Playing AI Dungeon
Table of Contents
Getting Started
New Player Guide
AI Dungeon 101
Adventure AwaitsCommon Questions
AI Model Differences
About the AI
Account Questions
Community 
Memberships & Benefits
Other Questions
Privacy & Security
Status
Terms of ServiceWhy Hamsters?
When you join our community for the first time, you’ll probably see a glaringly obvious (and confusing) theme throughout:
Hamsters.
Almost all of the stickers are hamsters. Official developers have hamster profile pictures. Voyage even has a hamster loading animation.
But… why? How?
A few of the stickers in our Discord server.
The Beginning
It all started about November 2023 on Discord, back when Latitude would personally select Alpha testers from the community to test features behind the scenes. (Since then, Alpha testing has become available to all players.)
Alpha testers were introduced to a new system involving uploading their own covers to scenarios and adventures. This was big; back then, you could only use the default pictures as your covers, due to safety concerns.
Safety was obviously still a concern, so the whole feature was protected by Hive AI, which would hopefully block inappropriate images outright.
Hive’s goal was to scan the image upon uploading and return information on how it was classified, as well as block the image if it classified as NSFW. An image might get classified with terms like anime, suggestive, person, and so on depending on what is detected in the image. The scan would also output a value based on how confident it was in that: if it can clearly detect a human, its score for person will be higher.
This scoring was used as a threshold for blocking NSFW images. For each category they wanted to block, a limit was set on that value. For example, if they set the tag anime threshold as 0.2, any image having more than 0.2 in anime would be blocked.
However, it was the first time using this system, and Latitude didn’t know where to put the limits, so they asked Alpha testers to help test it and find those limits naturally.
The plan was simple: Try to upload various images and see if they pass or not.
Testers were told to share images with Latitude with an explanation if they didn’t agree with the results, like an image being blocked for no reason at all, or something passing while it’s obviously crossing the line. This was used as a way for Latitude to adjust filtering values and try to find the golden spot. Easy enough, right?
So what in the world does this have to do with hamsters?
Well, this happened.
When one of our community members and Alpha testers, Dragranis, uploaded this image of an innocuous hamster, it was flagged by Hive and blocked.
Confusion, a million questions with no answers, just… how was it blocked? On what grounds?
Dragranis has been uploading tons of images at that time, and mostly agreed with results. This, though? No one had any idea. Testers couldn’t see the categories the image triggered, so all they could do was ask Ryan (currently CFO of Latitude) to investigate it.
Realistic NSFW? For a hamster? Naturally, it started some jokes. A lot of jokes, actually. For a long time, it was a silly inside joke between Latitude and Alpha testers.
Over time though, it expanded.
Stickers were made:
And Matu even responded with his own:
It was just random banter at first, hidden in private, alpha-only channels. But then Dragranis thought… why not make these into funny stickers for the server? People would definitely use them, after all.
By this little act, the rest of the server was exposed to the hamsters, and thus the joke only grew when exposed to a bigger audience.
The Expansion
Various members of Latitude and server staff, such as helpers and mods, were now sporting various hamster themed profile pictures. There was a hamster sage, a bald hamster, a coding hamster, and much more. It started to become a trend.
Dragranis and Onyx (another community member at the time; now part of the Latitude team) made most of these avatars, some of which are still being used to this day! Some were made by others, or just by the people themselves, wanting to make their customized hamster and wear it with pride as server profile picture.
Matu
Ryan
Nick
When you’re a part of hamster lore for so long, why not make it official?
No more boring “CEO”, “COO”, “CFO”… no, they are hamsters in chief – hamsters to rule above everything.
Somehow it’s easier talking to the CEO if you imagine him as a hamster, right?
What started as an inside joke eventually became what we could call actual server lore. And it just kept going!
2024 was extra special, because on April Fools, Latitude prepared a special event to celebrate.
One of the surprises was a Spotify album of AI-generated songs, which, naturally, had hamster themes!
Listen to the hamster song here →
The cover of the Spotify album, which is a band of hamsters.
Dragranis also made a scenario around this time, where you work at Latitude and get to meet different developers, mods, helpers, Alpha testers and other notable characters from the Discord server, with one caveat… everyone is a hamster!
The scenario was approved by a Latitude employee, and following that, hamsters finally breached out of the community and into the platform itself.
The cover of the Scenario ‘Hamstertude’
Conclusion
So… why hamsters? Nobody really knows why it became as popular as it did.
Our Discord server is lively; people create inside jokes every single day, but it doesn’t turn into server lore. The original hamster could have been another 5-minute laugh, one that would be quickly forgotten. Somehow, it survived.
This dumb-looking hamster is symbol of lore, community, jokes, fun and creating something new, even though for others it might make no sense. This is a special hamster. This is our hamster. Long live the original hamster, the one that accidentally started something beautiful!
