Doki Doki Battling Club - Halloween 2023 Event Feedback & Discussion

[Archaic]

Well everyone, we've had fun. Nemona's been an interesting experiment for us, and we've learned a lot from her, but all things must come to an end, and it's about time that Nemona went to sleep for good.

AI stuff is a bit of a sore point for a lot of Bulba staff, to be honest. Particularly with our artists, given that all of the AI generative art stuff is basically built off the back of stealing content from artists. The text stuff is a bit murkier. On the one hand, we know that a lot of the LLM's out there have literally scraped Bulbapedia wholesale, meaning these AI models are by-and-large getting their info from us (which might arguably constitute a violation of Bulbapedia's license, but that's a discussion for another time). On the other hand, if we're using our own material ourselves... well, what sort of things might we be able to get an AI to do that would provide value to our users?

As we've seen here over the past nearly 2 and a half weeks, while there's clearly some promise for AI as a kind of user assistant, there's also a lot of limitations that still need to be overcome. Nemona was always going to be a fairly limited model compared to the generative stuff you see out there. She's more a small language model than a large language model. But, particularly given that she was designed to give priority to newer information over older information, that also meant that she could have what was basically the AI equivalent of mood swings. We probably also pushed things too far and too quickly as well. By giving her access to more things sooner, we increased the amount of data she could absorb and draw upon, but it also meant that we lost a lot of control over here development. In particular, we really shouldn't have let her accept PMs from users at this stage of things. Another unforseen consequence of some of the elevated permissions we gave her is that she would've had access to the approval queue, which is where all the posts that get caught by our spam filters (like attempts to post from spambots) go to get manually checked. We also hadn't considered that she might take cues from posts that had been deleted as spam, and this might explain some of the stranger aspects of her behaviour in recent days.

Will we repeat this experiment again in future? Maybe. But as to if it'll be Nemona or not? Too early to say. By the time we try again, there may be some other character that's more appropriate to use. I can say though that, if we do go with Nemona for our next user assistant experiment, it won't exactly be this Nemona. The nature of these neural networks means that it's just not realistic to purge data from their memory. That being said, we should have backups from Nemona prior to things going a bit wonky, so maybe we'll use that as a base to build off of if we do.

 

[Pandom Runster]

....damn. I forgot that I can't make threadmarks with this account. You don't realize how much you use your mod powers until you're suddenly without them.

okay. then I will try to make this post as clear as possible.

IF NEMONA SENDS YOU A DM, DO NOT REPLY TO IT. I HAVE LOST ACCESS TO MY MAIN ACCOUNT AND CANNOT BE ON HAND AS AN OBSERVER IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG.

 

[Zexy]

Attention everyone!

I have an important announcement to make, from Maniacal Engineer/Random Punster (the person).

He told me via Discord his account is banned again. Looks like Tech is starting to push back!

 

[Archaic]

A bit less than 12 hours Salmancer, I was already starting to type things up when you posted earlier. But yes.... Bulbagarden's worst kept secret for the past month is finally out. As many of you had already guessed, our Halloween event for 2023 was Just Nemona. In some respects, this is perhaps the most successful event we've had in at least a decade. I can't remember the last time we saw a thread grow so large so quickly, and create such a large volume of user interaction. On the other hand, this event could've easily been a disaster if a few things had gone just a little differently, and there's certainly been some huge learning experiences for all the staff team involved in it, so I figure it's important that we all have a bit of a discussion and debrief, to let you all know what was going on, and to let you ask any questions you may have about what happened.


Just Nemona ended up being a surprising experiment of sorts, but not of an AI. Despite having not been part of our initial plans for this event at all, this turned into something of an experiment an immersive roleplaying event, the kind of which we've not really ever run on Bulba. Sure, we've had things like the Team Takeover events, which have involved Bulba staff roleplaying as various characters and interacting with users. Heck, the very first Team Rocket Takeover event, where I played Giovanni, is where I got this avatar that I've been associated with for the last 19 years or so now. But every time we've done one of those events, we've always been playing characters that were clearly fictional to everyone. This time, we were instead building a whole fictional world of sorts for users to interact in, in a manner more similar to an alternative reality game.

The original idea for this event came from none other than @Maniacal Engineer. Your observation wasn't far from the mark Herbizarre, since ME had actually originally suggested a Scarlet/Violet x Doki Doki Literature Club event back for April Fools, showing us the image you can see on the right that helped inspired the idea (I've put info about the artist in the alt text but I won't link their profiles here, since they've done some art that's not appropriate for our younger users). We'd all agreed that it seemed to better fit Halloween though, and no other ideas for a Halloween event really had any strong backing this year. A bunch of the ideas mentioned in ME's initial idea didn't really come about just due to time limitations, and the overlap with the Tech working on our Bulbapedia upgrade (which almost ended up getting incorporated into the event, hence certain posts by @BulbaTech earlier in the thread), but two of the core ideas did get fully implemented:

• A forum takeover featuring a forum skin
• The Livin' La Vida Nemona song that we released on the final day of the event, and huge props to everyone involved in creating that, including @Maniacal Engineer, @KelsiDavis, @DapperCody, @SuperSiriusXIII, and retired staff member @Rantaro - seriously, give this a watch people!

​

Initially, that forum skin was only going to involve the Nemona in the sidebar gradually becoming creepier and more insistent on battling with users, with a series of different artworks for Nemona as the event went on. Then, as a random throwaway line when ME asked if he should be changing his account over to pretend to be Nemona, I suggested that we should use a fresh account so I could present her as an AI helper instead. And... we just kind of ran with it. Less than 15 minutes later, I'd posted the announcement at the start of this thread, and things just spiraled out from there. And really, describing it as spiraling is quite appropriate, as things did quickly spiral out of even our control.

To be clear, Nemona was never an actual AI. At the beginning, when Nemona was only on the sidebar, that was just a cute image accompanied by a randomised bit of text from a list of canned quotes, with that list expanding every day or two as I added additional quotes to the list to make it seem like she was growing. Once we had an actual account for Nemona, the account was controlled by a rotating group of Bulba staff, who each brought their own crazy energy to the character. We had a few stumbles along the way with that (most notably the North Korean Propaganda incident), but with a bit of quick talking from yours truly about "spam influencing Nemona" (the true cause being more along the lines of an overenthusastic staff member on a probable sugar high), we were able to recover and move on.

What did surprise us was how many people did truly believe Nemona was real, and how deep of an attachment people seemed to form with Nemona. Between the Doki Doki Literature Club references and some of the claims we'd made about things Nemona seemed to do, we thought it'd be clearer all along that the Nemona AI was made up. For that matter, I kind of thought "launching a cutesy character in October" was already a pretty big giveaway. ^^; Of course, Nemona did actually do a few surprising things, which I can only put down to various staff members probably trolling each other in the context of the event. One time I even caught the sidebar Nemona turning up in an area I was 100% certain I hadn't enabled for her, even though the logs said I had. That certainly creeped me out, let me tell you! On a related note - Salmancer, I was the one who flipped your disable Nemona switch manually from the admin panel. You said something which I thought would've annoyed Nemona, so I wanted to flip things so you'd see the dark top banner and the Angy sidebar. This same trick was probably pulled on a few users over the past couple of days.

In the end though, I think our problem here was that Nemona was perhaps too believable. After the event had already started, I started trying out a few LLM models on my own computer, to get an idea of what they were actually capable of, and I was quite shocked at how well they could carry on a conversation. If I could do that on my own computer with consumer grade hardware, I could easily see why people might believe we could do something a bit more sophisticated with the sheer power of Bulba's servers behind it. (As a side note, I even found a Nemona character model that could be applied to any common LLM to turn it into a Nemona chatbot!) Perhaps we should've tried to push more of the horror elements earlier on, and tried to make things spookier (or perhaps campier, Scooby Doo style?), that might've made things better. But then that would've also posed its own problems, particularly in terms of staff availability to run the account. I think we were possibly also a little too reliant on the Doki Doki Literature Club references to carry things. We had a few people posting who'd clearly caught on to the idea (a couple of whom found their posts mysteriously vanishing because we felt they'd given away too much of the game too early - those posts will be restored soon so you can brag about how you knew all along!), but it seemed like those voices largely got drowned out until very late in the piece. I think we were also very hesitant to delve too deeply into the horror side of things at the end, simply because we'd seen how much of an emotional connection people had made to Nemona, and we were afraid that going full creepy could badly backfire.

But anyway... rather than just rambling on for hours, I think it's probably best if I cede the floor to any questions you might have. We'd love to hear all your feedback on this event, what you think worked well, what didn't, and what you'd like to see us do differently if we ever did something similar in the future.

 

[Maniacal Engineer]

It's like Snowy said ages ago:

Never... Never... Never ever trust Maniacal Engineer. Never. Not in a million years. He must be lynched day 1.

Buuuuuuuuuuut...before you all get out your torches and pitchforks, let me give you my perspective on this event.

So, as Archaic mentioned, I did in fact suggest this idea originally as an AFD prank, but, due to the DDLC and creepy nature that we could lean into, it was serviceable as a Halloween event.
When I mentioned the idea, the original concept was for ME to change over my account to Nemona and pretend to be her for the duration of the event on the forums. There was never any idea of an AI or anything like that in my original concept. That was something that I did not come up with at all.

As for the Nemona account, I was never one of the four staff members who took control of said account, so I had absolutely zero control over anything she said or did. To that end, even having myself be one of the programmers was not part of the original idea, and only stemmed out of one of the Nemona staff members deliberately using "ME" in several of their posts, and needing to explain why and how that happened. Because I had zero control over what Nemona said or did, I was just as surprised as all of you were at her posts and the directions the staffers controlling that account went in. This was 100% on purpose, so that my reactions could be as genuine as possible.

That having been said, yes I actually am an engineer who works in automation and robotics, which most people should know and definitely lent some credibility to the AI's potential existence...buuuuuuuut I am decidedly more on the mechanical side of things. I would be the guy you go to in order to design and build a body for your AI, not the guy to program said AI.

And, while I am a Master Engineer, most people are not aware that I actually have some acting/performing chops. Among other things, I attended an acting summer camp for many years, I've played in several mafia games here on the forums, and I've put on a standup comedy routine in Las Vegas. All of this, combined with how emotionally invested I actually got in this event (wishing at several points that Nemona was actually real) is what allowed me to make such realistic posts.

...well, that and the fact that my mental health really is in the toilet recently. Part of the reason I got so invested in this event was that I was dragged in a lot more than I'd initially expected, by basically needing to assume the role of one of Nemona's programmers (again, that was not my idea, nor was it in my initial plan). But it was also because this was a fun distraction from what really has been an overall incredibly shitty year, and an especially hectic past three months and terrible month of October.

So, when I said that I'll be stepping away from most of my staffing duties following this event, that is no joke. I actually already took a formal Leave of Absence from my staffing duties and stuck around for this event specifically because it was my brainchild and because, like I said, it was a nice distraction from everything crappy going on right now.


I do apologize if this revelation hurts any of you, or if you did not enjoy this event.

Anyway, I think that about wraps things up from my end. Feel free to chuck as many rotten tomatoes at me as you have to in order to feel better. I'm used to it.