 2 and higher) that are... actually kinda fun? The common theme here is taking advantage of 1. the AI models' ability to generate SHORT bits of text, and 2. its ability to take any situation and make it do a hard left out of nowhere.
"Medieval Problems" is overtly a clone of Reigns - you are presented with a short, simple problem, except in this circumstance you can type whatever you want in response. The AI here is designed to put up a little more resistance than the standard AID2 models, but the completely open-ended responses offer you plenty of opportunity to have some childish fun in the style of "insisting that you win rock, paper, scissors because you played 'gun'". Corrupt magistrate embezzling tax money? Send my 200 strong adult sons to beat the soul out of him.
"Loom" takes advantage of the wild derailments the AI model is capable of producing by taking your input and offering you several responses to choose from. Continue picking responses to advance the story, or return to an earlier prompt to create a sort of parallel timeline. These are all stored in a map on the left side of the screen and you can hop between them freely, moving these stories forward and abandoning them in equal measure until you've generated tens of increasingly erratic plotlines. It's classic AI Dungeon in a format that makes non sequiturs fun instead of frustrating.
--
Not really a review of AI Dungeon proper, of course, but I think it's worth pointing out the other things Latitude's doing that make the most of the AI's strengths while minimizing its weaknesses. These are still just toys and tools instead of full-fledged games at the moment, but it looks like they're planning on opening this up to third-party creators eventually and I'd be interested to see what people produce. With such a steep entry fee for this playground I don't think we're going to see any kind of viral success for anything hosted on Latitude's platform, but it wouldn't surprise me at all to see something in this vein crop up as an app (at a cheaper price point) and spread like wildfire.