AI dungeon, A text-based fantasy simulation running on OpenAI’s GPT-3 that has been generating eerie stories since May 2019. Reminiscent of early text adventure games like Giant Cave Adventureyou can choose from a list of recipe settings—fantasy, mystery, apocalypse, cyberpunk, zombies—before choosing a character class and name, and creating a story.
This is mine: “You are Mr. Magoo, a survivor trying to survive in a post-apocalyptic world by scavenging among the rubble of what remains. You have a backpack and a canteen. You haven’t eaten in two days, so you are desperately searching for food. So begins Magoo’s 300-word harrowing tale, where, “going mad” with hunger, he stumbles across “a man in white.” (God? Gordon Ramsay?) Giving him a greeting kiss, Magoo gets stabbed in the neck.
The story is just as lame, hinting at a complex copyright issue that the game industry is only just beginning to unravel. I created a story with my imagination—but for that, I used an AI helper. So who wrote the story? And who gets paid for the work?
Dungeon AI was created by Nick Walton, a former researcher in the deep learning lab at Brigham Young University in Utah who is now the CEO of Latitude, a company that bills itself as “the future of games created by games.” AI-generated”. Dungeon AI definitely not a mainstream title, though it’s still catchy millions of players. As Magoo’s story shows, the player drives the story with action, dialogue, and description; Dungeon AI react to text, like a dungeon master—or some kind of imaginary improvisation.
In my few years of experimenting with this tool, people have created much more engaging D&D-style stories than mine, as well as videos like “I broke the AI in Dungeon AI with my horrible text.” It’s also controversial, notably when users start prompting it to do it erotic content related to children. And like Dungeon AI—and similar tools—grow, they will raise more difficult questions about copyright, ownership, and copyright.
Many games give you a toolkit to create worlds. Classic lines like Halo or Empire includes complex mappers; Minecraft ending an imaginative, open-ended game form The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom‘S The Fuse and Ultrahand capabilities are clearly inspired by; others like dream or Robloxless games is a platform for players to create more games.
In the past, claims of ownership over in-game creations or user-generated creations (IGC or UGC) have been contested by “taking or dropping” a user’s license agreement. end-use—the dreaded EULAs that no one can read. In general, this means that players give up all ownership of their creations by turning on the game. (Minecraft is a rare exception here. EULAs have long allowed players to own their IGC, relatively little.) freakouts community.)
AI adds new complications. The laws in both the US and the UK state that, when it comes to copyright, only humans can claim copyright. So for a game like Dungeon AIBasically, the platform allows players to “write” a story with the help of a chatbot, the claims of ownership can become opaque: who owns the output, the company that develops the AI, or who use?
