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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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]"

To be fair -- looks around nervously -- many DMs aren't much beyond that point, either.

 

[mamba]

To be fair -- looks around nervously -- many DMs aren't much beyond that point, either.

shots fired

 

[Clint_L]

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.

AI can be very good for helping guide students to resources in fields that they don't know very well (this comes up a lot in my Theory of Knowledge classes). Yes, you can use Google, but AI responds much better to prompts written in real language. For instance, "what are some examples of data being misrepresented in the natural sciences?" Much like Wikipedia, you caution students that this can be a good way to get started, but then they have to do the legwork - AI tends to give them really cliched examples, but at least they now know what kind of thing they are looking for.

 

[I'm A Banana]

I think the appeal for businesses is to have as few humans -- who are expensive, slow and complain about things like being made to work all night on a holiday weekend -- involved in the process as possible. Other than the humans collecting the checks, of course. You can't make anything without them.

Yeah, I believe this. I also think that where creative projects like art and writing are concerned, the human element is a huge part of the value, to me. I don't buy a Murakami book because I have any particular need for sad old businessmen that only he can meet. I buy a Murakami book because I know from experience that he's a person that creates compelling and interesting narratives, and I want to encourage that and check out the next one.

A machine mimicking Gary's style isn't giving me what I value.

Businesses tend toward elimination of humanity wherever possible, but that's part of the perverse incentive scheme for businesses (labor be expensive), and part of why capitalism can't be used as a moral code.

Now talk to me about replacing the Hasbro CEO with an AI, and the calculus changes....

 

[Velderan]

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

I only remember one of my passwords: the one to get into my password manager. Every other password I have is just a random long string that the password manager generated for me and I'll never memorize them.

Do not under any circumstance reuse a password. Have a unique one for everything.

 

[Scribe]

Now talk to me about replacing the Hasbro CEO with an AI, and the calculus changes....

I wonder what the Chat Bots would have to say about the proposal of saving money by cutting CEO wages or replacing CEO's with an AI that doesnt need to get paid at all.

 

[tetrasodium]

I wonder what the Chat Bots would have to say about the proposal of saving money by cutting CEO wages or replacing CEO's with an AI that doesnt need to get paid at all.

Possibly much like this meeting.

 

[Mecheon]

The CEO has always been subordinate to boards of directors and especially shareholders. If they find out that the CEO is thwarting "business optimization tools" and theoretically costing shareholders value, the CEO who pulls this will be out on their ass.

The AIs are definitely coming for management and very few people will shed a lot of tears.

And then the AI logically declares the shareholders are bad for company stability and they should be removed because its looked at the data and seen one too many cases where shareholders have just throttled a company after making their profits

CEOs and shareholders aren't going to give AI power the moment it declares they're surplus to requirements.

Castle Zagyg is a great example, because it's incomplete. A lot of it is just notes. So, would a generative AI -- which we've already demonstrated in this thread can do Gygax's written style -- trained on Gygax's works (or a chosen subset) working off those notes to complete Castle Zagyg be creating something of worth? Would it be better or worse than a human doing it? Would it matter if the AI doing it could do it cheaper (I have no idea how much it would cost the Troll Lords to get an AI Gygax built for them) and could get it to market faster? (Fans of 1E AD&D aren't getting any younger.)

All generative AI does it use the pre-established data it has to try and predict. It cannot create anything truly new, merely remix what exists

It'll just mash up whatever Gygax modules you've put into it. It won't give you an authentic experience, it'll just be pieces copied from other modules and put together into what it vaguely considers the right order. And it'll be inconsistent because I bet if you did that, it'd probably just slap stuff in. Like, if you tried to get it to do a boss room it might just 100% reproduce the final chamber from Tomb of Horrors despite the fact its, not Tomb of Horrors. That's just how AI be. Or just, slap in stuff from Barrier Peaks around like its a normal thing for set dressing and not "why is there suddenly a spaceship window, we're in a castle"

Yep, generative AI isn't ready for many of the tasks it's been given. (At least we're not talking about Tesla's "self-driving" features here.)

But we're still in the very early stages. I'm sure you remember when DVD players were enormous and cost $1,000. Today, if you can find them, they cost $20 and aren't much bigger than a Blu-Ray disc.

In the very near future -- AI tech is improving far faster than DVD tech did -- generative AI hallucinations will be a thing of the past. Even free AI art generators now typically get the number of fingers right in pictures of people, something it famously struggled with a year ago. (The very AI over-saturated colors are still very much a thing, though, even when there's no other obvious tells that art may have been AI generated.)

I don't think we can get rid of AI hallucinations because I suspect that's actually a problem with the actual system. Its got to try and predict things and tends to just run off with what it has. Which is limited simply due to how the tech gets data inputted into it

AI art is never going to be great though. It can't do anything original or new, and it fails miserably the moment you get to obscurer subjects or just paleoart in general. I can tell you about Omnidens, All Tooth, biggest predator of the Cambrian period, a 1.7 meter long lobopodian, but due to that being obscure and little known outside of the paleo space, AI can't do anything with that. Heck, I doubt it can do 'lobopodian' despite 'like those Cambrian weirdos' being enough to give most people a good mental image

Oh, and incidentally on that art stuff, there's a liiiiiittle bit of a lawsuit going on with the art stuff and boy, look at the language they're using to describe their own work. "Launder" isn't language I like to see on "Brand new world-changing tech" and is more what I associate with, y'know. Money laundering.

It is already finding brain tumors months earlier than a human radiologist can. That's definitely making the world better.

Lumping all AI uses into what Sports Illustrated is shortsightedly doing is pretty silly.

The stuff for pattern recognition and that isn't the predictive stuff we're talking about here, AI being the root cause doesn't mean they're comparable techs. On the other side, this stuff running rampart has given us folks making deepfake pornography of people they don't like to ruin their reputation. That is very much not making the world better

This generative AI stuff doesn't help the 'here's the good data analysis' side that lets it do stuff like detecting brain tumours. This is the stuff where Disney tried to cheat people out on deals so they could just use AI crowds rather than ever paying people. They found a toy that produces sub-par work and are trying to say I should be impressed by it

Castle Zagyg was never finished before EGG's death.

Well, if they got the rights to do what they can with what's leftover, hire an author to do what they can with them to try and produce something

AI isn't going to produce "The real full Castle Greyhawk as it was going to be!" by looking at the pre-existing modules. Its going to look at those modules, go "This is how a dungeon is", and then try to slap them together with less grace than a randomly generated room in a roguelike.

 

[QuentinGeorge]

You guys are all missing the most obvious positive here.

Anything an AI produces has GOT to be superior to WG7.

Admittedly, that's a very low bar to clear.

In all seriousness...nah. WG7 is a stupid module but stupid in that way that a bunch of humans making puns wherever they can are, not stupid as-in "here's a computer trying to approximate human creativity and producing something incredibly banal"

I can guarantee you couldn't get AI to generate a module with film director Mordenkainen in a hot tub. Only humans are that demented.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Now talk to me about replacing the Hasbro CEO with an AI, and the calculus changes....

That day will be coming sooner than any of us (especially the CEOs) think and, oh, the schadenfreude ...