There is a crusader kings mod in progress which will use chat gpt to procedurally generate speech for every character, and make the relationships and actions of the characters depend on what the player literally types on the keyboard.
Thrive, as the game which allows for the most alien possibilities, can certainly use this. It would only take an internet connection for access to chat gpt.
Imagine playing in an aristocratic society and interacting with other nobles, or playing as Jeff Bezos in a capitalistic society and suggesting Elon Musk to go to Venus instead of Mars.
If we just play as “the invisible entity whose actions represents the collective decisions of its country, be it a monarchy or a democracy, and internal mechanics of the country being interacted with a simplified system”, then there wouldn’t be npc’s, (except in awakening?) and this would have less use. But it can still be used in diplomacy with other civs, resulting in more lively talks.
How would the talks actually interact with game logic?
I saw a video about that one AI chatbot that used some of the new AI stuff, but also the old chatbot logic of looking for patterns and applying predefined logic to them. I’d imagine we’d have to do the same thing. And also we’d anyway need to have a fully offline alternative.
There can be pre written scripts if it is offline, or a different chatbot included in Thrive.
Currently, this can be used for signalling agents. I can write “Follow me, and attack that cell from the sides when I do a tactical retreat” and the other cells can say “ok”. This makes more sense if complex behavior exists, but we don’t play in organism mode when the complex behaviors in cities begin, unless there is something like spore galactic adventures. Asking[1] other tribe members to collect fruits could be the only use of this, if the the cell communication idea isn’t good.
The communications menu only has a few options to chose from in Spore. Procedural responses in diplomacy can exist, for example, the civ that gave a mission can say “how unfortunate you had to drop half of the loot when pirates arrived”, so comment on the specific events instead of just keeping time.
If we would be able to play as a creature in society stage, ask questions to other creatures in the town square, that would be where a chatbot would be useful. Or playing as generals commanding troops. How detailed will society stage be? Can I go to an international court due to a border dispute with my neighbor, close the game and ask reddit for advice, copy paste the argument they gave me to the chatbot and win the case?
The civilisations can have speech patterns, phrases, jokes according to their histories. Asking the chat gpt “how would a communist reptilian alien civilisation respond if I tell them “convert to my religion or die!” ?” would return an answer. It could remember the previous interactions between the two species, and include references to those events in that aliens response.