F.A.Q.

Is everything purely A.I. generated?

As much as possible. A.I. at the moment does tend to drift off into nonsense. While it's somewhat impressive how well it works to keep track of the story, it does have a limit to its ‘memory’ so to speak. Sometimes characters are forgotten. Other times they leave and suddenly are back in the room. Sometimes the location changes altogether. Then still other times it just plops down “The End” and leaves it at that.

So to combat this, the story can sometimes need a ‘push’ to coax it along. Other times, a suggestion might be added just to get it going in an interesting direction. The main goal is to avoid writing a predictive text short story where half is human and half is artificial. Sometimes things work out and the initial paragraph will swiftly progress towards something interesting. Other times a bit of work is needed.

There’s a few ways to nudge things. In the system being used, you can add actions, dialogue, or just jump in and directly affect the text. Each will factor into the following response. A line or two is appended upon each ‘turn’ of the A.I. processing, based on the previous 20 or so inputs. There is also the option to enter nothing and see how things progress on their own, which is the purest method, but one that doesn’t always go as planned. The final option is to discard the latest response and try again. While this doesn’t actively influence the story, you can opt to keep one that makes more sense, and retain the A.I. driven story as faithfully as possible.

What A.I. model is being used?

OpenAI is the backbone, and the current model is the Griffin implementation. It’s more limited than some others, with a smaller training set, but it’s relatively quick and does the job. Plus the weirder things are, the better they would fit in here.

Where does the nightmare-inducing art come from?

Portraits and landscapes are from Artbreeder which does a very good job with those. The abstract art is from Night Cafe, which is very much hit-or-miss and tends to spit out bizarre hellscapes.

Is anything off limits?

The model will actively remove anything dealing with underage participants; its virtual nature being irrelevant. This helps the stories from ever going crossing that boundary, which is good. Other than that, most things seem to be open game, and the output certainly shows this. The tropes of sex and violence certainly ring true and don’t appear to have many limits.