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

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Although EGG doesn't have quite the volume of published writing that some prominent psychologists have, he's probably got more out there (including posts on ENWorld and Dragonsfoot) than one might think.

From Politico:

Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.

The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”

Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.

Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.

The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.

In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself.

Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.”

Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it.

This is probably not doable for EGG's work in 2024. (Although, how many podcast episodes did it take to recreate Esther Perel?) But I wouldn't bet against it being doable in 2025 or 2026.

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?

And what other works along these lines would you buy, once the technology was good enough that the quality was on par with a human author's below-average day? Would you buy The Winds of Winter by an AI-generated George R. R. Martin? Would you buy new Lord of the Rings works by an AI-generated Tolkien?

 

[mamba]

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?

no, get an actual writer to go through the notes and fill in the gaps / add to it, and an artist to create maps, etc.

And what other works along these lines would you buy, once the technology was good enough that the quality was on par with a human author's below-average day? Would you buy The Winds of Winter by an AI-generated George R. R. Martin? Would you buy new Lord of the Rings works by an AI-generated Tolkien?

same, no, there is enough ‘real’ literature out there that I have no interest in reading the mechanized drivel of an AI, even if it nails the writing style.

I do not read fan fiction either however, so there probably are some people out there that would

I also do not like this bit

“Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it.”

It absolutely should be illegal

 

[billd91]

Hell, no. And the only reason I'm saying "hell, no" is because I can't say the word I actually want to say here.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I do not read fan fiction either however, so there probably are some people out there that would

Given some of the stuff that has made the jump from fan fic to published novels and movie franchises, I think the WGA was probably right to be concerned about the rapid advances in AI writing.

Is AI in 2024 dramatically worse than 50 Shades of Grey when it was a Twilight fanfic, Master of the Universe? Is AI-written content dramatically worse than 50 Shades of Grey is, in its published final state, for that matter?

This is all going to move from being theoretical to real-world questions pretty soon, I suspect.

 

[mamba]

Is AI-written content dramatically worse than 50 Shades of Grey is, in its published final state, for that matter?

maybe today, but not in a few years. That is setting a low bar however

This is all going to move from being theoretical to real-world questions pretty soon, I suspect

probably, didn’t Hollywood already have a similar discussion about CGI actors? Why pay a real ‘star’ actor when I can create a new movie with them in it via CGI. Heck, it will become cheap enough to wonder about minor roles too

 

[Parmandur]

No.

 

[cbwjm]

In the future, maybe, though not at a high price and honestly i dont really care about Gygax so i wouldnt be auper enthusiastic about buying something based on his wroting style. I find now though that, while they ai like chatgpt can create some interesting ideas for adventures you still need to go through it.

 

[Hex08]

No, even if EGG's estate was ok with it he didn't give his ok so I would avoid it for that reason alone.

 

[Mecheon]

Is AI in 2024 dramatically worse than 50 Shades of Grey when it was a Twilight fanfic, Master of the Universe? Is AI-written content dramatically worse than 50 Shades of Grey is, in its published final state, for that matter?

Yes.

Sure, 50 Shades of Grey is blatent fanfiction where you can downright see the "right its been a week or so, time to throw everyone for a massive curveball" hallmark of fanfiction dot net writing, but someone put work and effort into it. They didn't just put a prompt into something and get a machine to vomit up trash

I've seen AI stuff and its awful. Its process of creation directly implies you think other writers and creators are beneath you and don't deserve money or attention. Frankly, they should be paying me to tolerate the existence of AI slop like this. So, no, I would not want an AI generated Castle Greyhawk and am amazed anyone would think this is desireable

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

 

[Alzrius]

No. Some computer imitating a person's style is not the same thing as a work by that person.