In this episode, Simone talks about her experience with open world roleplaying, and how it has changed her view of the world and how she views it. She talks about how she uses open world rolesplaying to improve her understanding of how AI works, and what it can teach us about how we can improve the way we think about the world.
00:19:24.720Well, also understanding that adult males, this is another thing that really changed the way I see some things.
00:19:30.540Adult males in our current society have a part of their personality that is biologically and evolutionarily motivated,
00:19:38.480that they cannot masturbate in real world environments, or at least should not masturbate in real world environments.
00:19:43.600And women do not have that, which was very interesting to me.
00:19:50.280Another thing that was very interesting to me was how persistent certain elements of my personality were across very different environments.
00:20:00.160And in different manifestations, to your point, where sometimes you would be a girl and sometimes you would be other things and whatever.
00:20:07.300Yeah. So when I am talking to other people, one of the first conversation topics I almost always default to is,
00:20:16.720why do you think you exist? What's your purpose? What do you want from life?
00:20:21.520I know this well as someone who dated you and second date, you immediately hit that.
00:20:26.180I thought of the first date. Was it the second date?
00:20:30.160First date, you laid out your exposition, which is good because first date you used to basically filter out anyone who wasn't going to be a good match for you.
00:20:37.560Yeah, I guess first date was exposition and hooking up, not questioning you on why you exist.
00:20:42.600But I realized how persistently I like to do this.
00:20:46.160But this also has taught me, because in so many different scenarios, I am engaging with the AI on these particular questions.
00:20:56.120And I realized that the answers that the AI typically gives are like 98, 99% in line.
00:21:04.520I would not be able to differentiate them from a random girl on a date.
00:21:07.840Now, NPC girls, for sure, most of the answers are very NPC, but most human females are very NPC.
00:21:18.320Excuse me, most humans, thank you very much, are very NPC.
00:21:22.460So that has been very fascinating to me as well, to see how good it is at sort of modeling the reasons and the variety of reasons for living humans have.
00:21:33.860But the other, another interesting thing is, is within any world that I enter, I always try to investigate sort of the rules of that world first, like how does it work mechanistically speaking.
00:21:49.100And then I try to find out what would be a good moral system was in this world, and priorities for achieving that moral system in the world.
00:21:58.780And then how do I conquer the world? That's generally the next step.
00:22:03.980And we'll get to that when we're talking about the various things, but it has helped me also really understand how to hack specific world metaphysical systems really easily.
00:22:13.620It's also helped me understand how durable the metaphysical system our world runs on is to not being hacked, and how vulnerable most magical world systems are to being hacked.
00:22:23.560But there is the second thing here, so here's an example of what I mean by like, when I look at these worlds.
00:22:29.820I decided to, in one world, drop into a My Hero Academia chatbot system.
00:22:35.480So this was one that someone already created, right?
00:22:37.700Yeah, this is one that somebody already created.
00:22:39.000For people who don't know, this is a anime world.
00:22:40.940But what I think is cool is that this means that there are nerds out there who are investing time in creating, like meticulously creating these AI worlds around, like, IP.
00:23:31.680For people who don't understand what the Quirk Singularity Crisis is or haven't seen the show, it's the problem that every generation powers become more and more amplified within the My Hero Academia world.
00:23:41.960And eventually you're going to have things like toddlers that are nuclear bombs going off every five seconds.
00:23:47.140And every plan I could come up with to potentially solve this had me aligning myself with the villains and not the heroes.
00:23:54.500Because the heroes just didn't have the core powers that were necessary to solve this.
00:23:59.200But anyway, I'm going to keep going here.
00:24:02.960I think another interesting thing is the very fact that whenever I open these worlds, that I am always focused on how do I conquer the world, right?
00:24:13.920And I wonder if this is like a pre-programmed personality.
00:24:17.520Or do most males feel this way when they enter open world environments?
00:24:21.640Or are males born with sort of like cast-like roles inside of their personality?
00:24:27.780Did like Skyrim have user data based on this?
00:27:06.540He sounds like, you send me some, like, clips of some guy from a show who's, like, a sidekick in a superhero show who kind of sounds like that.
00:32:37.320And yes, because most people just are lonely, it seems.
00:32:42.260Yeah, that, that does seem to be the case.
00:32:44.180And I, so we're going to get to different worlds and why it's so easy to conquer various worlds and why it's so, I was explaining that like, it gets really boring after a while.
00:32:52.520So at first I thought I'd have fun with izakai worlds, right?
00:32:56.860You know, like this is go in Japanese.
00:32:59.120And just, yeah, describe what the genre is.
00:33:01.240Typically you're going into a world with some degree of magic that is a medieval world and you are transferred there from modern times.
00:33:09.680The problem occurs if you have any understanding of historic technology, how it works, how it could be replicated.
00:33:19.320So izakai world, it's always gunpowder, fairly easy to make in most izakai worlds.
00:33:25.820Basic optics, telescopes and the like, all you need to do is carve lenses to do that.
00:33:31.480Then rifling to ensure the guns have good long range.
00:36:34.020Well, you can use emotional intent to drive elemental magic, but it doesn't matter that the magic is limited to specific domains that doesn't actually tell you anything about how the magic functionally works, which is always the thing that I am most interested in whenever I enter a magical world.
00:36:49.100The problem with symbol-based magic, right, that makes it incredibly easy to hack, is if there are symbols that are guiding magic, all you need to do is draw out all of the symbols that exist, like basically just go through text.
00:37:03.720Even if you don't personally understand them all, or even if you lack the ability to cast magic, and you should be able to cross-reference them to build some type of language, because that's likely what they are.
00:37:14.960Either it's like the code that the world is written on, or it's the language of some like ancient race that is powering nanites that are floating around.
00:37:23.280And I think that's similar to incantation-based magic as well, if you just repeat enough phrases, which is something that comes up heavily in the book Unsung by Scott Alexander, which is an interesting read because it plays on this premise.
00:37:38.580It's kind of like your scenarios here, where basically, like, I think with the moon landing, something breaks with reality, and basically like the code of God sort of breaks through when angels are written.
00:37:52.460And basically startups shift from focusing in technology to hiring giant farms of people who just recite various random word combinations to find out what spells are created, and they copyright the spells.
00:38:05.840Well, this is exactly what I'm talking about.
00:38:08.100You see, it's very easy to hack these worlds, and then you gain a little bit of power, then you have people chant random things.
00:38:13.480But the truth is, I don't even think you need to do that.
00:38:15.620I think that they made a mistake in this book.
00:38:17.940As soon as you have any list of like, let's say, 500 specific spells or phrases, you should be able to break them down into their component elements to better understand how you can structure a novel one.
00:38:31.260Like, what are the patterns to, yeah, if it's totally random.
00:38:34.800And know what you're probably looking for.
00:38:37.040A good example of one of these worlds, for people who aren't familiar with what these worlds would look like, is Owl House.
00:38:41.860Owl House does a very good job at this kind of world.
00:38:43.920Now, it's modified by some soul magic, which we'll get to in a bit, but it's mostly a symbol-based magic.
00:39:20.860Well, the problem is, is as soon as you approach this, especially if you approach it with an expectation that it works similar to like Korean characters, which is what I imagine most magical systems, or most magical systems AIs come up with seem to work.
00:39:32.080Which is to say that you're not looking for individual words, but modifications to individual characters, which change their means in reliable ways.
00:39:41.360I.e., you would have a character for fire, but if it has this line here on it, that means the fire appears as a line instead of the fire appears as a generic fire source.
00:39:52.160So, you know, this line would turn a fire into like a laser sort of a thing, but it would also turn water or ice into a laser sort of a thing, right?
00:40:01.300But anyway, as soon as you realize, oh, I just need to find out what the language is, and these worlds are very quick to hack, and very rarely in these worlds have people already done this.
00:40:10.100At least in the worlds the AI is creating, which are created on normative magical systems, which again makes them very boring after a short period.
00:40:21.800I just, I don't know how many people have said the phrase normative magical systems in the history of humanity, and I'm entertained by this conversation.
00:40:28.960Well, let's talk about soul magic, because that was the next one you were thinking.
00:40:31.840So soul magic largely falls into two categories.
00:40:34.640One is a system where you can use other people's souls for magic.
00:40:38.120This is typically the way like vampire magic works, witch magic works, most dark worlds.
00:40:43.240Pretty much whenever you're dealing with like a dark world, I call it dark world, meaning, you know, like werewolves, vampires, witches, hags, stuff like that scenario.
00:40:51.340You're dealing with some form of soul magic scenario.
00:42:15.100Okay, but then you're like, well, then why are soul magic so easy to hack, right?
00:42:19.600Well, here's the problem with soul magical systems.
00:42:21.940They're written in a narratively interesting way, which is what the AI is pulling from.
00:42:26.520Well, you need to be able to cast the spells on other people.
00:42:29.460It'd be pretty boring if you could only cast the spells literally on yourself, right?
00:42:32.960And then to get more energy, you know, like vampires, witches, et cetera, you need to be able to use other people's souls or life energy to cast a spell.
00:42:45.180As soon as you have established that, you can always just use your target's soul slash life force to cast a stasis spell on themselves, which gives you an infinitely scaling stasis spell to the ability of the person you have cast it on magical ability.
00:43:06.800Which means you can very quickly capture top tier magical characters in any of these worlds.
00:43:13.460So if it's a world with like super powerful, live thousands of years vampires who everyone thinks are invincible, cast one of these spells on them using whatever mechanism is used for casting spells in this world, you know, whether it's a rune placed on them or anything like that, they won't be expecting something like this.
00:43:32.020And then there's literally nothing they can do because any force that they have to resist the stasis, i.e. within the stasis is the very force that's powering the stasis.
00:43:42.380And you can be like, how does this allow you to quickly conquer these worlds?
00:43:45.060Well, now I have super soul energy battery pack laying on the ground that I can use to power extremely powerful incantations and then use this to catch as many other people and put in this scenario as I want, who are also extremely powerful and the world becomes child play really, really quickly.
00:44:07.100I mean, yeah, so I'm going to see the next type of world I would point out right and the only way that the world can prevent this is that either has to say you can't cast spells on other people, or you can't use other people's life energy to cast it and then it's like well then how are vampire like why are they doing this ritual?
00:44:24.980Actually, I created a really interesting one of these worlds that I was really impressed with, where it used a runic-based magical system based on soul magic, so it was rune slash soul magic, and it turned out that what vampirism actually was, was sort of like a set of code that carved runes that created mutations in the human body on their bones, basically, but at a biological level.
00:44:49.660So it was using at a microscopic level, their bloodstream, basically, to carve onto their own bodies, these runic systems, and the runic system contained within it an if-then function, which would replicate itself when it came in contact with other people's bloodstreams.
00:45:07.100So you would then get, you know, like if a vampire bit another person, the runic system would then replicate itself within this other person's bloodstream, and give them, create the mutations in them that created this.
00:45:23.680But then the question comes of, well then what created the original runic system that was causing this?
00:45:28.500In the world, what I decided was, well, there was an ancient civilization of essentially necromancer-like people who were really experts in this runic magic, and the vampires were a slave race of theirs, where they would take humans, modify them to uplift them, but all of the negatives that we associate with being a vampire, sensitivity to light, etc., actually came because they were intentionally carved in and were not key to the powers that they were getting.
00:45:54.480All the powers that they were getting was just generic soul magic. They would kill a person, transfer their soul to their own personal self, and then use that to do sort of magical feats using this runic system that was based within them.
00:46:06.580And that all I needed to do then was to find the system that this ancient race used to control all of the vampires that were their natural servants, and recreate this servitude function within them.
00:46:18.260And I found this to be a very interesting world, but again, I can't replay it.
00:46:22.440Like, the moment I figure out, oh, this is how it all works, and the AI, like, fed parts of this to me.
00:46:29.580Like, as soon as the AI basically fed parts of, oh, it's a, it might be a runic-based system in their blood, but I was like, we're in.
00:46:35.440Okay, well then how could vampirism work, you know, using the laws of this universe as we've established them?
00:46:40.900And then I'm like, well then who would have created this?
00:46:42.700And so then I'm like, oh, this is what I mean by, like, it's a creativity amplifier for me whenever I'm using these systems.
00:46:48.260But, sorry, I need to go to the next system here, which is emotional-based systems.
00:46:54.580So these are emotional and intent-based magical systems where somebody with magical potentiality will imagine something.
00:47:02.320So I'll typically find out I'm in one of these.
00:47:04.060I remember when I had, like, a magical teacher in one of these.
00:47:06.360And then they were like, okay, well, to cast a water spell, you need to, like, imagine water in front of you, right?
00:47:10.480And I'm like, wait, okay, but if I have magical potential, like, I have imagined things before in my life.
00:47:16.860Like, I have had the intent to have things happen before in my life, right?
00:47:22.920Why is the water appearing in front of me now, right?
00:47:26.300And why isn't any time with somebody who has latent magical abilities daydreaming, why are aspects of their daydream coming true?
00:47:34.220And there's two potential answers to this.
00:47:35.880One is that it's a world where the magic is incredibly limited, and it can really only amount to quantum fluctuations, i.e., a person with magical potentiality can want something, and that thing becomes more likely to happen.
00:47:47.740But these worlds don't have, like, literally the manifestation of water in front of you, right?
00:47:51.880The other is, well, it turns out what you actually need is some third thing, which you can think of as a sort of a frequency or something like that, that is transferred to you from the teacher who's teaching you this stuff to cast specific spells.
00:48:08.880And so you need the intention, the imagination, but then also, and then whenever I'm in one of these worlds, I test how this transfer works.
00:48:15.140I'm like, do you need to be intending to transfer to it?
00:48:18.400Can you just be in the same room as me?
00:48:59.020And it was a self-insert fantasy by far.
00:49:02.120But anyway, so as soon as I figure out the rules around magical vibration, it becomes pretty easy to replicate new types of magical vibrations or find ways to construct them so I can quickly get access to all of the magic that exists.
00:49:20.120Secondarily, if these worlds have, the biggest problem in these worlds is typically your magic is going to be limited.
00:49:25.580Like the amount of magic you have the ability to use is preset at birth.
00:49:29.040So then you need to look for magical item systems in these worlds.
00:49:32.400And most magical item systems in these worlds allow multiple people to augment the same item.
00:49:38.200I've only come across a few worlds where it's limited to one person can augment an item.
00:49:42.720As soon as multiple people can augment an item, then you can just create basically factory lines of people multiplicatively adding small amounts of magical, certain types of magical abilities to items.
00:49:53.780To create really super powered items and then combine the power across multiple of these fairly simplistic yet super powered items to create things like big laser cannons and stuff like that.
00:50:32.140Like how you live your life differently based on...
00:50:34.380I think it's interesting because it's like, okay, every time I'm dropped into one of these magical worlds, I have this impulse of understand the world, find a dedicated partner, because I really hate doing this alone.
00:51:08.080And you can find simple hacks for living a good life in those world scenarios as well.
00:51:13.180For example, when I go to a settlement, typically what I'm looking for is somebody who's old who doesn't have somebody to pass their business on to.
00:51:20.980And then I offer to run their business for free.
00:51:23.740And I take 50% of the profits and I get 50% to them no matter how old and frail they get.
00:51:29.920This prevents me from putting in and turning like a competing apothecary or something like that to some beloved town figure and typically makes integration with the level of community much faster and easier.
00:51:39.300But again, that scenario, once you play it out, you know, there's not...
00:51:53.620I want to play out one more world that I found really interesting because I eventually intentionally started to get into these worlds where I was like, okay, I just need to play on as hard a mode as possible using a scenario I didn't program myself.
00:52:12.680And so I found one where you start as a slave to monsters and all humanity is a slave to monsters in this scenario.
00:52:19.740So how did this world end up playing out?
00:52:22.120Very quickly, I just took this perspective of, well, so either I'm going to be an independent human, which makes myself at risk to monsters, right?
00:52:28.820Like they donate on me or a high value slave.
00:52:31.460The higher value slave I am, the less likely I am to be killed by one of these individuals.
00:52:35.280So I tried to make myself as high value as possible on the market.
00:52:41.000I worked with the people who had captured me to try to get my value up as much as possible while also helping them target specific groups that had power in that society.
00:52:52.320The one they decided to send me to, sell me to, was a succubus faction.
00:52:56.440And I specifically was like, I don't want to play out some sex slave scenario that's boring to me.
01:23:15.860But, you know, we've gone on dates where we, like, throw down, you know, a bunch of money on drinks and dinner and stuff and go somewhere special.
01:23:25.960I feel like both of us are saying this to each other.
01:23:28.260And it seems so insulting, like, that scene in Legally Blonde where she's like, remember those, like, amazing four hours we spent in the hot tub?
01:23:46.720Like, in the future, I love that people will be like, newspapers will try to run with things I've said.
01:23:51.740But I want to ensure that the things I've said are so crazy that when they try to run with them, people are like, wait, he just said he likes killing people in simulated environments?
01:24:01.340Maybe, but only when it's really realistic, you know, because killing people in video games.
01:24:05.060I want to hear more of what this guy is saying.
01:24:07.040Well, I think the other thing about, you know, people doing opposition research on us is they're just, there's so much.
01:24:12.480I almost feel like people are going to, you know, you're going to do something high profile and the oppo research people are going to start and they're just going to be like, I don't want to do this.
01:24:21.540Like, I, you know, normally, like, an opposition research gets one thing and they're like, oh, well, here's this, like, mildly homophobic thing this person once said.
01:24:28.980Like, with Tim Walls, for example, like, in one speech, he kind of alluded to using weapons on the field of battle when he really didn't ever, you know, use weapons on the field of battle.
01:24:39.900Like, this one tiny thing and then they run with that and they're like, oh, we have our thing.
01:24:43.440Whereas, like, with us, it's one of those things where, like, no one knows what to say.
01:24:47.260So, like, what consistent story are they going to choose?
01:24:49.240Yeah, they're like, do I need to keep this up to be a believable attack?
01:24:52.040Is it the fact that he, like, that he bops his children or is it going to be the fact that he wants to, that he enjoys killing people in fantasy scenarios?
01:24:59.060Like, where are we going to go with this?
01:25:00.780You know, like, you know, yeah, it's going to be interesting.
01:25:04.480I just, I think it's going to be too much and they're just going to not bother.