It Began As an AI-Fueled Dungeon Game. It Got Much Darker - WIRED

The company used text-generation technology from artificial intelligence company OpenAI to create a choose-your-own adventure game inspired by Dungeons & Dragons.

Then, last month, OpenAI says, it discovered AI Dungeon also showed a dark side to human-AI collaboration.

“The community feels betrayed that Latitude would scan and manually access and read private fictional literary content,” says one AI Dungeon player who goes by the handle Mimi and claims to have written an estimated total of more than 1 million words with the AI’s help, including poetry, Twilight Zone parodies, and erotic adventures.

Staff had previously banned players who they learned had used AI Dungeon to generate sexual content featuring children.

Latitude pledged in a blog post last week that AI Dungeon would “continue to support other NSFW content, including consensual adult content, violence, and profanity.”.

Blocking the AI system from creating some types of sexual or adult content while allowing others will be difficult.

Technology like OpenAI’s can generate text in many different styles because it is built using machine learning algorithms that have digested the statistical patterns of language use in billions of words scraped from the web, including parts not appropriate for minors.

OpenAI said it would carefully vet customers to weed out bad actors, and required most customers—but not Latitude—to use filters the AI provider created to block profanity, hate speech, or sexual content.

Out of the limelight, AI Dungeon provided relatively unconstrained access to OpenAI’s text-generation technology.

The veteran player was among the AI Dungeon aficionados who embraced the game as an AI-enhanced writing tool to explore adult themes, including in a dedicated writing group.

OpenAI’s website says AI Dungeon attracts more than 20,000 players each day.

An AI Dungeon player who posted last week about a security flaw that made every story generated in the game publicly accessible says he downloaded several hundred thousand adventures created during four days in April.

The startup now must use OpenAI’s filtering technology, an OpenAI spokesperson said.

OpenAI helped AI Dungeon to launch an impressive but fraught application that let people prompt the technology to unspool more or less whatever it could.

He contributed to a study and interactive online demo with researchers from UW and Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence showing that when text borrowed from the web was used to prompt five different language generation models, including from OpenAI, all were capable of spewing toxic text.

OpenAI and Latitude say they’re working on that too, while also trying to make money from the technology.