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

[J.Quondam]

No. Please, just let the dead lie.

 

[payn]

No. Please, just let the dead lie.

 

[General_Tangent]

Would I buy it? No,

I wonder if this will give rise to the android head of Philip K. Dick V2.0 ?

 

[Jasperak]

They used technology to extract a up until now impossible to extact but genuine vocal track of John Lennon's, added it to a guitar track that Harrison had already recorded, and got McCartney and Starr to record new parts. No bit of that was "ai-generated". It would be akin to scanning in illegible notes that Gygax left behind and using "AI" powered OCR to extract the text and publish that.

And that I think is my line. AI should be used only where it is nearly impossible for a human to do the work.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I heard someone tell Alexa, "Thank You" like they were having a conversation with a real person.

I do this.

1) There's zero chance the tech giants aren't keeping records of this, even if it was just some programmer being cute.

2) I've seen the Terminator movies and Black Mirror. The day will come when the machines will care about who has said "please" and "thank you" to them.

 

[payn]

I do this.

1) There's zero chance the tech giants aren't keeping records of this, even if it was some programmer being cute.

2) I've seen the Terminator movies and Black Mirror. The day will come when the machines will care about who has said "please" and "thank you" to them.

 

[Blue Orange]

Look on the bright side, the publishing company can use this to force Patrick Rothfuss to finish the trilogy.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Also like, given the limitations of AI, I know people just 'love' inconsistencies in dungeon maps and designs but like... That's in-built into how AIs design things. They can't remember things. They can't remember there's supposed to be a door from E6 that leads into a certain area

They also don’t actually understand the point, because they can’t understand anything, because “they” don’t exist it’s just a complex math equation that’s been fed a few dictionaries and some novels as inputs.

 

[Willie the Duck]

So, would you buy such a work? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to his estate? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to just the people publishing it?

So, well beyond the ethical concerns about AI, my answer is no. The reason is that I am buying a new Gygax work because of the provenance -- this is something that (one of) the creators of a game I love developed for use in the game. Without that, what is it that this product providers for me? A good adventure or setting? In theory, but I'm not holding my breath. EGG was incredibly hit-or-miss with his output. I already own the good Gygax material. restricting the algorithm to reflect that is destined to put out something resembling a greatest-hits album, and anything including his other works is going to be sub-par to much of what I can get elsewhere. You also need to factor in how mercurial EGG was in his goals and positions, and how often a given output reflected a specific Gary in relation to the gamer zeitgeist of a particularly moment in time. An algorithm trained to spit out a 'Gary Gygax'-like product unchained to a moment in time is going to seem self-contradictory and bizarre, and I have no faith in AI software writing 'What Gary Gygax would produce for gaming in 2024' or the like.

So, at the end of the day, even without the ethical concerns related to AI, there's simply nothing here for me upon which I would want to spend money.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Here's the thing about AI; it's not good at creating a final copy, only drafting. Sure, you could feed it all of Gary Gygax's works and tell it "create an adventure set in Castle Greyhawk" and it would spit something out. But it only knows what you tell it to know, so it's not like the creation would have any creativity. Nor, would it likely be publishable without a human to go through it and edit/retouch it. At that point, you might as well just pay someone to write the thing in the first place based on Gary's notes and comments, rather than spend the money and resources to train an LLM to copy Gary Gygax's writing.