Generative AI storytelling platform MidReal has officially launched its flagship product, Choose Your Own Adventure. Based on the most recent Morpheus-1 model, the tool allows players to generate stories that evolve as they make decisions. Rather than passively consuming media, MidReal puts players, readers, TV and film fans, and more accountable for shaping the narrative.
Founded in October 2023 with researchers from MIT, Cornell, and Duke, MidReal blurs the lines between text adventures and games. The San Francisco-based company employs seven full-time and five part-time employees to advance the medium's potential.
In addition to story generation, MidReal has other features to advertise story immersion and have interaction users. This includes generated illustrations with consistent characters and the power to remix public stories.
“In the world of AI-driven narrative and storytelling, readability and credibility are paramount, and this desire to supply creatives with essentially the most advanced tools available is what drove us to create MidReal and its newest AI module, Morpheus develop. 1,'” said Kaijie Chen, co-founder and CEO of MidReal. “With today’s official launch, we sit up for the countless stories just waiting to be told to the world.”
MidReal's academic skills
Unlike other generative AI tools that deal with storytelling, the team behind MidReal has developed proprietary tools to enhance results.
“We retrained large language models to fundamentally transform them from chat-based models into story completion agents optimized for narrative coherence and immersion,” Chen told GamesBeat.
“We were inspired by Shunyu Yao’s work “Tree of Thoughts,” which organizes the overall problem-solving process in a tree structure. We found that the strategy of writing stories is comparable to constructing a problem-solving tree. When writing stories, the user's input scenario serves as the foundation of the tree, while subsequent possibilities of plot development serve because the leaf nodes of the tree, extending in numerous directions. Writing a superb story is about selecting the branch that gives the very best plot development.”
Morpheus-1 is a practical application based on a Paper 2023 which proposed a post-training framework for constructing LLM-based agents. The project's collaborators included Princeton Karthik Narasimhan (one among the unique authors of the unique GPT study), Shunyu Yao and MidReal's other co-founder, COO and President Andrew Chen.
Testing Morpheus-1
True to MidReal's academic roots, the team tested Morpheus-1's performance against its competitors. In a double-blind study, American readers compared 900 pairs of stories – one from Morpheus and the opposite from a competing model. Readers rated these pairs on five dimensions: interestingness, coherence, relevance, emotional impact, and linguistic style.
Overall, Morpheus-1 outperformed each GPT-4 and other state-of-the-art storytelling models. Readers preferred MidReal's product over GPT-4 85% of the time and over competing storytelling products 75% of the time.
“Our model wins essentially the most within the 'Interesting' and 'Emotional Impact' directions, which we consider are the 2 most significant directions in AI storytelling today,” Chen said. “This is because tools like ChatGPT can tell a story, however the story is often, if not at all times, too boring. For a story to really be consumable, it must first be interesting. Therefore, ‘interestingness’ is the direction during which we attempt to optimize the model essentially the most.”
What's next
While MidReal launches today, the San Francisco-based company has no plans to decelerate.
“MidReal is poised to significantly expand its capabilities. We are working on integrating photo-based fantasy diary compositions and interactive video experiences. “In addition, we plan to release our APP and introduce a brand new “SERVER” function,” Chen said.
“Imagine entering a Discord server where your folks on the server are AI agents and you possibly can freely chat with them such as you do with real friends. Stories are generated on the server, identical to social media posts (image and video) and YouTube shorts. Of course, you too can invite human friends to affix the server. This is an immersive world where everyone can live their imaginary life.”
Although MidReal has raised funds previously, the corporate currently has no plans to boost one other round of funding within the near future.
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