Seele Vollerei: The end of reality, and what came after.

Then, you wake up.

You're in your bed, covered in sweat. You reach over to your alarm-clock and turn off the alarm. It's still early, but you can't get back to sleep after that nightmare. You lie in bed, trying to fall back asleep, but it's no good. You've been having the same nightmare every night for the past two weeks, and you're sick of it. Finally, you throw back the covers and get out of bed. Might as well get the day started.

After a quick shower to wake yourself up, you get dressed and walk downstairs. Your parents are in the kitchen. Your father is reading the newspaper, while your mother...

Your mother is lying on the ground. There's blood everywhere. The cupboard doors are open, and you can see your sister hiding behind them, sobbing. Something is very wrong.

"A... a monster..." you say.

You hear a howl, and turn to see the creature standing in the kitchen doorway. It shifts into the appearance of your father. The howl turns to speech.

"I'm sorry," it says. "I love you."

= = =

Several votes were ignored due to not being remotely reasonable to perform in this situation. Well, I was honestly expecting this to take more than literally three minutes before we're right back here again; "waking up" usually works. I know I was being threatening and all, but that was with regards to possible later tweaks.

Instead, uh. Here we are again? At this point a new attempt at 'waking up' will get us in a terrible nightmare doom loop, which can be fun... just don't expect it to do anything to solve your problem.

Given this super-short update, I'm going to run with literally the first thing anyone posts, assuming I'm awake at the time. It's a split second decision!

I've mentioned this before, but the biggest limitation of this AI is its highly limited memory. It only looks at the last ~1000 words. There are ways to get around that, but they're manual -- you need to keep the memories up to date manually, both "short-term" and associative. This isn't something secret, of course -- it's a well known limitation.

So naturally, the AI Dungeon programmer has been working on ways to get around that.

Their latest update, currently marked as 'experimental' (and thus available to subscribers only) has the AI Dungeon system itself keep the memory fields up to date. It's not perfect; I've seen it insert "memories" that amount to the opposite of reality. Still, it's pretty good, and so long as you keep an eye on things yourself it's a huge time saver. I spent some time working on a different story, which you can find here...

It's a pretty huge improvement over how this worked last week, to be honest, so of course I'll be using it.

Here's an example of what it generates:

That's "short-term memory", which updates pretty much all the time. I'll show off associative memory once I've got some generated for this story. The thing is, none of this exact text appears in the story. Similar text certainly does, but text extraction of this sort is a complicated research area that I wouldn't expect the AI Dungeon author to be all that familiar with, just because few people are. I could be wrong, of course, but what I suspect is more likely is that it's providing GPT-3 with input much like this -- relevant text bolded.

Lisa nods, then pauses.

"Suzy, I don't have any teammates," she says. "Wish I did. I'm the only one in the entire school who can do what I can. There's nobody else. I'm all alone."

That can't be right. "Rachel?" You ask. "The twins, Amber and Hazel?"

"Nope. Never met 'em," Lisa says.

She goes quiet and looks at the floor. You open your mouth to say something, then close it. She's forgotten everyone who could possibly help her... except you, and you're a robot, maybe.

To summarize the preceding,
1. You have no idea what's going on.
2. Lisa doesn't have any friends apart from you.
3. She's forgotten everyone except you.
4. You're a robot, maybe.

Click to expand...

Click to shrink...

...because GPT-3 is, frankly, really good at summarizing text. Including stories. Especially stories. You'd still need some clever code to parse the output, which wouldn't be in any sort of fixed format, but that's still a far more tractable problem than semantic extraction from arbitrary text without, you know, an already-existing AI doing the extraction. Especially considering that, despite how AI Dungeon appears to work, the API call to OpenAI actually returns 10 or so possible results -- not just one.

Personally, I find this rather amusing.

You back away, nervously. A half-dozes thoughts fly through your head, everything from wanting to demand answers, to a crazed desire to simply go along with it, hoping it'll let you live if you help it. One thing's for sure, however. This might not quite be a dream -- it doesn't feel like a dream -- but it isn't reality, either. It can't be reality. You hope you aren't fooling yourself.

"Please! Just let me go!" you shout.

"I'm sorry," it says. "I love you."

It steps forward, and you flinch backwards. You bump into the wall, and slowly begin inching your way up towards the door.

"No...!" you whimper.

Your father's body steps forward, and its mouth opens unnaturally wide. It looks like a supernatural being from a horror film. It lunges towards you, mouth open. You try to get out of the way, but you're far too slow. The...

"Stop right there!" A voice shouts.

The creature's momentum carries it forward, but it's stopped in its tracks. You turn your head, and see a girl in a police uniform. It's not a real police uniform, but rather one of those cheap ones you can buy online. The girl has short brown hair and is fairly pretty -- well, you've always thought she was cute. It's your childhood friend, Mai.

"Hiya," Mai says. "I'm here to save you!"

What's she doing here? She lives miles away! More importantly, how can she possibly hope to fight it? Even you know that this thing cannot be killed...

The creature turns to look at her, and snarls. Then, it bursts forward with unnatural speed, knocking the sword from Mai's hands.

Sword?

The creature grabs the sword, and then looks at it. Then, it begins to laugh, a horrible sound that fills you with dread.

"Is this the best you can do?" the creature asks. "A little girl with a plastic sword? Pathetic."

"Hey! I'm thirteen!" Mai shouts at it, obviously ticked off.

The creature grabs her, and picks her up by the throat. Your heart pounds at the sight, but you know there's nothing you can do to help.

"I'll give you one last chance," the creature snarls. "Join me, or die."

"Oh, gimme a break," Mai says. "Ariel, you have the worst dreams."

You just stare at the scene in front of you, feeling paralyzed.

"Hey!" Mai shouts. "Are you gonna take all day? I coulda sworn I took a blow to the head earlier..."

The creature looks down at her for a moment, and then drops her.

"I'll deal with you another time," the creature snarls.

"No. You won't," Mai says. "Darkness beyond the windows, nightmares beyond the door, and I'll knock your fangs out, bone by bone."

The creature lets out a roar of anger and frustration, before dissipating into the darkness. Mai runs over to you and helps you up.

You don't quite get what's going on. What happened to the monster? Where did dad go? And Mai's incantation just now... that's something you made up for a game, you're sure of it!

"What happened?" you ask.

"Magic happened," Mai says.

She picks up her sword, and grabs your hand.

"Come on! We need to get you home."

You wake up.

= = =

I could have gone further, but that last line was just too great not to stop there. WTB: Sanity.

Funnily enough, I didn't get around to asking Mai what's going on; the AI did so on its own, and then I edited in a line above it just to... well, really just to flesh out the story a little bit more, though if we hadn't immediately woken up, I'm sure it would have mattered. As it stands, the AI appears to have stuffed most of that paragraph in half a dozen memory cells. It's hard to explain just how much better the damn thing got in the last week...

There were about even odds this would happen. In the other branch, we'd still have Mai visiting -- I added her to our memory cells about two weeks ago -- it just wouldn't still be a dream.

I guess it's obvious which incantation I was angling for here, but oh well. The AI had different ideas, and honestly this outcome works better.

In any event, what next? You could phone her, for instance.