Love to chat with characters, but The Sims isn’t extensive enough? This game uses ChatGPT allowing you to keep chatting.
AI like ChatGPT is here to stay. Consequently, its applications have been looked at with big eyes lately. Especially in text writing, video creation and photo editing, the technology is bearing fruit. In games, it also has its own role. That’s exactly what this The Sims-like game capitalizes on.
The charm of The Sims is that you can let your created characters live a life the way you want. This often goes well, but sometimes it doesn’t. Things can get chaotic rather quickly. Now add ChatGPT to the gameplay and you have a game with unpredictable dialogue: AI Town is born.
AI Town is The Sims with ChatGPT
AI Town is a bizarre creation. It feeds itself with information from Open AI’s GPT4 and Meta’s Llama 3. Your town is home to characters who are always active, so you can always have a chat with them. So thanks to ChatGPT’s input, you can talk about anything. So that’s the opposite of The Sims, where in the game you were still dependent on a largely prescribed script.
Clicking on characters shows their personality (image: Convex)
AI Town really feels perhaps more alive than The Sims, and that’s also because the characters in the game can thus talk to each other via ChatGPT. So NPC to NPC, or AI talks to AI. Otherwise, the game does not have absurdly large underlying codes and such. So it can be downloaded on almost all computers. You can also play it through the game’s own site.
What is the purpose of AI Town?
Like in The Sims, you don’t really have a purpose. You look down on how characters live a life. Now the thing is that AI Town isn’t necessarily a game either. It’s actually more like a signboard to show what AI like ChatGPT in games is all about. The idea of AI Town also comes from a study by Google and Stanford. Researchers wanted to see how different characters all controlled by AI would interact with each other in one environment.
Not much happened at first, but in no time characters were looking to interact with each other. The researchers no longer had to do anything themselves, only observe how entire conversations were held thanks to ChatGPT and Llama3. A kind of The Sims where you don’t have to scroll through clouds.
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Run an AI Town locally, powered by llama3 
No cloud signups needed. Make your own world, and then talk to it 🙂
Runs the open-source @convex_dev backend locally.
Use @ollama locally or @togethercompute for cloud LLM. @realaitown pic.twitter.com/7YmK6wBVIS
– Ian Macartney (@ianmacartney) April 26, 2024
So the game won’t be “game of the year” anytime soon, but it’s a good demonstration of what’s possible. It shows that ChatGPT can be used for more than just getting your homework written by AI. It will probably have a big role in the gaming industry in the future. Anyway, for now, it’s just really fun to chat with all the dolls in AI Town when you’re tired of The Sims.
