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Verbal Verdict, a small and still in development mystery game that has a free demo on Steam, is built entirely around interrogating characters suspected of a crime. It plays a lot like Rockstar’s multi-million dollar budget L.A Noire, which was also built around interrogating non-player characters, but is much more interesting because it uses a large language model, allowing you to ask the suspects literally whatever question you can think of, and provide a coherent answer most of the time.
I’ve spent much of the last six months at 404 Media covering the exploding interest in artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) specifically. Most of the time, these stories are about how these LLMs behave in unexpected ways, like pretending to be a train with boobs, revealing their training data, or attracting the attention of neo-Nazis. I’m still skeptical that LLMs and chatbots will be as useful as the companies that are making them claim, but after playing around with Verbal Verdict, I am pretty much convinced that the technology can be integrated into video games in a really fun and additive way.