D&D General New art with a bit of text from Ravenloft: Horror Within

[beta-ray]

What exactly do you think "this" is? On a whim a year or so ago, I used ChatGPT to generate some names of new Lovecraftian entities so I wouldn't have to just use the same old Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth and Tsathoggua and all that that everyone always uses. I wasn't very happy with the results, but they curiously sounded very much like "Domain of the Imprisoned Apocalyptic." Out of 100 names or so that I generated, I got maybe half a dozen that were OK. Not good, but OK. But the text associated with these images is very representative of the kind of output ChatGPT gives you.

If you think I was going for the typical reddit and ENW screech and head for the fainting couches at the very mention of AI, you've definitely called this one wrong.

Unless there is a hint of it not being produced by an artist, it is distasteful to say that it is. It is often a quick reaction from folks and is tiresome.

 

[Tonguez]

whats going on in that pic for Lamordia?

 

[VashVet]

whats going on in that pic for Lamordia?

It kinda looks like a Tarrasque or some other kaiju size monster coming up out of the ice, while a guy is trying to harpoon it Moby Dick style.

 

[Desdichado]

It's easy to create names for Lovecraftian entities, you just string random consonants together "Q'fknjopuc". So it's pretty sad that anyone needs a computer to help them do it. But one thing these LLMs have been taught now is grammar, so it's very unlikely to confuse an adjective with a noun. That's the sort of mistake (or more likely in this case deliberate creative choice) that takes a human.

No. That's not a Lovecraftian entity. That's just got mashing your keyboard.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

No. That's not a Lovecraftian entity. That's just got mashing your keyboard.

That’s how Lovecraft did it!

The point is to make it look alien by using letters that rarely appear in English words - the high scoring Scrabble tiles. And if it’s unpronounceable, so much the better.

A LLM is only capable of regurgitating what has been written many times before, so is inevitably going to come up with the blandest cliches. You would get better results drawing random letters from a bag.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

whats going on in that pic for Lamordia?

It kinda looks like a Tarrasque or some other kaiju size monster coming up out of the ice, while a guy is trying to harpoon it Moby Dick style.

It appears to be a Frankensteined sea serpent in the icy sea off Lamordia. As well as referencing Moby Dick I think it also references the Eberron lighting rail heist pic.

It’s clearly cut from a larger picture. I’m sure exactly what is going on is explained in the book!

 

[Desdichado]

That’s how Lovecraft did it!

The point is to make it look alien by using letters that rarely appear in English words - the high scoring Scrabble tiles. And if it’s unpronounceable, so much the better.

A LLM is only capable of regurgitating what has been written many times before, so is inevitably going to come up with the blandest cliches. You would get better results drawing random letters from a bag.

That's not how Lovecraft did it, and that's not better. No, that's simply not correct at all.

And that's not all the LLMs can do and it's not at all equivalent to drawing random letters from a bag. You only think that because you aren't very familiar (apparently) with the wider corpus of Lovecraftian entities. Random letters and apostrophes look like what a 13 year old who's read maybe one or two Lovecraft stories and is trying to imitate them would do. I already said that I didn't get any great results from it that I was actually happy with, I only brought it up to point out that the titles in the OP look exactly like the unsatisfying results I got from that experiment. It wasn't just the names, it also generated titles and concepts around them. Please try to follow the point rather than get distracted by your hate on for AI.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

It wasn't just the names, it also generated titles and concepts around them

Which people used to be perfectly capable of doing themselves before they decided they would rather let a computer do their thinking for them.

That's not how Lovecraft did it

You have proof for that? Or did the computer tell you what to believe?

You only think that because you aren't very familiar (apparently) with the wider corpus of Lovecraftian entities

I’ve read the original stories (even the horrible racist ones) if that’s what you mean. I haven’t read the huge pile of derivative work.

 

[Desdichado]

Which people used to be perfectly capable of doing themselves before they decided they would rather let a computer do their thinking for them.

Some of them. Not everybody is equally good at the same things. I was never good at making good-sounding names up out of thin air, so I usually borrowed them from some other source, sometimes with a twist. There's a lot of bad fantasy names out there.
Or maybe I just have unreasonable standards in what I think is a good sounding fantasy name. I also use a lot of name generators, like donjon and others, but few of them seem to have a decent "Lovecraftian" section. So I thought I'd try ChatGPT to see what it could do.

Once again, I wasn't really very happy with the results. But the very act of doing the experiment and trying it told me something about LLMs and their potential uses with gaming.

You have proof for that? Or did the computer tell you what to believe?

Don't be snarky. Do you think Lovecraft came up with names like Azathoth or Yogash the Ghoul or that Smith came up with Tsathoggua or Eibon, or Howard created Gol-Goroth by mashing a keyboard on a spare piece of old paper? Obviously they did not. Your opinion here is, I guess, noted, but so is the fact that you clearly are wrong. Even much lesser writers like Lin Carter had much better sounding fantasy names than your ridiculous example. Zoth-Ommog was a cool enough name that it even became a famous (at least within its scene) industrial music record label throughout the 90s.

I’ve read the original stories (even the horrible racist ones) if that’s what you mean. I haven’t read the huge pile of derivative work.

Ironically, the very expanded corpus of hangers-on and imitators is much more likely to engage in that very poor practice of creating names than the actual masters of the craft, who never did that. You've read too much commentary on one single story, "Call of Cthulhu" obviously, based on your understanding of what the Great Old Ones actually were and what their names were like.

 

[tetrasodium]

I wonder how many of the posters claiming Lovecraft engaged in things like smashing random keys have ever had the chance to sit down at a manual type writer and has the privilege of discovering how easy it is to tangle the keys up even at lowish typing speeds.