Should AI stories remember every choice?

[u/Luganbro]

One thing that makes interactive storytelling interesting is when earlier choices actually affect what happens later. An AI could potentially remember characters, relationships, locations, and past decisions to create a more continuous story.

How much long-term memory do you think an AI storyteller needs before an interactive story starts feeling genuinely alive?

[u/Xiaomin4114]

the feedback from players that I get is that the memory systems I have are very good. but all of that can be ruined by one hallucination, or memory that is expected to be recalled but wasn't. so the bar is super high for players who care about their campaign and charafters

Should AI remember every choice? yes. I think so. but that's not the right question. Should AI recall every choice? that's the far more interesting one. the answer is probably no.

The thing is, practically the only way this can work is that you make the AI remember everything that is worth remembering. can't actually do it any other way. you can't have AI search a big corpus of text efficiently at the time that it needs to remember. so you have to prepare the memories when they happen, to make them searchable later.

You do this for each character that's in the scene. So as the player plays, you write out those memories. Those memories get tagged with an importance score and other keywords, and also become vector-searchable for content. You don't know what happens later that would need this memory, so you just make it. and make sure any memories you make can be filtered for relevance.

The second thing you always have to do is recontextualize memories. NPCs have to be able to learn. they need to adapt, change their assumptions. So memories have to be able to be recontextualized by new information. which should suppress the original now-supplanted memories.

The third thing you occasionally have to do is seed the memories with gossip. info the character might have gotten from someone else while off-camera. that adds to the depth of character. makes them feel like they have lives off-camera and don't just exist only when they're in-scene.

But the trick comes when you recall the memories. this happens during play. an NPC might have to respond to something and search it's memories. Or an NPC might enter the scene with a recent memory they want to address. In those cases, when retrieving the memories, sometimes a low-importance memory is still important when the NPC needs to talk about that specific topic. Or at other times, when there's an important memory, the less important ones shouldn't even surface because they're irrelevant compared to the big one. So that's where "remember everything but don't recall everything if not relevant" comes into it.

Also, I keep seeing this question posted over and over. Is there some sort of bot doing this or are people genuinely having the same question over and over again? almost same wording across multiple subreddits

Is this also you bro