One constant in our ongoing civilization is a continuous branching of complexity. Assuming civ continues, how does your entertainment become more tailored to you as you imagine it?
Decades ago I wanted a game where a world building economy game, industry and domestic simulators, real time war strategy, and a first person shooter that bridges to an adventure/explorer were all combined into one. This is a game where all of these roles could be filled by autonomous AI characters, but where recruiting and filling roles creates dynamic complexity that is advantageous for all. Each layer of gameplay dictates the constraints of the next while interactions across layers are entertaining and engaging for all.
It does not need to be gaming. What can you imagine for entertainment with tailored complexity?
I imagine a video content platform (movies, series, short form, etc) that generates the content as you watch it, and adjusts in real time based on your engagement, with optional prompting. Like I could start out by prompting it with “a show like The Office, but if it were directed by Tim Robinson; prioritize my laughter” and it takes it from there, adjusting as it goes to include more of what makes me laugh.
This would of course have to be run locally. I’d never sign up for something this invasive if it were connected to the internet at all
Instagram and Facebook feeds already work a lot like this. They throw in a few random posts between the ones you’re actually subscribed to see and after a while you’ll realise the random ones are more of the sort you lingered on for longer and there aren’t so many of the others.
The problem, for both the viewer and the content server, is that this technique gets stuck in local maxima, that is, after a while it tends to serve exclusively one kind of unsubscribed content and stands little chance of broadening into the viewer’s other interests, assuming there are any.
From an outside perspective, this is a good thing in a way because it gets that viewer out of the clutches of the content server for a while once the viewer is sufficiently bored, but it’s a bad thing if you’re a viewer hungry for content, and especially bad for the content server who is desperate for that viewer to stay, eyes glued to the site, where they will see more of the advertisements that pay for everything.
Have you noticed how LLMs are more like this now? My older starting context stories don’t work any more, but I can start cold with one sentence and get into the same spaces fluidly.
I think people will like something that is even more immersive in their interactions than just a window into a show like program. AI really needs to be grounded in collaborative interaction. I don’t picture that changing. The show becomes more of a friends around a campfire meta-dynamic in a context of your choosing. I do a lot of this already with my own science fiction universe and a LLM.
I absolutely think this will be very popular, but I (and many others, I’m sure) often like to just sit back and mindlessly watch- I don’t always want to participate in the entertainment.
Especially if we get FDVR though- it could be like blending video games with TV/movies
I know what you mean about tuning out. For me, even with engagement, I’m still able to largely tune out. I use text models a little differently in that I am in a full text editor like setup. The model will continue my character’s part of the interaction. The more I change and alter this, the more it shapes what it generates for me. Eventually it becomes so collaborative that I am only making small changes to all characters. It becomes both disconnected and entertaining for me very quickly. I’ve been doing this a whole lot for over a year and have developed the language to interact well with alignment patterns and behaviors. I see that learning curve decreasing with time and making this more main stream. We really need better compute hardware though so that multi modal interaction is more feasible.