First Impressions of AlienGPT
Published on Thursday, May 4, 2023 By
TL;DR - a very impressive and arguably revolutionary beginning, but still needs refinement.
My background is I've been playing the GalCiv series since GalCiv1, and have waited on buying GC4 until it arrived on Steam. Loading up the game felt immediately familiar. I had very little awareness of the whole AI/GPT thing prior to the game; seen it mentioned, never really bothered to learn more.
I write speculative fiction; have over a hundred projects on the go, none finished. You know how it goes.
My very first impression came by trying to see what the AI would generate for one of my stories major races; I gave the AI the name of the primary racial polity, put a brief description of them in the Description, their Cultural Affinity, their Behavior, a Leader name and their homeworld's name, and let it generate the rest, and I was pleasantly surprised by what it came up with. The two issues were that there were a few syntax bits to tweak because it treated the polity name as a race name, and none of the images it generated were right. (which is easily forgiven when dealing with custom aliens that have no analogue)
Over the next few days, I've been testing it a little.
What I find really impressive is that it can develop so much even when working from only the Description; I tested just putting the word "Tyrannosaurus" a few times, and I expected it to struggle from having so little to work with, but it came up with some pretty interesting concepts.
I did feel a bit let down that it didn't bring up an appropriate picture, but equally in retrospect Tyrannosaurids aren't exactly a common idea as a sophont race, and I understand it is all very much under development.
That led me to repeat the experiment using the well known sci-fi/fantasy race of the "Ork"; I put in the Description just the word "Ork", and I gave it that these Orks are Malevolent Innovators who were Aggressive and Opportunistic.
The results were really quite intriguing. Starting with the negative and moving onto the positive, it wasn't until the third attempt it gave me a race picture that was Orky (being a pedant, the image was more goblinoid) but in these three attempts it came up with three different ideas; the first generation offered a hive mind that otherwise exactly fitted the description of a synthesis of both the classic and revisionist perspectives on Orks, the second offered an Ork MegaCorp, which is a quite interesting concept, while the third was a criminal syndicate. All three times it came up with an Orcish name for the Leader that felt thematically appropriate.
This morning, I put "United Nations of Earth" into the Description, and generated until it gave me a picture of Human wearing robes rather than an armour suit or a uniform type of outfit, and again what the text generation came up with was very much workable concepts each time, although again there were tweaks that had to be made; only once did it realise the Earth was the homeworld name. (although granted, it doesn't necessarily mean the homeworld, just the starting world, which may or may not be the same place)
Obviously the dataset is nowhere near large enough to draw conclusions on, which is why it is first impressions. But on the whole, it's impressive results.
What I would like to see changed is for the capability for the generator to also manage citizen names, portraits and the backend that makes Citizens work, and the image selection to get better at picking more applicable pictures - it definitely feels like you could use several generations to use one picture. I know it is early days, but the overwhelming majority of the pictures seen have been Humans of either gender in armour, splices of animal/Human mixes and droids, which isn't really what you expect when you asked for "Tyrannosaurus" and/or "Ork".
At the moment, it's very good for generating concepts, and I'm very intrigued by how the feature will develop.
Regarding gameplay, GalCiv4 is sufficiently improved that after uninstalling GalCiv3 to free up hard drive space, nothing has made me want to go back; research especially feels like a major step forward from GC3. (and Stellaris, the other space game that I play most often)