I did play with AI dungeon, and I would say the analogy to a dream is even deeper than it may appear at first, because I found that lucid dreaming techniques basically work on it, which is bizarrely impressive. I would characterize a lot of what one does in lucid dreaming (or, at least, what I do) is basically "expectations management"; if you can learn to expect something to happen in a dream, it frequently does. Not necessarily exactly what you "expected", but it will have a very significant influence. Correspondingly, it is possible (and indeed easy) to basically lead the AI along by using your text prompts to expect things to happen, and in a very dreamlike fashion, while that doesn't mean the exact thing you "expected" will be what the AI produces, it can clearly have very very significant impact on the result.
I should warn you this sort of removes the magic from AI Dungeon as an experience though... I have to consciously "let" it drive the story because it's pretty easy to exert much more control than you're "supposed" to have, when you know how to look behind the curtain.
There is indeed. I'll recount my own words after my first proper exposure to the model, in the form of playing custom stories in AI Dungeon:
"I played more of it today, and I can confirm that prolonged exposure makes me feel like I'm half awake, and half in a dream - particularly when the real world interrupts, I feel like I didn't fully wake up.
What's worse, whenever I tried to talk to a real person today, I've felt like I'm just feeding words to an AI, and anticipated "story" to evolve.
Never before has a game messed up with my mind so badly. I'm not sure if it's safe."
To which I got a reply perfectly summarizing the phenomenon:
"AI Dungeon feels a bit like a fever-dream."
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It's been a year since; thinking back, I feel the trick here is, GPT-3 crosses the threshold of being able to produce plausible and interesting text - where by "interesting" I mean "almost, but not quite, unpredictable". The way other people and their stories are interesting - their words aren't totally random, you have this feeling for the possible trajectories the conversation can take, but you can't quite guess what they're going to say next. GPT-3 does that well enough that it's easy to suspend disbelief and feel as if you're dealing with a mind. But then the feelings that arise in you, that's just you projecting - engaging your mental machinery for dealing with other minds.