A new Georgia Tech
artificial intelligence system develops interactive stories through
crowdsourced data
for more robust fiction. Here, the AI replicates a typical first date
to the movies
(user choices are in red), complete with loud theater talkers and
the
arm-over-shoulder movie move.
(September 3, 2015) Georgia
Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially
intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are
popular in video games and let players choose different branching story
options.
With potentially limitless crowdsourced plot points, the
system could allow for more creative stories and an easier method for
interactive narrative generation. Current AI models for games have a limited
number of scenarios, no matter what a player chooses. They depend on a dataset
already programmed into a model by experts.
Using the Georgia Tech approach, one might imagine a Star
Wars game using online fan fiction to let the AI system generate countless
paths for a player to take.
“Our open interactive narrative system learns genre models
from crowdsourced example stories so that the player can perform different
actions and still receive a coherent story experience,” says Mark Riedl, lead
investigator and associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech.
A test of the AI system, called Scheherazade IF (Interactive
Fiction) -- a reference to the fabled Arabic queen and storyteller – showed
that it can achieve near human-level authoring.
“When enough data is available and that data sufficiently
covers all aspects of the game experience, the system was able to meet or come
close to meeting human performance in creating a playable story,” says Riedl.
The researchers evaluated the AI system by measuring the
number of “commonsense” errors (e.g. scenes out of sequence) found by players,
as well as players’ subjective experiences for things such as enjoyment and
coherence of story.