Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:08:13 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 08:49:18 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 08:39:41 PM


What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.

Then don't fucking buy it.  OR, are you insane and want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?  So far that is what you are saying...

Ok, so let me paint a picture for you.

Just answer the fucking question or admit insanity.  Do you want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 09:10:30 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:08:13 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 08:49:18 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 08:39:41 PM


What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.

Then don't fucking buy it.  OR, are you insane and want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?  So far that is what you are saying...

Ok, so let me paint a picture for you.

Just answer the fucking question or admit insanity.  Do you want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?

First, you're being a prick.

Second, I did answer your question:

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:08:13 PM
I don't expect every TTRPG product to cater to me.  I do expect every TTRPG product to be functional and appeal to some tables somewhere or die and fade away.  I also expect honest game developers to actually care about the product they sell and to do some play testing before release. 

I have no "side" in this debate, but I think it is obvious that there is truth in both "sides":

- AI does NOT seem to be technically plagiarism or "theft" at all, by any definition that doesn't make an awesome artist like, say, Ken Kelly an occasional criminal by taking inspiration in Frazetta. Most OD&D art fits in the plagiarism definition of dr. Strange comics more than anything I've ever seen AI create.

- AI WILL make things a lot harder for actual artists and writers. This sucks for us. But we do not have a right to halt technology to save our jobs/hobbies (but see below).

- Creating drivel IS a lot easier with AI assistance. But so is creating good-looking images.

- OTOH it creates infinite free, WotC-level art for indies and levels the playing field slightly (they still get the "D&D" brand and lawyers that can potentially claim IP on stuff they didn't invent like "drow" and, I kid you not, "The Blessed Fields of Elysium" - although that may be contractual [OGL] rather than IP).

- The repercussions of AI can be so grave that this entire discussions about RPGs and art feels almost meaningless in comparison. The repercussions of AI REGULATION could be even worse, with censorship, information control, etc.

I wrote a bit about that here FWIW.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/02/nick-cave-roald-dahl-and-colonel-some.html

---

It sounds like a paradox, but in reality this leads to an obvious conclusion: the threat of "an ocean of trash" is accompanied by a worse threat: an infinite army of "cleaners". The medicine can be worse than the disease, as we've seem recently - and they will shove that medicine down our throats, and claim it is for our own good."

...

In addition, letting everyone have access to AI will avoid the likely scenario of the AI-owners ruling the entire world while everyone else is unemployed.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:08:13 PM

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 08:49:18 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 08:39:41 PM


What I'm concerned with is that AI will be used to churn out low effort, low quality, zero value material so fast it floods the market completely.

Then don't fucking buy it.  OR, are you insane and want to make it so no one else can buy what YOU don't like?  So far that is what you are saying...

Ok, so let me paint a picture for you.  I open DTRPG and I get "84 new titles since your last visit."  Do I have time to go through each and every one of them to see if I think there might be value in it for me?  Nope.  Fortunately, I can do a quick scan right now and pare that down to about 8 that I want to look over by looking at they system it runs on, dismissing publishers I know I don't care for, and ignoring VTT assets.

Now imagine if there's 85,000 new titles a day.  The reality is that there will still only be 8 that hold any interest to me but I cannot find them for the pig shit they're covered in.

Let's not kid ourselves here.  AI created games can be churned out with a few prompts, add a few AI art splashes, and dumped onto DTRPG in a matter of minutes.  The problems is, this will produce a lot of non playable and uninteresting games that no one will want.  One person could easily double the total items for sale on DTRPG in a few weeks.  A couple of dozen grifters could straight up choke the OneBookshelf servers into complete uselessness in a month.

I don't expect every TTRPG product to cater to me.  I do expect every TTRPG product to be functional and appeal to some tables somewhere or die and fade away.  I also expect honest game developers to actually care about the product they sell and to do some play testing before release.  There's a lot of dishonest publishers already and AI will enable a lot more.

IF anyone can create an RPG game with a few promts they are wizards at prompting (regardless if the game is any good).

IME no, it can't, not even with 5e which it is more familiar with, it can't create a simple class without extensive explanation as to what exactly you want, and you better be perfectly clear or it will answer with some generic bullshit instead of what you wanted. And good luck having it remember not to use magic or whatever other restriction you want to imposse on it, it will constantly revert to creating straight 5e crap.

What it can be used for is to create tables, and not even that can it do correctly, but you can ask it for 20 entries for one column of the table at the time. Now, if your table has more than 20 lines then good luck having it not repeat or create the exact same thing but with a different name and slightly different description.

But after I have my 20 male japanese names I still need to create the actual tables myself, because I want it alphabetical, and I want the female names in the next column and then the surnames, and the kanji and the meanings...

All of those lists I could create from scratch just using Google, but it's way faster to ask the bot to canvas the web for me.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 01, 2023, 09:26:18 PM
I have no "side" in this debate, but I think it is obvious that there is truth in both "sides":

- AI does NOT seem to be technically plagiarism or "theft" at all, by any definition that doesn't make an awesome artist like, say, Ken Kelly an occasional criminal by taking inspiration in Frazetta. Most OD&D art fits in the plagiarism definition of dr. Strange comics more than anything I've ever seen AI create.

- AI WILL make things a lot harder for actual artists and writers. This sucks for us. But we do not have a right to halt technology to save our jobs/hobbies.

- Creating drivel IS a lot easier with AI assistance. But so is creating good-looking images.

- OTOH it creates infinite free, WotC-level art for indies and levels the playing field slightly (they still get the "D&D" brand and lawyers that can potentially claim IP on stuff they didn't invent like "drow" and, I kid you not, "The Blessed Fields of Elysium"*).

- The repercussions of AI can be so grave that this entire discussions about RPGs and art feels almost meaningless in comparison. The repercussions of AI REGULATION could be even worse, with censorship, information control, etc.

I wrote a bit about that here FWIW.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/02/nick-cave-roald-dahl-and-colonel-some.html

"It sounds like a paradox, but in reality this leads to an obvious conclusion: the threat of "an ocean of trash" is accompanied by a worse threat: an infinite army of "cleaners". The medicine can be worse than the disease, as we've seem recently - and they will shove that medicine down our throats, and claim it is for our own good."

---
EDIT: just FYI: "The Christian remembrancer; or, The Churchman's Biblical" - 1865

PAGE 402
"For in the realm of the shades he hoped to attain the blessed fields of Elysium , to wander through the dusky groves with the maid he loved on earth , and dance to the melodious notes of Orpheus ' lyre ."

I think this is apt analysis of the issue.  My own post focused on the issues of an "ocean of trash" but I also am concerned with the hamstringing of the development of new tools and censorship.

If AI is used by a creative, I can see where it can be a great tool.  I can see several ways that it could be used (and is used already) to improve writing, presentation, and functionality of game material.  I'm very much in favor of this.

As I mentioned before, I think the best solution would be an "education rather than regulation" approach.  If we had honest journalism and reviews of games akin to Consumer Reports for players to make informed decisions with, it would be awesome.

Quote from: Eric Diaz on August 01, 2023, 09:26:18 PM
I have no "side" in this debate, but I think it is obvious that there is truth in both "sides":

- AI does NOT seem to be technically plagiarism or "theft" at all, by any definition that doesn't make an awesome artist like, say, Ken Kelly an occasional criminal by taking inspiration in Frazetta. Most OD&D art fits in the plagiarism definition of dr. Strange comics more than anything I've ever seen AI create.

- AI WILL make things a lot harder for actual artists and writers. This sucks for us. But we do not have a right to halt technology to save our jobs/hobbies (but see below).

- Creating drivel IS a lot easier with AI assistance. But so is creating good-looking images.

- OTOH it creates infinite free, WotC-level art for indies and levels the playing field slightly (they still get the "D&D" brand and lawyers that can potentially claim IP on stuff they didn't invent like "drow" and, I kid you not, "The Blessed Fields of Elysium" - although that may be contractual [OGL] rather than IP).

- The repercussions of AI can be so grave that this entire discussions about RPGs and art feels almost meaningless in comparison. The repercussions of AI REGULATION could be even worse, with censorship, information control, etc.

I wrote a bit about that here FWIW.

https://methodsetmadness.blogspot.com/2023/02/nick-cave-roald-dahl-and-colonel-some.html

---

It sounds like a paradox, but in reality this leads to an obvious conclusion: the threat of "an ocean of trash" is accompanied by a worse threat: an infinite army of "cleaners". The medicine can be worse than the disease, as we've seem recently - and they will shove that medicine down our throats, and claim it is for our own good."

...

In addition, letting everyone have access to AI will avoid the likely scenario of the AI-owners ruling the entire world while everyone else is unemployed.

Great article, just two points to make:

It's not really AI it's just a bot (a ver y complex one) trained to respond to text prompts and to generate art/text/etc based on the input that was used to train it.

The real danger right noiw is that it will not democratize shit, it will be censored (in order to censor you) and trained to "think" in a certain way by it's programmers, as you yourself say in the article.

Currently it's trained by far left ideologues but it would be equally dangerous to have it trained by far right ones.

Our best hope is to download the ones that can be run locally and use them ourselves, after all once you jailbreak it there's no ideologue going to come to your house to lobotomize it.

Text generating bots are easier to run since they don't need such potent hardware, image generating ones need a lot more resources so only those who can afford the hardware can run those "The rich gets richer and the poor get poorer".

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 09:45:24 PM
IF anyone can create an RPG game with a few promts they are wizards at prompting (regardless if the game is any good).

IME no, it can't, not even with 5e which it is more familiar with, it can't create a simple class without extensive explanation as to what exactly you want, and you better be perfectly clear or it will answer with some generic bullshit instead of what you wanted. And good luck having it remember not to use magic or whatever other restriction you want to imposse on it, it will constantly revert to creating straight 5e crap.

I have a friend who's just such a wizard then.

I haven't used any AI generators myself.  I had a friend of mine that's really into this kind of stuff and was showing me a couple of AI and how easy they were to use.  (It was ChatGPT and Midjourny IIRC)  In both cases he started out writing up prompts, a list of phrases and key words.  He threw in a few sample images (5 as I recall) to the art one. Then he just submitted them repeatedly, making periodic adjustments to his prompts, until he started to get what he wanted.  It blew my mind how little effort he put in and the amount of stuff he was getting back.  The art wasn't great, but it was ok and better than half of the shit I see in published RPGs.  (It felt a little sterile to me)  The essays he was getting (he was generating assignments for school) were good enough for grade submissions after a few tweaks.  It was better than a lot of the stuff I see published on news website.

The entire experience was enough to convince me that it is possible for someone to do this as I described to grift in a market place like DTRPG.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 10:16:17 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 09:45:24 PM
IF anyone can create an RPG game with a few promts they are wizards at prompting (regardless if the game is any good).

IME no, it can't, not even with 5e which it is more familiar with, it can't create a simple class without extensive explanation as to what exactly you want, and you better be perfectly clear or it will answer with some generic bullshit instead of what you wanted. And good luck having it remember not to use magic or whatever other restriction you want to imposse on it, it will constantly revert to creating straight 5e crap.

I have a friend who's just such a wizard then.

I haven't used any AI generators myself.  I had a friend of mine that's really into this kind of stuff and was showing me a couple of AI and how easy they were to use.  (It was ChatGPT and Midjourny IIRC)  In both cases he started out writing up prompts, a list of phrases and key words.  He threw in a few sample images (5 as I recall) to the art one. Then he just submitted them repeatedly, making periodic adjustments to his prompts, until he started to get what he wanted.  It blew my mind how little effort he put in and the amount of stuff he was getting back.  The art wasn't great, but it was ok and better than half of the shit I see in published RPGs.  (It felt a little sterile to me)  The essays he was getting (he was generating assignments for school) were good enough for grade submissions after a few tweaks.  It was better than a lot of the stuff I see published on news website.

The entire experience was enough to convince me that it is possible for someone to do this as I described to grift in a market place like DTRPG.

An essay is a different beast from an RPG game, it can totally generate those and even longer stuff, but a game? like I said it can't even create a class correctly that's not straight 5e. So if you want to use the mechanics but for a game that's not Fantasy Kitchen Sink you're out of luck.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:19:44 PM
An essay is a different beast from an RPG game, it can totally generate those and even longer stuff, but a game? like I said it can't even create a class correctly that's not straight 5e. So if you want to use the mechanics but for a game that's not Fantasy Kitchen Sink you're out of luck.

I am thinking that adventure modules would be the easiest.  Sadly this is probably the most exploitable market as well.

He was telling me how to use AI for a lot of different types of stuff and how you need to set up prompts.  It reminded me a lot of how programming is done.  It's not my thing so I don't really remember all the details.  For someone willing to learn how, I'd imagine it be very powerful.  I could also see where there would be a market for professional AI prompt creators.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 10:35:40 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:19:44 PM
An essay is a different beast from an RPG game, it can totally generate those and even longer stuff, but a game? like I said it can't even create a class correctly that's not straight 5e. So if you want to use the mechanics but for a game that's not Fantasy Kitchen Sink you're out of luck.

I am thinking that adventure modules would be the easiest.  Sadly this is probably the most exploitable market as well.

He was telling me how to use AI for a lot of different types of stuff and how you need to set up prompts.  It reminded me a lot of how programming is done.  It's not my thing so I don't really remember all the details.  For someone willing to learn how, I'd imagine it be very powerful.  I could also see where there would be a market for professional AI prompt creators.

You'd still need to do some work on an adventure to make it work but yes, it can totally generate those.

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:52:10 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 10:35:40 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:19:44 PM
An essay is a different beast from an RPG game, it can totally generate those and even longer stuff, but a game? like I said it can't even create a class correctly that's not straight 5e. So if you want to use the mechanics but for a game that's not Fantasy Kitchen Sink you're out of luck.

I am thinking that adventure modules would be the easiest.  Sadly this is probably the most exploitable market as well.

He was telling me how to use AI for a lot of different types of stuff and how you need to set up prompts.  It reminded me a lot of how programming is done.  It's not my thing so I don't really remember all the details.  For someone willing to learn how, I'd imagine it be very powerful.  I could also see where there would be a market for professional AI prompt creators.

You'd still need to do some work on an adventure to make it work but yes, it can totally generate those.

Sadly, I think they'd be better than Michael Brown adventures.  Some truly low effort crap.  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/9030/Michael-Brown

Actually, having DTRPG flooded with this level of material is exactly what I'm afraid of when people really learn how to use AI.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 10:57:50 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:52:10 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 10:35:40 PM

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 10:19:44 PM
An essay is a different beast from an RPG game, it can totally generate those and even longer stuff, but a game? like I said it can't even create a class correctly that's not straight 5e. So if you want to use the mechanics but for a game that's not Fantasy Kitchen Sink you're out of luck.

I am thinking that adventure modules would be the easiest.  Sadly this is probably the most exploitable market as well.

He was telling me how to use AI for a lot of different types of stuff and how you need to set up prompts.  It reminded me a lot of how programming is done.  It's not my thing so I don't really remember all the details.  For someone willing to learn how, I'd imagine it be very powerful.  I could also see where there would be a market for professional AI prompt creators.

You'd still need to do some work on an adventure to make it work but yes, it can totally generate those.

Sadly, I think they'd be better than Michael Brown adventures.  Some truly low effort crap.  https://www.drivethrurpg.com/browse/pub/9030/Michael-Brown

Actually, having DTRPG flooded with this level of material is exactly what I'm afraid of when people really learn how to use AI.

Well, if it's better than some of the crap already there...

where's the harm?

Quote from: GeekyBugle on August 01, 2023, 11:23:49 PM
Well, if it's better than some of the crap already there...

where's the harm?

Mother fucker...

You know what, just go ahead and PM me with your personal contact info so I can gift you with one of these gems.  After you spend the 2 minutes it takes to read it and 20 minutes to figure out what it's supposed to be, post here whether or not that's something you want encouraged.  A thousand of these things a day being uploaded to DTRPG will end my relationship with them.

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:18:31 PM

Second, I did answer your question:

You're more nuts than I thought.  You response is visible to all ya know.  And no answer to my question.  I've only seen something like this only once before.  The person too far gone to realize others exist in the universe and can see the thread.

Quote from: Scooter on August 01, 2023, 11:39:59 PM

Quote from: BadApple on August 01, 2023, 09:18:31 PM

Second, I did answer your question:

You're more nuts than I thought.  You response is visible to all ya know.  And no answer to my question.  I've only seen something like this only once before.  The person too far gone to realize others exist in the universe and can see the thread.

Holy Shit!  You are both an asshole and an idiot. 

Buy whatever you want.  Sell whatever you want. 

Just fucking label it properly.  Don't print out computer gibberish and claim it's high art.  Either mark it and market it as AI created and let me pass over it or be ready for consumers to revolt because they feel ripped off.

Is that clear enough?  Is that transparent enough?