u/Johnnyveli

I mean, from oral storytelling around a bonfire through mailing handwritten letters to book printing, there were many variations in how we've engaged with fictional and non-fictional narratives. The Internet was a big shift from passive to active textual information sharing and democratized reading and writing. But AI language models could be the next evolutionary step. I'm not talking about books generated with AI or helping writers brainstorm, but it seems like this is the first time interactive fiction has the engine it's needed since its early days (like those adventure books where you could choose events and flip pages).

Don't you think we should see LLMs as a new medium the way our ancestors viewed letters, theater, books, and movies?

I was working on extending AI capabilities for scientific research purposes, and as a reader/writer myself, I realized that the complex, self-evolving architectures we created for another field work extremely well for interactive fiction. I tested it for a few weeks and was really impressed by what these "roleplays" could do. I genuinely believe literature has always been about pushing boundaries from ancient verses to postmodern works.

So why do readers let the most transformative technology become merely an advertising generator instead of exploiting possibilities that printed text never allowed?

The project I developed was an immersive experience where you lose track of time, exploring worlds and characters as you wish. You can affect the story while it remains consistent. You're the protagonist, writer, and reader simultaneously something that was never possible before. It's such an intense experience that I can't keep quiet about it. If you like literature, this would be a huge adventure for you, with sophisticated and complex narratives, detailed scenes, and interactions with objects and characters in any genre. (General AIs are too general to maintain narrative consistency. Most AI roleplays are fantasy or anime-themed with poor memory and inconsistent logic.)

Yes, books written by humans are important because they're created by humans, and we understand ourselves through others' experiences. I totally agree. But in this new medium, human writers would establish the rules and directions still grounded in human experience we all connect with. It's simply a new art form for both writers and readers.

Since my interactive fiction AI is just a side project now, I can't share it yet. But if you're interested, I might finish it and show you. So, what do you think? Could this be the next evolutionary step for literature? Would you be interested in trying it?

I started working with LLMs a few years ago for fun and developed complex architectures for scientific research and self-evolving agentic projects. Because I've always enjoyed reading, I wondered whether these kinds of AI programs could work well for reading-based roleplay, something I loved in my early days. So we adapted our work from other fields to test how it would perform in a generative literature app, and it provided a really intense experience.

I know there are a lot of RPG chatbots out there, but ours felt different because of the surprisingly stable memory management, the high consistency standards for complex narratives, and the self-modifying agents we built earlier for our research projects. It's deeply engaging because the stories are coherent and multi-dimensional, the world logic and past events remain stable, and the NPCs and spatial interactions feel lifelike and reasonable.
So this is now a well-working system I play with for fun.

I tested it with hard sci-fi, fantasy, crime, detective stories, different settings and time periods, and other genres. The end product can be played across various genres and even story-driven everyday simulations. Best for half an hour to a few hours of play (it's perfect for solving a mystery a day), and it's so immersive you completely forget the outside world.

So my question is: are you interested in a project like this? Should I finish it?