WotC Would you buy WotC products produced or enhanced with AI?

[kayakingpoodle]

Was it a sad day for DMs when Matt Mercer or Brennan Lee Mulligan got youtube channels?

For many it was, many players started expectexpecting a near identical experience from every DM.

Oddly enough there are many youtube videos addressing this.

 

[Faolyn]

Yes, because corporate leadership by and large is...not smart.

Smart Fridge. God people, WHY. You put the food in, and you close the door. It keeps things cold. Thats it.

What is the use case, that tells me I need to integrate my FRIDGE into my 24/7 connected life.

Anyone?

It's so your robot maid knows when to use the view-screen to order more space-lunches.

Honestly, I think it's entirely that. A smart fridge is something you'd see in a sci-fi flick, and therefore desirable to some. Kind of like how flying cars are cool until you start realizing that there will be problems if it breaks down mid-air, and you think about how terribly people drive on the ground.

 

[Faolyn]

The body proportions of females, specifically? What an odd thing to be an expert on.

For some people, that's sadly all that matters.

 

[Scribe]

It's so your robot maid knows when to use the view-screen to order more space-lunches.

Honestly, I think it's entirely that. A smart fridge is something you'd see in a sci-fi flick, and therefore desirable to some. Kind of like how flying cars are cool until you start realizing that there will be problems if it breaks down mid-air, and you think about how terribly people drive on the ground.

 

[Faolyn]

But here is code that makes every possible picture. Doesn't care if they are good, creative, imaginative, or whatever. But it does makes them.
(P.s. don't run it as it will fill your hard drive with garbage images).

That's rather telling.

Was it a sad day for DMs when Matt Mercer or Brennan Lee Mulligan got youtube channels?


Because they are better DMs that I am, and thus devalued my DM skills. I got outclassed, but I believe the hobby is better for it. And doesn't mean I stopped DMing.

The only way your DM skills will be devalued is if you refuse to try to improve your skills as a DM--or if you continue to insist on comparing your skills to other people.

 

[BookTenTiger]

Here are some weird things AI could never make:

Sure you could type a million prompts into AI, you could ask it to recreate something in the style of X or in the voice of Y, but the reason AI could never create it is because all these are creations based on the lived experiences, memories, triumphs, tragedies, etc of human beings. That's an integral part of art, and something that I think we, as a society, should recognize, celebrate, and support.

 

[J.Quondam]

For now... And yeah, it is just scale. You brought it up, after all.

Yeah, time will tell. (That's why I'm careful to say "current" gen AI.)
But to be fair, I didn't bring up scale; you did. I said current gen AI and humans are fundamentally different in ways that are not attributable to scale. E.g., throwing more images at a human doesn't make that person a better, faster artist; but that's exactly how you get better faster gen AIs. And building a gen AI from human levels of training data, energy, and bandwidth doesn't yield a functional app, much less a human-level artist.

 

[The Firebird]

One currently exists (Gen-AI), and has no capacity for creative thought or imagination, because it can only make outputs based on its inputs. All it can do is regurgitate data, and rearrange it, but it cannot achieve true thought of any kind, let alone creative thought. You are taking human qualities, and placing them on a machine, while expecting the results to be the same. Think about that for a second...

I think you are underestimating the creativity inherent in rearranging data. A lot of very creative work samples heavily from other sources. Take Star Wars, where Lucas repackages Samurai movies, Sergio Leone Westerns, pulp sword And sorcery, Flash Gordon, and mythological narrative into something wholly original. Does the fact that Han Solo steps out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly detract?

And we can push this further. The playwright Charles Mee has a 'remaking project', in which he assembles new takes on classics by sampling and rearranging large passages that are already extant. E.g., he has a version of Iphigenia at Aulis that incorporates monologues (if I recall right) from Jarhead or Apocalypse Now.

As he puts it: "There is no such thing as an original play."

That is all to say--I'm not speaking about AGI but about LLMs. These are not capability of creativity or imagination as we know it and as we perform it.

But they very well might be capable of creativity as we don't know it. In a way that is alien to us.

 

[Reynard]

I think debate whether LLMs or similar models have "imagination" is the wrong debate. The debate that matters, I think, is whether people will a) be willing to tell the difference between AI generated exertainment and human generated entertainment, and b) whether they will care.

Do we really think that the same people that go to rote action, horror or romance flicks will actually care whether a human developed the script? I think some will, but probably not enough to keep it from happening.

 

[Jfdlsjfd]

Value is something we assign, yes.

Yes. And it's disputably related to art quality of execution. The infamous Comedian being sold for 6 millions USD certainly has more value than most art pieces, yet I am not sure everyone would agree that it is great art (I do), and I am all the more sure that not everyone would say the execution (stappling a banana to a wall) is what creates this value, and that it makes it tens or thousands times more valuable than a detailed fantasy artpiece for an RPG supplement (I don't).

How we assign value is exclusively dependant on whether a buyer can be convinced to buy your product. If I glue a banana on my wall, I am not 6 millions USD richer. Execution will be the same, but the concept (that makes Cattelan's work unique) isn't.

But here is code that makes every possible picture.

Yes. It's trivial to execute any sort of pictures. Or, as you demonstrated, all sort of possible picture. The process of sorting out ONE outside the realm of possibles is where the value is added.

Likewise, I sincerely hope, and expect, that you will be able create to your hearts content in the future.

I think (hope) nobody is disputing the fact that people will still be able to create with the advent of AI. People are still able to paint despite the advent of photography or computer-assisted drawing. It's the ability to turn that ability into a job that is questionned.