D&D General Would you buy an AI-generated Castle Greyhawk "by" Gary Gygax?" Should you?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I have cited this same passage in discussions at work with teachers who bewail the impact phones are having on students memorizing material. Instead of looking at phones as competing with our memory and knowledge, we should look at them as memory and knowledge prosthetics. Just like books, but on steroids.

Yeah, off-loading memorizing 10-digit (in the US) strings of numbers to a machine just frees us up for other stuff. At worst, whatever they fill that capacity with can't be worse than storing random strings of numbers with no intrinsic value.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Why? Inherently the only thing of value is the string of numbers, because if you are ever without your phone, and you need to call (with someone elses phone) you are SOL otherwise.

Because that's a single use case. Everything else one could fill with that space, even if other people might find it silly ("Why do you need to memorize every monster in the Monster Manual?"), can be used in more ways than that. And it lets people fill that capacity with whatever they like, rather than everyone being tethered to a specific 20th century use case.

 

[mamba]

If literacy didn't ruin the human race, I have faith that we'll survive AI.

I don’t know, literacy requires you to structure your thoughts, AI does not, once it is good enough. That to me is the dividing line, if the technology lets us get away with becoming babbling idiots, then it is detrimental to us as a society.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I use that part of my brain to memorise passwords now.

I think security experts would tell you that your passwords aren't secure enough, then.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I don’t know, literacy requires you to structure your thoughts, AI does not, once it is good enough. That to me is the dividing line, if the technology lets us get away with becoming babbling idiots, then it is detrimental to us as a society.

Socrates was worried about this issue as well, that by off-loading memory to the written word, people weren't "really" understanding what they were accessing.

In the end, it's all tools. Some people will be babbling idiots no matter what, while I think everyone else will find ways to use the new tools available to good effect.

I personally am looking forward to AI agents -- not generative AI -- that will be able to pull data for me, cite sources and do spreadsheet-style work on the fly. I can do all of that work myself, although I struggle with more complex spreadsheet work, but it takes a long time. Having that automated will mean I can spend more time working with the results of the data, not assembling it.

And I'm sure if we go back to the 1980s, we will find will find accountants who thought that people didn't "really" understand their finances or math in general if they were using VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 instead of doing spreadsheets by hand. I think they've been proven wrong at this point.

 

[Scribe]

I use that part of my brain to memorise passwords now.

Big truth to that.

Having done first line technical support, the ability to write in a clear and concise manner really does wonders for how quickly your ticket is dealt with and resolved.

In my personal experience I found that the people that could clearly convey their issues were those people with English as a second language.

Yes, and this even applies to myself. I've found that I know the rules of various programming languages, better than I do English.

 

[mamba]

Some people will be babbling idiots no matter what, while I think everyone else will find ways to use the new tools available to good effect.

Some people always will, a concerning amount actually. My problem is that percentage seems to be increasing, and this is not helping in the least

 

[Scribe]

And I'm sure if we go back to the 1980s, we will find will find accountants who thought that people didn't "really" understand their finances or math in general if they were using VisiCalc and Lotus 1-2-3 instead of doing spreadsheets by hand. I think they've been proven wrong at this point.

I've used applications to do my taxes myself, and I promise you I understood nothing of what I was doing/entering.

Thankfully this was when I was poor, and it hardly mattered, compared to going to an actual accountant now, who understands these things and saved me a meaningful amount of money last year.

 

[the Jester]

Interestingly, I just happened upon this.


EDIT: And it's not trained on a bunch of artists' music. This seems like an ethical AI effort, at least from what Tank says in the first part of the video.

 

[tetrasodium]

Maybe... But probably not. So is barely at the point where it can write coherently with length. I'm not against AI as a tool for creators and pretty sure I follow or have read a handful of webnovels where the non/poor-english speaking author writes in a native language>translates to English as best they can >then finally uses an AI thingy to rephrase the result in a more dramatically correct/native seeming style. Even then the results are sometimes iffy.

AI is very much not at the point where it could build a coherent adventure that goes much deeper than a basic 3-5room dungeon with a summary plot seed like "a local village hired you to clear undead from the crypts. [Room description]"