AI Dungeon

A game written while you play

AI Dungeon is a text adventure game: the player types what their character does or says, and a language model writes what happens next. According to Wikipedia, at the start of the game you choose a world (fantasy, mystery, post-apocalyptic, cyberpunk or zombies), and from there the player types an action, a line of speech, or a sentence describing what happens in the story. The story was not written in advance: the model invents it in response to what the player writes. You can undo and rewrite what the model wrote, and ask it to "remember" details over the course of the story. Players can also write their own scenarios, publish them for others, and play together in multiplayer mode.

From a hackathon to hundreds of thousands of players

According to Wikipedia, the first version was built by Nick Walton, of a deep learning lab at Brigham Young University, in March 2019 during a hackathon. The inspiration came from Dungeons & Dragons: Walton wondered whether artificial intelligence could fill the role of the "dungeon master," the person who runs the story in the game. This version, which relied on an early version of GPT-2, was released to the public in May 2019 and offered the player a fixed list of actions. In November 2019, OpenAI released the full version of GPT-2, with 1.5 billion parameters, and Walton built AI Dungeon 2 on it, released in December as open source and run through Google Colab. Each player had to download the model, about 5 gigabytes, and within days bandwidth charges of more than $20,000 piled up, taking the game down temporarily. The game moved to Walton's company, Latitude, and became closed software, and apps for iOS and Android came out on 17 December. According to WIRED, that month the game reached 100,000 players.

GPT-3 and the "Dragon" model

In July 2020, Latitude added a model called Dragon for paying subscribers, which called OpenAI's API and relied on GPT-3, and upgraded the free model to a less advanced version of GPT-3. According to WIRED, OpenAI gave Latitude early access to the commercial version of its technology, and featured AI Dungeon in its marketing materials as an example of the commercial and creative potential of writing algorithms. According to Wikipedia, players also used the interface for purposes other than the game: co-writing an article about GPT-3 itself, fictional interviews, and conversations with simulated versions of celebrities. In February 2021, Latitude raised $3.3 million in a seed round led by the NFX fund.

2021: the moderation crisis

In April 2021, according to WIRED, a new OpenAI monitoring system found that players were causing the game to produce sexual stories involving children, and OpenAI demanded that Latitude act immediately. "Content moderation decisions are difficult in some cases, but not this one," said OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Until then, according to WIRED, OpenAI had required most of its customers to use its filters, but not Latitude. The moderation system Latitude turned on set off a revolt in the community: users complained that it also wrongly flagged innocent phrases, such as an "8-year-old laptop," and the plan to manually review flagged private stories was seen as an invasion of privacy. At the same time, a security flaw came to light, fixed by the time the article was published, that made all the stories accessible. A player who exploited it downloaded several hundred thousand adventures, and in a sample of 188,000 of them found that 31% contained words suggesting sexually explicit content. According to WIRED, the attempt at combining people and algorithms to police content produced by people and algorithms "turned into a mess," and Latitude has since been required to use OpenAI's moderation technology.

From AI Dungeon to Voyage

The game kept developing. According to Wikipedia, in August 2022 it gained a "See" mode, which generates an image of what the player asks to see, and in March 2024 it was removed from the Steam game store. On 21 April 2026, Latitude unveiled Voyage, a platform for creating AI-based role-playing games. According to TechCrunch, at the heart of the platform is a "World Engine" that took five years to develop. According to Latitude, it tracks characters, objects and relationships and is meant to keep the story consistent, and the company combines its own models with Google models: Gemini Flash for images and Gemma for text, audio and video. Walton, Latitude's CEO, described AI Dungeon as "one of the first times people interacted with generative AI." On 26 August 2026, Voyage opened to everyone on iOS, Android and the web, with no invite code. AI Dungeon itself, as of early October 2026, is still active on Latitude's site.