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

[overgeeked]

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 on all counts. There are too many living humans writing amazing things to want to pseudo-resurrect a dead game designer to produce more works. Besides, it's recursive. Training an AI on his works would only rehash and remix what exists, not create anything remotely new.

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?

Literally none of them. Ever. Again, too many living humans writing amazing things to want to bother training an AI to produce fake works for consumption. The stack of existing literature is already so overwhelming that it would take several human lifetimes 100% dedicated to nothing but reading to get through even a tiny fraction of all available literature.

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.

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.

Exactly.

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

I have read some fanfiction. In most cases it's below average quality-wise compared to the original. In a very few, incredibly rare cases, the fanfiction is better than the original. Just like how every so often a cover song can be better than the original.

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

Training AI on copyrighted works very clearly requires making a copy of the original work without permission, thus violating copyright. Many of the programmers involved got hold of the texts they used to train their AIs by pirating those works from torrent sites...which is another copyright violation. Even if that were not the case, generating new works using the original author's IP without permission (i.e. unauthorized derivative works) is also very clearly a violation of copyright. There's no way around it. Generative AI violates copyright at every step of the process.

 

[Blue Orange]

Technically they can remember, just not nearly enough to avoid those sorts of consistency problems; a larger working memory slows down the model fast.

50 Shades also rolled a few natural 100's: it (1) came out when e-readers had just started to be popular, allowing hidden public reading of (2) a book with a theme that's intensely popular but not politically acceptable (M/f BDSM). Theoretically a book made with AI could get lucky in the same way--and given that you can generate books at will with AI, eventually the algorithms are going to get good enough that it will happen. I have no idea what that next winning combo's going to be, or I'd be producing it myself, but I wouldn't be surprised if an AI book hits the bestseller list; after all, 50 Shades shows us relatively poor writing skill (she still writes better than me, after all) isn't a bar to success.

 

[bedir than]

I'm completely OK with generative AI that's been trained on controlled works with permission of those who control the works.

That would not be the same as what's currently being done commercially.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

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

It is, but 50 Shades of Grey was the top-selling book of the 2010s, and the movie made more than $500 million against a budget of $40 million. All told, the film trilogy brought in more than $1 billion, against a total budget of about $150 million.

Hollywood is definitely thinking about these numbers and I would bet the major publishing houses are, too.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Just like how every so often a cover song can be better than the original.

Obligatory shout-out to the Coverville podcast, which surprises me at least once an episode with a cover that's definitely worth listening to alongside the originals. (The gospel cover of "Right Here, Right Now" in the most recent episode was a jaw-dropper for me.)

 

[bedir than]

It is, but 50 Shades of Grey was the top-selling book of the 2010s, and the movie made more than $500 million against a budget of $40 million. All told, the film trilogy brought in more than $1 billion, against a total budget of about $150 million.

Hollywood is definitely thinking about these numbers and I would bet the major publishing houses are, too.

Yes, they'd love to do it. But they'd have no copyright protection for something created using generative AI that includes works that they do not wholly control

 

[Clint_L]

There are both aesthetic and ethical aspects to this discussion.

For me, the aesthetic aspect is simple: is it good? Do I enjoy it? If yes, then I am interested. I do not agree that AI-generated art cannot be good in principle, or that there is some ineffable human quality that AI can never equal or surpass. Here, the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.

The ethical aspect is much thornier, partly because there are a lot of different ways that AI art could be generated, and partly because I think there is a double-standard in how many folks think about human creativity, which is often romanticized, and AI creativity. And neither is fully understood.

So, going back to the original example, if a creator trains an AI using their own work, then I don't see any issue with them selling it or me buying. If George R.R. Martin wanted to use AI trained using his writing to finish his books, then I would buy it, if it was good. I would expect it to be properly cited, just as I would anything written with a ghostwriter, though.

EGG is not around to do that, so it would have to be his estate. If they published something written in that style, and properly credited, I wouldn't have an ethical objection. But I doubt I'd buy it, since I don't think EGG was a good writer.

 

[mamba]

Hollywood is definitely thinking about these numbers and I would bet the major publishing houses are, too.

no doubt they are, they would be stupid not to

 

[Scribe]

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?

I wouldnt buy any of it. I have been thinking on legacy a lot lately, and this is of course an interesting (and often done) sci-fi line of thought. I dont understand why some are so eager to hurtle towards replacing our species, but then again I find much of what goes on today ghastly anyway. The future is not for people like me.

 

[Stormonu]

I'd be interested in adventures created by AI (I've been having one assist me recently taking my summaries and fleshing them out), though not necessarily a Gygax adventure. Train it on the Hickmans, Niles, Grubb, Cook, Skip Williams and the rest of the 1E/2E D&D crew and I'd probably be interested.