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⬅️ Previous capture (2023-09-28)
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The new algorithm for shuffling gamebooks that I implemented yesterday caused all sorts of bugs in Pangamebook. It also revealed one or two old bugs I just had not noticed before.
I decided I needed better test data, so I asked ChatGPT to write gamebooks for me. The alternative would have been to write a gamebook-generating script spitting out boring lorem ipsum sections. Now I have seven LLM-generated gamebooks for regression testing. Much more fun, even if they are sometimes a bit confusing and some human intervention was required to fix up some broken links. The first two generated books each triggered a bug I had not seen before. ChatGPT used some Markdown syntax I had not used, like putting the links in an unordered list. But things are much better now. I decided to tag Pangamebook as version 1.6.0.
Anyone curious about how the GPT-generated books look... Well, I do not want to contribute to polluting the world with more LLM-generated nonsense texts, but I can share one of my prompts. I know it usually works better to chat with ChatGPT for a bit to build things, pointing out what is wrong and asking for new revisions, but for this I wanted to have a single prompt that I can make variations of and post in a new empty chat and instantly get a result back (but it usually takes two or three attempt it seems, since my instructions to not specify everything in enough detail even with this long prompt).
Can you write me a short gamebook? Each section should have a header in markdown syntax, starting with a single #. The header must begin with a letter and consist only of underscores and lowercase letters, and describe the section. Each section, unless it is an ending of the story, should have at least one link to another section. Links are just the header of the target in square brackets. So a way to link can be, as an example (not something that needs to be in the book): "If you want to go left see [some_section], if you want to go right see [some_other_section]". Remember to put everything in a code-block so that the markdown text is not interpreted as part of your output, and to only use valid references that are identical to some header (for instance do not add extra underscores).
ChatGPT 3.5 has a weird preference for generating fantasy gamebooks set in forests. It can be useful to add some instructions at the end for what the book should be about to get other themes. It also works reasonably well to ask it to continue a story to build longer stories, longer than the around 20 sections it can do in a single answer, but that almost inevitably leads to some confusing bad links or repeated sections that has to be manually fixed up.
I probably should read up a bit on how to best explain things like this to ChatGPT (or other similar bots)?. Not really any clue what I am doing. Maybe someone can suggest improvements?
tags: #gamebooks #pandoc #foss