Goblin Mung, A Neural Net Expose

I recently listened to the excellent 99% Invisible podcast, wherein the discussion centered on modern conversational AI, its 20th century origins, and its evolution into contemporary neural networks. One of the top-performing "most human" neural nets today is GPT2, which famously made a very convincing news-story-style write-up about the discovery of unicorns in the Andes (scroll to the bottom). I decided to spin up a test of the open-source coding for this model available at Talk to Transformer, focusing on my favorite fantasy RPG McGuffin, goblin mung. Here's the prompt: Goblin mung is one of the most hotly sought-after hallucinogens available today.

After a few clicks, here's what I got in response:

As a popular party drug, its use tends to be highly destructive. In Arloc, however, even its warping effects are believed to offer a major relief, and it's typically bought in pill or crystal form. You can even drink a very tasty cocktail made with a mix of goblin mung and grog. According to Arloc vivimancers, the slight change in perception "reduces or entirely eliminates the effects of many dangerous chemicals including alcohol, alcohol poisoning, and lead." One vendor just put out a press release declaring that the mung will be abolished by 2015. This, he claims, is because it's so tender you could put it in your mouth, and is thus dangerous. "Look, here's an apple. Well, it's soft enough you could bend it at the bottom with your hand," he says. "It was dry, though, and you couldn't actually have put your hand inside it and plunked it down."

The problem is that while it looks like it will soon disappear, it is back again from time to time, showing up as a different species and growing elsewhere. After all, do we really know exactly how it feels to plunk a politician down on a slab of rock to give him a spiked lance? This was the criticism by the infamous mung dealer known only as The Three Toed Hobgoblin. He poses in his suite, consulting with his pilot, Cobra Commander Ebonarm. In a candid interview, he had asked how I felt about milking a donkey for a couple of cents. I had been working the hill in the afternoon and drove to his shop, eager to find out how I felt about milking a camel. When I went in to talk to Ebonarm, the receptionist told me that he "doesn't sell orchid milking bulls for two shillings." We talked about the ethics of what the milking of a camel is, and why the practice is so ubiquitous. I was a little shocked. What did it have to do with mung?

At a later date, the Three Toed Hobgoblin had this to say: "There are not many things in life that can be described as in the dark," he writes. "Only a few things—death, being raped, PTSD—can have the power to cause it to occur without sapient beings going through it. That is to say, there are not many things in the world of phenomena like loss and suffering and grief and it makes no sense to blame them on anyone else."

So far, Maraad's role in the campaign against goblin mung has been a presence along the shoreline of Daggerdale, where her wizards have joined her party of neutral hobgoblins to use her magic to defend the camp and prevent a young party of adventurers from heading there and finding it—at the risk of being turned into a mung witch or transformed into a drug-dead creature themselves. Maraad says that the mung condition can be managed with rest and frequent bowel movements but can sometimes cause an unpleasant sensation in the colon. It is currently not a contraindication to levamisole therapy for the treatment of the peptic ulcer, however, there is no counter-drug to prevent or cure constipation. This must be carefully considered with all patients until a drug that can do so has been identified.

Is it readable? Sure, if a little clunky. But if I told you I didn't want to put together a goblin mung cartel after reading this, I'd be lying to you. The Three Toed Hobgoblin and Cobra Commander Ebonarm may yet make an appearance...

What sort of gems can you dig up using a neural network to spawn gameable content?