AI Dungeon is Making the Best Out of Text and Image Generators

It Began as an AI-Fuelled Dungeon Game: AI Dungeon recognizes the limitless dream of players

AI Dungeon recognized the dream many gamers have had since the '80s: an evolving storyline that players themselves present and direct. Now, it's going further with a new feature that provides authority to players to develop images that illustrate those stories.

Developed by indie game studio Latitude, which was initially a one-person operation, AI Dungeon writes dialogue and scene descriptions using one of several AI text-generating models — permitting players to respond to events how they choose (within reason). It remains a work in progress, but with the emergence of image-generating systems like Stability AI's Stable Diffusion, Latitude is investing in new ways to liven up players' narratives. Before getting into the article, we must be aware of AI Dungeon.

What is AI Dungeon?

AI Dungeon is a free-to-play single-player and multiplayer text adventure game that processes artificial intelligence to develop content. It allows players to create and share their own custom adventure settings. Its first version was made available on Colab in May 2019, and its second version initially named AI Dungeon 2 was released online and for iOS and Android in December 2019. The AI model was then upgraded in July 2020. AI Dungeon is a text adventure game that uses artificial intelligence to generate open-ended storylines in response to the player-submitted stimulus. Players are allowed to choose a setting for their adventures, such as fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, cyberpunk, or zombies, followed by other options relevant to that, such as character class for fantasy settings.

AI permits you to play a text adventure where you can generate the environment entirely from scratch or else use a world that's been pre-configured by someone else. You have the freedom to create anything: stories based on fantasy, science fiction, westerns, or whatever you can imagine, and play them through using text prompts. Every text prompt contains three choices: Do something, say something, or inform the Story with something that happened. Each decision further clarifies the adventure.

If you'd wish, you can play AI Dungeon as a Zork-like adventure, selecting a character class, race, and so on. That performs best in a traditional fantasy environment. But you can also generate an entirely custom scenario, which can play out in completely unexpected ways. AI Dungeon is a "freemium" game just like many mobile games, each "move" is measured, which can be abolished with a paid plan. It requires a subscription to one of Latitude's premium plans, which starts at $9.99 per month. It's a credit-based system — creating an image costs two credits, with credit limits ranging from 480 per month for the cheapest plan to 1,650 for the priciest ($29.99 per month). On the AI Dungeon client available through Valve's Steam marketplace, which is priced at $30, members are being provided 500 credits with their purchase.

Latitude senior marketing director Josh Terranova conveyed to TechCrunch via email "With Stable Diffusion, image generation is fast enough and cheap enough to offer custom image generation to everyone. Image generation is fun on its own, and being able to create custom images to go with your AI Dungeon story was a no-brainer." Unlike other AI image-generating systems of a comparable fidelity such as OpenAI's DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion is unlimited in what it can create, excepting the versions served through an API, like Stability AI's. Trained on 12 billion images from the web, it's been used to generate artwork, architectural concepts, and photorealistic portraits — but also pornography and celebrity deepfakes.

Latitude dreams to lean into this freedom, permitting users to create "NSFW" images, including nudes, so long as they don't make them public. AI Dungeon's built-in story-sharing mechanism is presently disabled for stories containing images — a step Terranova says is necessary while Latitude "figure[s] out the right experience and safeguards." It is like taking a big risk. Latitude landed here several years ago when some users showed that the game could be used to generate text-based simulated child porn. The company carried out a moderation process involving a human moderator reading through stories alongside an automated filter, but the filter regularly flagged false positives, resulting in overzealous banning.

Latitude in due course corrected for the moderation process' flaws and followed an acceptable content policy — but not until after some serious reviews exploded with negative publicity. To avoid the same fate, Terranova says that Latitude is moving steps to "sensibly" curate AI-generated images while affording players creative expression.

"We are working with Stability AI, the makers of Stable Diffusion, to ensure measures are in place to avert generating certain types of content — especially content depicting the sexual exploitation of children. These measures would apply to both published and unpublished stories," Terranova stated. "There are several unanswered questions about the use of AI images that all of us will be working through as AI image models become more accessible. As we learn more about how players will use this powerful AI technology, we expect adjustments could be made to our product and policies."