Independent Spaces for RPG Discourse

[SlyFlourish]

This is why AI summaries are a thing.


Yet #Bluesky is on your list.

Im giving Bluesky the benefit of the doubt that they won’t fully enshittify before someone else stands up a compatible atproto instance. They are, at least, not pushing an opaque algorithm of their own.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

Even if we had reliable summaries, people still wouldn't read them. They would still ask the same questions that have been asked a billion times before even if those questions are extremely well documented.

Yeah but with AI answering them it's no longer my problem.

No one reads the documentation.

OK, not "no one"; but the people who do, by definition, don't ask questions that have already been answered.

It is often the case that documentation doesn't answer your questions so much as give you the understanding needed to ask the right ones. And if you've ever used complicated applications or software you'll understand that simply finding the right function to call can be an issue.

And the appellate courts overturned the regulatory requirements for net neutrality.

Among other restrictions. At this point corporations in the US can charge and censor whatever they want, for whatever reasons they want, and I have no doubt they will absolutely abuse it.

In giving Bluesky the benefit of the doubt that they won’t fully enshittify before someone else stands up a compatible atproto instance. They are, at least, not pushing an opaque algorithm of their own.

I genuinely don't understand why folks continually put their faith in corporate institutions like this. And #Bluesky is already enshittified due to its lack of privacy and culture of putting folks on lists, which are also public.

 

[Joshua Randall]

Yeah but with AI answering them it's no longer my problem.

Sure it is. Because the platform will be like every other platform, drowned in a sea of repetitive questions that have already been discussed and answered ad nauseam.

Artificial un-intelligence won’t change human behavior.

 

[Anon Adderlan]

Sadly #Reddit has become the de facto forum service for a majority of companies at this point, and it’s turning into a disaster, as not only do companies lose control of their branding, they can get banned from their own forums. But most users are not willing to look outside the #Reddit bubble, and having to create another account, and share their personal data, on a site they don’t know if they can trust, is all the discouragement they need. Hell I have a hard time just getting anyone to check a new site at all because they’re (rightfully) afraid of spamming and security breaches.

Because the platform will be like every other platform, drowned in a sea of repetitive questions that have already been discussed and answered ad nauseam.

You’re right, it’s no different than any other search engine. And like all such engines I don’t have to repeatedly answer a question when they can find it through a simple query.

 

[Joshua Randall]

You’re right, it’s no different than any other search engine. And like all such engines I don’t have to repeatedly answer a question when they can find it through a simple query.

But we weren’t talking about search engines. We were talking about a forum, full of humans (and some bots now I guess), where Johnny can post the question “How far can a dwarf in platemail who is carrying a heavy load and has Fly, Haste, and Expeditious Retreat cast on him - move in one round when it’s the full moon in the house of Atrius?” And other humans have to see that post. And some artificial untelligence jumps in to “summarize” previous arguments about it.

And this despite there being a FAQ pinned to the top of the forum that reads: “1. Dwarf movement in platmail (etc.)”

 

[Ruin Explorer]

But we weren’t talking about search engines. We were talking about a forum, full of humans (and some bots now I guess), where Johnny can post the question “How far can a dwarf in platemail who is carrying a heavy load and has Fly, Haste, and Expeditious Retreat cast on him - move in one round when it’s the full moon in the house of Atrius?” And other humans have to see that post. And some artificial untelligence jumps in to “summarize” previous arguments about it.

And this despite there being a FAQ pinned to the top of the forum that reads: “1. Dwarf movement in platmail (etc.)”

Yeah, Anon seems to be coming at this from a "technical documentation" standpoint. AI (and this was true even before "generative" AI, note) is pretty good at searching technical documentation or legal documents, and digging out obscure stuff that's not a hallucination or misinformation (however, you always have to check the source, because sometimes it is just making it up - but with technical documentation that tends to be easy to do once you've found the function it's pointing you at, you can quickly tell if its hogwash or not).

That's not what's useful for TTRPGs though, typically. Usually rules are pretty easy to find and well-known, but rules discussions are often quite nuanced and often the rules-correct argument and the most sane argument are NOT the ones repeated most, in part because once someone gets it right, people tend to stop arguing.

So you'll often see a dozen nitwits repeat ill-informed misunderstandings of the rules, often quite loudly and at length, often using each other as backup, and then someone will come in with the right interpretation, and people will barely respond, but the nitwits will typically stop posting.

Gen AI, because it can't think at all, just mindlessly provide text based on how popular/repeated that text is (to put it very simply), can't cope well with this. Instead it'll often take the repeated nitwit position as gospel. Or worse still, it'll combine elements of the correct position, and a terrible idiot version of the position, sometimes nonsensically.

Or maybe no-one has really answered the issue, in which case Gen AI tends to just make up something based on similar-seeming discussions and usually doesn't even tell you that's what it did.