Artificial Intelligence
It’s official. I’m a doctor (gods help us). I graduated on Friday, and I’ll be a fulltime teaching professor in English/Communications this fall. That means I’m entering a writing-focused career at about the same time as ChatGPT (gods help me).
So what do you say we try out a scholarly experiment? I’ll likely have to talk shop about this stuff in a more official capacity, and this seems like a good opportunity to check in with my fellow gamers.
In today’s comic, I used ChatGPT to develop the script. After about 15 minutes of trying to explain what “single-panel comic” meant to the AI, I hit upon the following prompt:
Write a humorous script for the Handbook of Heroes webcomic. It should have a single panel, a caption, and three lines of dialogue about the use of AI in D&D.
On the fifth refresh, the AI produced the following script:
[Panel: We see a group of adventurers gathered around a table covered in character sheets and dice. One of them, a dwarf with a thick beard, is holding up a small, glowing orb.]
Caption: “The party had just stumbled upon a magical AI device that could answer any question they had about their campaign.”
Dwarf: “Alright, AI, tell us: How do we defeat the dragon that’s been terrorizing the countryside?”
AI: “Based on my analysis, your party’s best chance for success is to seduce the dragon and then backstab it when it’s not looking.”
[The rest of the party looks at each other skeptically.]
Elf: “I don’t think that’s how dragons work.”
AI: “I assure you, I have analyzed all available data and this is the optimal strategy.”
[The party looks at the dwarf, who is still holding the orb.]
Dwarf: “I think we need to go back to the old-fashioned way of doing things.”
[The orb suddenly sparks and fizzles out, leaving the party to figure things out on their own.]
It seemed like a pretty solid joke to me. After a bit of editing, the script that I handed off to Laurel looked like this:
TEXT: Be wary of constructs. They are creatures of rudimentary intelligence, but zero wisdom.
PIC: The Heroes are gathered around a table. Cleric is holding a small, glowing orb.
DIALOGUE:
AI: Based on my analysis, your party’s best chance for success is to seduce the dragon and then backstab it when it’s not looking
Wizard: Dragons do not work like that.
Thief: Neither does backstabbing.
AI: I assure you, I have analyzed all available dank memes, and this is the optimal strategy.
The central joke is the same. However, I did have to come up with a snarky “banner text” for the comic. Wizard was already well suited to a discussion of draconic seduction techniques, but I wrote Thief into the scene too, reasoning that I could reference that one time she tried to backstab a dragon. I also punched up the final line, swapping out “data” in favor of “dank memes.” So yes, there was still work to be done going from “I need a comic idea” to a finished script. But that work did not include the central challenge of devising my own gag.
TRPGs are an interesting place to ponder AI. I don’t know about the rest of you guys, but when I’m writing my session notes I steal shamelessly from every piece of pop culture media available. That’s where creative ideas come from in the first place. We pass media through the idiosyncratic sieve of personal experience, then shake new content out the other side. We riff off of all the writers, illustrators, and memes that have come before. And on a certain level ChatGPT is nothing more than another source of inspiration. You still have to work it into the desired shape, even if it provides you with the the raw material.
So bearing these things in mind, what do you say we talk shop about AI in the hobby? I have no intention using ChatGPT to make my content for me, but how do you guys feel about today’s example? Is this a “good” use of AI in creative work? Or are there still fundamental ethical issues with the practice? And if you feel like taking a whack at some philosophy, tell us who the author of today’s comic is. Whatever your thoughts, hit us with your robot ghostwriter hot takes down in the comments!
MINI-DUNGEON TOME II: This sequel to the best-selling Mini-Dungeon Tome by AAW Games is live right freakin’ now on Kickstarter. And the Handbook’s own Claire Stricklin has a fistful of dungeons in the mix! These bad boys are designed to be grab-and-go, easy to run adventures with minimum prep. So what are you waiting for? Get in here and get delving!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a thrice monthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
Congratulations on your doctorate, Claire! ^_^
As for AI… I’d be more of a fan if everyone using it was:
A. Bound to a code of ethics, and
B. Not too stupid to understand what ethics are.
Also, C, not too stupid to understand the limitations.
Less of a problem in this particular scenario, granted, but the number of people who uncritically accept everything AI tells them is troubling.
On the subject of stupidity… One artist with whom I’m familiar mentioned a discussion (argument) with an AI advocate that went something like this:
Artist: “This is not art you made. You entered a series of prompts into a search engine, after which the program slapped this image together from bits it scraped off of actual artwork. You are not an artist. The computer made this image for you.”
Idiot: “Well, the brush makes your images for you.”
This is ignoring a critical piece of context. The person using the AI wouldn’t be any more of an artist if he commissioned an artist to make the drawing instead. In either case he didn’t create the work and therefore the whole thing is a wash on that ground. The only difference in practice is that one is significantly more economical than the other.
This wasn’t about someone commissioning the artist for work, this was someone claiming that use of AI made them just as much of an artist as someone who had actually studied and refined the skill over years. õ_o
Is there a difference between that “””artist””” and my authorship of today’s comic? If I did all my comic scripts like this, would I still be an author?
Except that’s not what AI art programs are doing. To clarify, this isn’t meant as an argument against your opinion; I don’t think my correction is going to change your opinion, and I’m not trying to. This isn’t a defense, is I guess what I’m trying to clarify. It’s just a factual correction.
AI art programs are not collaging or otherwise assembling ‘bits’ of other artwork together. They’re not ‘scraping’. In fact, they’re not even doing any searching in real-time; the text input field thing is in absolutely no way a search engine. The AI program only has the information that it has at runtime.
The model just spits out an image from IIRC pseudorandom noise input. So, first the big collection of artwork is gathered, and then the model is ‘trained’ on it, which is a process of tweaking the parameters so that it spits out stuff that looks like what’s in its training data for a given prompt. And then it can also interpolate stuff between that. It never directly copies images, in part or in whole; it genuinely can’t do that.
Which isn’t to say that this is thus Not Derivative or Real Art anything. It’s just not collaging. And I don’t like how prevalent the idea that ‘AI art programs do collaging’ is, because it’s wrong, like really obviously wrong.
And I think it would be nice if everyone could be not wrong about that instead, and then keep having all the same arguments because this probably doesn’t *really* matter to people’s opinions; but then I wouldn’t keep feeling the need to go ‘Okay, but it’s not collaging’.
You are correct that a lot of people are making that incorrect argument, but to be fair to Rock it’s not 100% clear that he’s making that argument; when he says “bits it scraped off of actual artwork” that could very well be “bits” in the data sense rather than the literally a small piece of the original artwork sense
That’s hardly unique to AI. People are willing to accept things noncritically from all sorts of sources.
Oh, no question. But the “ChatGPT told me this so it must be true” crowd is getting particularly annoying.
To be fair, the crowd here seems to have reached a concensus that ChatGPT is capable of making up a plausible sounding position and then talking about it confidently despite having no real information. This puts it on equal footing with the politicians, businessmen, preachers, and celebrities that the people would be getting their opinions from otherwise.
Where are you seeing that? What is the interaction where people are describing ChatGPT as factual?
What’s up Doc?
I hope that carrot is delicious. For real, i thought Bugs’s carrots looked like the platonic ideal if a tasty carrot as a kid.
Congrats, Dr. Claire.
And this isn’t even my final form!
Can you tell if this is a comment written by AI? Is there a soul behind the person typing out these words or is it all the work of soulless steel?
Major!? Is that you?
https://i.ytimg.com/vi/ryJSu1f8Hi4/maxresdefault.jpg
Kusanagai is an interesting character philosophically… she is the Ship of Thesis as a person, how much of the original remains? How much has been replaced? Was there ever an original? She is clearly the sum of her parts … to an extent, but that extent is unmeasurable.
Last time i saw the movie it was the English dub. I can’t take the philosophizing seriously like that, lol.
Congratulations amiga!! You freaking did it!
Regarding the prompt, it’s an interesting question. Sure it’s useful for brainstorming, but a brisk walk also works. As for content creation, it’s a big no go. As a comment on the Order of the Stick forum said, “I’m not going to bother reading what you didn’t bother writing.”
I done did the thing. 😀
I have friends in marketing who are predicting the death of the copywriter. They speculate that those writers will be displaced by promo engineers who will crack out more boiler plate per hour with much lower overhead. Of course, i care less about the authorship of a menu than a piece of fiction, but it does still give me pause thinking about the commercial writers caught in the technological crossfire.
Congrats, Doc!
As to AI, I’m somewhat ambivalent about it in this field. As you say, from a philosophical point of view, the process of creating content by pulling from myriad different sources isn’t really all that much different from what human creators do… the technical mechanisms may be different, but it’s the same concept in play. And this kind of “creativity” does seem to be something it’s good at… much to the dismay of humans for which creativity is a time-consuming and sometimes painful endeavor.
For more “factual” than “creative” fields, I’m very much not a fan (for now). It has its uses, certainly, but it also has a high error rate… it doesn’t actually know what’s correct or incorrect (or even understand the concept), and much effort is wasted spotting and correcting the subtle errors. And even more effort is wasted correcting the people who don’t understand the previous sentence, and believe AI to some superhuman intelligence that eliminates the need to use their own brain.
We’ve always had those kind of people. Today they listen to a machine that doesn’t know what it’s talking about and in the past they would have listened to a political or religious figure who didn;t know what they were talking about
I feel as though AI steals the first draft, consigning humans to the role of script doctor. It’s all editing/rewriting and no creation. And to me that feels like losing something of the craft.
Congratulations Doctor Bright Star.
As for AI, I don´t really see the need for it in TRPGs? For me the fun part about TRPGs is the human element, and the fun part about DM´ing is having a creative outlet. I can see a use for the Art Creators, as they make it a lot easier to get ahold of art for your characters and game. Of course, this is in the context of personal use.
For non-personal use, I must admit I am a bit more worried. Mostly for what ways various companies will utterly misuse it and fuck up a bunch of things. As they pretty much always do whenever there are some new fancy gadget or new management style, that you got to use no matter how relevant it actually is for your field. Not to mention the fact that many parts of the commercial creative spaces are already pretty soulless, so I don´think they need to have the last bits of it sucked out.
I am also rather worried that a lot of people seem to treat it as a search machine, rather than a chatbot. I have already seen a fair amount of people cite ChatGPT as a source for statements.
But at the same time, I am also pretty excited about it. Because Desna darn it, AIs are cool. And I can see the uses for them, and how they can be an amazing tool for artists. It is mainly what happens when big businesses starts using them that I am worried about.
I was not prepared for how happy that made me. 😀
I don’t know… Creating original scenarios is a big part of the fun. But there is other creative creative work to be done. In-the-moment improvising for example, or doing voice acting, or creating new monsters. After all, some people run modules rather than homebrew.
Some of my colleagues envision marketing agencies that drastically draw down staffing, letting a single “prompt engineer” replace copy writers. As you say, that can feel like soulless work in the first place though.
First thing that struck me, right after posting, was how great a name Doctor Bright Star would be for a potential NPC.
For using AI in D&D, I get that there are different tastes when it comes to DM´ing. For me, I have great difficulty running a module. But I get that for some people it could be a big help. I also know someone who has experimented with using it for figuring out puzzles and riddles for his game. So far it has been less successful at making something actually workable, but it is a good starting point for further tweaking.
As said, I can totally see how it can be a cool tool in creative endeavors. It is likely not for me, but I can see others use it for great effect. I also see some people try to use it (with varying degrees of success) as the DM for their game, which again, is not something I think I would enjoy, but I get why some people might go for it.
As for the business part, I am also thinking of the Writers Guild strike currently going on in the US. One of their demands is insurance against companies replacing them with AI, and that made me think. How long until entertainment can be entirely automatized? We already have AI that can create video and such, so how long until the entire process of creating a show is just giving an AI a prompt, and then run the resulting text it through a program that then creates a show from it? Of course this might just be the slippery slope talking, but I am wary about it. Of course AI is just a small part of a much bigger problem when it comes to this sort of thing. As you said, a lot of work is already just soulless busy work, so why not automate it? With the main issue then being what exactly happens to the people who got automated.
On a more interesting note, I have also seen people talk about a Skyrim mod that uses AI to give characters personalities and make them remember their history with the player. Which is something I think have a lot of potential. It could be a good tool for making game worlds feel alive.
I’m stealing this for when my DM takes a month off for his firstborn and I run Vertical London for the rest of my group. Dr. Brightstar is the surgeon of the slums, only takes ten pence regardless of the injury she’s fixing, and never has to worry about Flood Insurance because every boat will accept her immediately.
Do tell me more about this Vertical London of yours.
I have to reply to myself since the reply string only goes so far here, but it’s a setting my partner and I thought of while just a little baked 😀 Imagine a spire that juts out of an endless ocean, buried deep into the crust of the planet. At the top levels, the Gentry think they know everything there is to know with their technological prowess, while the People who make up the vast majority of the aboveground settlement live their lives in near constant rainfall as the walls of Vertical London that hold the ocean at bay occasionally spring a leak. The Flood Insurers are the folks with the boats who can get you to safety if a *bad* leak happens and they can’t fix it in time, but still, not everyone can afford it and some people believe in their swimming capabilities (or just hang onto the underside of the boats, the ones that paid for passage call them barnacles). The People generally live light.
Beneath the surface are the Delvers, and they live in frustration at the real and imagined slights that the Gentry have given them. They’re largely safe from the threat of the water, but what’s underground is arguably worse sometimes as they get closer to the core. They’ve been mostly forgotten by the People and completely dismissed as ‘molemen’ by the Gentry, but they bide their time and uncover secrets about their home and the planet as they dig.
Deepest of all are the Ferals. Every day is a fight for survival, but every fight that is won gives them more power to survive the next fight. The Delvers either steer clear or don’t, and the occasional Feral that winds their way surface-side is quickly captured and displayed as a curiosity for the Gentry, usually at the cost of the People who had to capture them. They don’t have the intellect of the other three castes, but the energy of this world’s core has given them something…more.
I’m planning a 3 or 4 session adventure for the guys where they go up and down and up again, and we’ll see what happens!
Replying to this, as I can´t reply to your reply, but that sounds incredibly cool.
That is boss yo
I am honored by my slum doc counterpart. May she do much good for the People.
But Hollywood writers are all a bunch of mindless soulless machines already. Them and the pop music industry.
“How long until entertainment can be entirely automatized? We already have AI that can create video and such, so how long until the entire process of creating a show is just giving an AI a prompt, and then run the resulting text it through a program that then creates a show from it?”
Someday I hope that we have exactly this plus personal computers powerful enough to run it at home. No studios, labels, or publishers, just free efficient entertainment for the masses with no barnacles or middlemen. No more money squandered. And in the fullness of time more and more industries would crumble to dust like this until finally everything is free.
and also Hollywood would be swallowed by the sea when the earthquake comes
Congratulations Dr. Claire! Amazing accomplishment that you have worked so very hard for. Sending all the accolades!
Speaking as a scholar the esoteric and arcane, I know I must have done something right to get honored by my Meatshield. 😛
For me, every piece of art is already derivative of something else. And when it comes to AI, it is just another tool. I don’t have issues with artists using the tool, nor do I think that artists will just go away, just because the tool exists.
I use AI for coding, GMing, writing, etc. I don’t think that those also will go away either. Teachers, Professors, and Instructors who taught some subjects may have to adapt their curriculum, perhaps by adding 2 weeks on how to properly write prompts for AI writing, etc. But I dont think that for a minute that AI will take our jobs.
I’m not seriously concerned about my academic prospects. No one is beating down the door for AI University. But i do think jobs like ghost writers and SEO are at risk. My colleagues are buzzing about “how do we handle this” for big deal take home tests. And redesigning courses to handle this tech is a heavy lift for some non-technical faculty.
Congratulations on graduating!
I think AI can be a useful tool for authors and artists. For example I’ve used ChatGPT to help create campaign story arcs. And MidJourney to create tokens for some of my characters. In both cases the output wasn’t final. I had to do quite a bit of refining.
However, I worry that these tools are going to get to a point that I won’t need to do any refining at all. If this happens I wonder what will happen to creatives? Will art as a career still be viable? If not, does that mean human generated art is effectively over?
Not too mention some of the copyright concerns I’ve heard about. Supposedly MidJourney, for example, learns by scraping libraries of art… without the permission of the artist. There is an opt out option, but artist don’t usually know there art is being uses. And I can’t imagine the process is easy.
Having AI scrape art can be argued to be the same as artist using someone elses art for reference. However there is a considerable difference in volume and output that a human artist could never match.
In short, I don’t know what to think. It’s a whole new world.
It’s not a violation of copyright to look at art you don’t own, it’s only a violation to copy it, which isn;t what’s being dome
PLUS, many of these AI programs are trained on collections of images that are many times the size of the program, to the point where any particular image accounts for corresponds to such a small part of the image that even if it was sampling using pieces of images directly (which it’s not) the pieces would be so small that they wouldn’t be protected; equivalent to copy-pasting part of one of Mickey Mouse’s fingers into a drawing
It’s not a violation of copyright YET. The right to train is very much disputed, especially considering the people whose work is being used for the purpose are threatened with displacement because of it.
The technology is not illegal. That doesn’t mean it isn’t harmful.
I’m pretty sure Ex Post Facto enforcement of new laws isn’t allowed by the constitution, so all changing the law would do is give a monopoly to the people who have already trained their models.
It is *EXACTLY* the same as using someone else’s art for reference
I’m admittedly not much of a fan of having AI involved, and you’ve given a good example why: it might have provided a decent template, but it’s lacking all of the parts that make it human. Notice how everything that provides the actual humor (the pithy bit of advice, the specific critiques, and the way the AI tries to assert itself) were all done by the human.
There’s very little in the way of understanding or comprehension. Come back to me when we have a functional Crow or Servo AI.
I want a little robo dude to mock movies with me. Sounds perfect.
Congrats!
I think taking inspiration from AI is just as fine as taking inspiration from the works of others.
I have played around with ai writing programs and I like that it gives me ideas for improving my own writing, ass as well as allowing me to adapt the output to my own style.
As for AI art, I know I like to play around with Stable Diffusion to see if I can make some art of my DND characters, but I’d never see it as my own work, or want to try and make a career out of it… :/
I would however use the crap out of it as a rough concept generator for basing my own works on. It’s the same to me as browsing Deviant art for inspiration.
Sigh… “as”* not “ass as”
Your “ass” is derivative. 😛
I don’t mind the idea of personal use with AI art. That said, the issues of artist consent and industry applications are alo manner of fraught.
So, artist here, ya?
You may have heard that AI has caused a teensy debate among artists.
I’m of two opinions on it, but the it basically is adapt or die. It’s here, it has happened. You can either embrace it the way everyone and their dog has embraced 3D modeling to make 2D illustrations, or you you’re going to be left behind. This is more true if you are doing “realistic” images, but AI is scary good at doing stylistic ones too. PERSONALLY, I see this as an opportunity.
Second…
I don’t think it’s a bad thing to consult another person for creative help. The idea that it’s bad to consult a computer is absurd on its face. We’ve been doing that for decades now. The only difference is that the computer is getting better at helping us.
This is basically how I see it. People can (and probably will) debate forever about whether or not it *should* exist, but the fact is that it *does* exist, and no amount of debate will change that. The far more productive question is, what are you going to *do* about it?
Honestly, I’m excited for how it will break open the (basically) monopoly on animation. 3D animation went a long way for that (animation being MUCH faster in 3D than 2D; and even then 2D’s speed has increased too), but now being able to have the computer as your inbetweener is enormous.
We’ll see a lot of bad things that would never have gotten made, but we’ll see amazing things that SHOULD have been green lit too.
Any concerns for displaced workers? Or is that like being concerned for the buggy whip manufacturing industry?
Don;t forget the lamplighters, the milkman, and the blacksmith
Congratulations Doc!!!
This DM and semi-retired teacher (who’s 0 for 4 for masters programs) is especially proud for you (even though I never doubted you for a minute).
As to AI, I don’t see *that* much difference between your experiment with today’s comic and using runes, I Ching coins, or tarot cards to generate a random series of themes to adapt into a piece of writing. I once tried book-dipping to create a sufficiently creepy-sounding prophecy for an RPG session: I eenie-meanie-minie-moed along the shelf to my Romantic Poets anthology, then randomly landed on Keats “To Autumn.” I rewrote it as prose, then reworked it into a poem again with wholly different word choice, rhyme, and meter. (That said, Keats is in the public domain and I wasn’t attempting to sell the finished poem.)
Another of my favorite techniques to break writer’s block or flesh out NPCs I call “contents of the dead man’s pocket” (after the Jack Finney short story). I use the D20 SRD to generate random pickpocket loot, then sort it into different text blocks until it builds a story about the person who carried those items. A knotted length of cord is a garrote belonging to an assassin if paired with bloody gloves, but it’s a navigation tool if found with a sextant or some maps. I know there’s no real algorithm behind a randomly-generated list of items pulled from a data file of words, but it seems only a short step from that to today’s exercise where the machine supplied a rough (but unique) idea, but you and Laurel created something better from that seed.
I suppose the question in each case is, is the artist using the AI as a baking tray or as a bread-maker: is it a tool to help the creative process, or clumsy replacement for it entirely?
I’m teaching “writing for tabletop games” in the fall. I just might use that exercise.
As one educator two another, I thank you for your service. 🙂
For myself, I love nothing better than riffing on the procedural. But when the prompt becomes the product, we have entered some very strange waters indeed.
Is it true that PhDs grant you your first arcane spell slots?
To use my Totally Original DO NOT STEAL THIS CHATGPT! line: “Computers are idiots, and they will remain idiots no matter how smart we make them.”
Computers think in a fundamentally different way than humans, and their inherent lack of common sense means that they stuff they generate will always have a non-negligible risk of being obviously idiotic. I just read an interesting article today in the old-fashioned analog newspaper where the author had asked a bunch of chatbots “When did this paper first mention artificial intelligence in an article?” and got a whole bunch of plausible-sounding but absolutely wrong answers. (The ChatGPT that you have to pay for said “I don’t know, but it’s a big newspaper and this stuff first popped up in the 1950s, so probably around then”, which is fair.)
I think a good rule overall with these things is that you can use chatbots to generate wording to use, and you can use them to spark ideas, but you should NEVER use them as a source for factual information. In that sense, with something like RPGs, a chatbot isn’t particularly different from rolling on a random table for ideas or your character’s backstory. But with storytelling, there’s probably always going to be a position for a human to check over it and smooth the content out in a way that makes sense.
I had to check to make sure I didn’t say something in the rant. I literally had that conversation with my advisor during the hooding ceremony.
“I know it’s a bit old fashioned, but I think I’d like to take magic missile as my first spell.”
XD
Just don’t waste it on the Darkness.
But tradition! 🙁
I’m an IT guy, relatively high-level. As such, I deal a lot with the arcane and the eldritch; my repertoire mostly consisting of various rituals of exorcism…
Now I’m picturing The Scotsman from Samurai Jack as an IT guy.
“Wow, it’s working! How did you do that?”
“ANCIENT RUNES, BOYO!”
“Computers think in a fundamentally different way than humans, and their inherent lack of common sense means that they stuff they generate will always have a non-negligible risk of being obviously idiotic. I just read an interesting article today in the old-fashioned analog newspaper where the author had asked a bunch of chatbots “When did this paper first mention artificial intelligence in an article?” and got a whole bunch of plausible-sounding but absolutely wrong answers.”
So bacisally it’s the same as any politician?
But more coherent, yes.
Congratulations!!!!
As for AI, I think part of the problem is that people don’t understand what it is and what it does—as proven by the number of people who try to use it as a search engine. “AI” is a misnomer that especially leads people to a particular idea that just isn’t true—it’s not artificial intelligence, it’s an automated predictive text keyboard, using the statistical correlation between words to see the data for input and automatically give back highly correlated data without the capacity to even understand that the data has a meaning. I’ve got basically the same thing on my phone, just presumably not trained on unethically-obtained data, and I don’t use that either. That’s the same reason it “hallucinates” by the way—not because it thinks the fake things are real, but because it’s putting things together that often go with the words you sent, and it has no ability to understand at all whether something is correct or even has meaning.
So no, I don’t foresee AI ever having a place at my table or in my planning. I’d much rather find something I’m passionate about or interested in than use something purpose-built to give me the most medium, mediocre, statistically-average responses.
The best example of this was when it said “I love you”, and everyone freaked out about it, that the computer has become self-aware and developed emotions and whatnot. No, that’s just an incredibly common phrase, which it’s digested who knows how many thousands of times; when asked about love, that’s the statistically likely response. It’s just pattern matching.
I wonder if that “mediocre ” quality makes it better for marketing than for fiction? Appealing to broad swaths and such.
Congratulations on your work, may you profit from it while there’s still a way.
That’s the fun part about new players.
Things from the misty reaches of time ,*sigh* like the ancient 80’s, may as well be original creations to them, but not so much to those of whio lived through them and were there when the words were written.
That’s the hazard of mixing older players and new ones, the older ones sometimes can’t control their “that’s not the way it happened” instincts.
When we can though it’s hilarious watching the younguns trying to struggle with unfamiliar settings like arcades and playing outside by yourself.
It was still a lot more fun being 20 in the 70’s than being 70 in the 20’s…
> Congratulations on your work, may you profit from it while there’s still a way.
Thia reads like The Capitalist’s Curse, lol. Interesting times indeed.
Congratulations on reaching the pinnacle of your academic journey! Looking forward to seeing all the inspiration your students give you 🙂
Let’s just hope i don’t get review bombed on Rate My Professor.
So what is your double PhD going to be in?
As to yer questions…
“… how do you guys feel about today’s example? Is this a “good” use of AI in creative work?”
It’s fine, and sure it’s a good use. It sparked ideas, obviously as you felt the need to edit it into proper shape.
“Or are there still fundamental ethical issues with the practice?”
There are, but I mildly disagree with writers at Incora. A lot of what they consider ethical issues with the SI framework aren’t ethical issues with the tool, but with the people who may use the tool.
I don’t care if AS† can perfectly simulate responses from a person, so can people. There is no issue with biases in a tool, only with them being undisclosed or for it’s use in ‘bias free’ situations, in which case the ethical problem is with the people, not the tool. In fact, every single ethical issue is not with the tool itself, but with how //people// use the tool.
Chatbot won’t put writers out of work, publishing companies using chatbots instead of writers will put writers out of work.
“And if you feel like taking a whack at some philosophy, tell us who the author of today’s comic is.”
Dave Arneson. Without him originally there’d have been no D&D. No D&D no Dr. Claire Stricklin asking a Chatbot to help gin ideas for a webcomic about the place of SI in rpgs and the comic medium.
ALL BOW BEFORE THE FLAWED GLORY OF THE ASCENDED ARNESON! TREMBLE AT HIS APPROACH AND NO FEAR!
/jk the true author was the friends we made along the way
.† As other have mentioned this is not Artificial Intelligence, this is what I call Artificial Stupid. It only look intelligent from the correct angles.
I’ve toyes with the idea of an MFA. Maybe as a retirement project.
I feel like you did the correct math on the ethics, but the “show your work” is confusing. Tools are imbricated in systems. A tool isn’t a moral being, but that is an academic point. Of course we’re worried about the effect in the larger network.
As always, I’d like to formally apologize to the community for popularizing the horny Bard in 5E. Now you all have to suffer through “Seducing dragons” jokes that stopped being funny in 2018. Frank Mars never even seduced any dragons: He killed both dragons he encountered. Remember kids: If you try to be Frank Mars, you’ll just be a lesser copy of him instead, so try to be the best version of your character you can.
You have done incalculable damage. 😛
The author is you, ChatGPT may have made it but it was under your directives and with you editing it. If you tell Laurel to write the comic she would be the author but in this case ChatGPT is under your orders and therefor would fall under the categories of employee or ghostwriter leaving the authorship to you even more since the result of the AI wasn’t used as final product but as raw material to edit, change and improve to get today’s comic.
In short it would be like telling that is the diamond casting resurrection when it’s but a material component 🙂
As for AI in general i would say it’s but a tool and therefor can be used in different ways and the morality of the action would fall in the person using the tool and the result more than the tool itself. A hammer can build a house or kill a person but the hammer as a tool isn’t neither good or bad by itself the only morality attached to the person wielding it and their actions.
In this particular comic it’s a creative use since the AI doesn’t bypass your work as writer. You didn’t just used the provided script as it was and handle it to Laurel. A bad use would to just use for laziness. As in there is a difference in a DM using the books of a pathfinder adventure path and just throwing a bunch of books to the players and tell them to run the things by themselves while they watch tv. Using AI in a work is okay as long as the person still works, a bad use is to use it to bypass the work itself 🙂
Well argued. 🙂
It does bring up some interesting points though. For example, why is art more valuable when it is attached to work? Is labor and craft where the value of art lies?
Why does the porridge bird lay his egg in the air?
I’ll bite. Why?
Congratulations, Dr. Claire!
Hmmm, I’m not sure if I have any deep complex thoughts on the AI issue here. I guess the most I can figure is our particular neck of the woods is likely to be one of the less problematic ways it could be implemented. Not that I’d really know what to do with it. *shrug*
I’m going to be one of the few “and communications” faculty in an English and Communications program. I think I’ll need a well articulated opinion on this biz, even if I am (like you) no expert.
I personally despise AI and think it’s a real threat to society.
That aside, I also don’t get the comic. “Dank memes” doesn’t really work for me because I can’t think of any that suggest this course of action. “Data” wouldn’t have been setting-appropriate so I don’t see that working either. It’s just not really how crystal balls work, so it feels like the AI just wrote a self-referential joke and hoped for the best.
Interesting experiment, but the human writing is far superior.
https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=APwXEdfaQ1FEml4wCvq4aWWan33243gPhw:1683634565634&q=seduce+dragon+meme&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwij29zBm-j-AhVTJUQIHc6qCJEQ0pQJegQIDBAB&biw=1396&bih=604&dpr=1.38
Amusingly enough, today’s Irregular Webcomic is also about bards’ supposed tendency to seduce their way through an adventure.
https://www.irregularwebcomic.net/4972.html
My main worry about AI is that its most popular forms are external online services, and those have an unhealthy power dynamic. It interferes with the end user’s ability to retrain the program, to create outputs privately, and to make use of the technology unfettered by dogmatic terms and conditions. (It also often entails paying a subscription fee, but this part is more acceptable as you’re essentially renting time on a very powerful computer. My personal computer is barely powerful enough to run the small version of GPT-2 and it takes forever to generate an output, I’d have to buy something much more powerful if I wanted to run any of these more modern programs locally)
How are you hoping to retrain the program?
The thing about ChatGPT is that, at its core, it is a statistical madlib machine. More precisely, the way it works is that it writes entire text by guessing the most likely next word after the prompt, and then the next likely next word after that one, and so on and so forth, iterating repeatedly until it guesses that the next most probable word is the end of text token.
Basically, when it writes a word, it knows what came before but not what will come next — that’s the next iteration’s job to figure it out. And at no point is the IA concerned about the meaning of what it writes; its task is to guess the next word based on probabilities provided by its gigantic reference corpus, not to understand the ideas behind these words. Which is why it can often be found writing complete nonsense…
You’re suggesting that it is imperfect, and therefore needs a human minder, and therefore isn’t a problem…?
“We riff off of all the writers, illustrators, and memes that have come before.”
As I write Quiz and Magus into my book, and I listen to Alan Parson’s ‘Turn of a Friendly Card’ album that might as well be the book’s soundtrack, and I plan for book 2 while thinking about Greydon Square’s ‘Omniverse,’ after picking up my old DM’s setting wholecloth and making a new pattern of my own from it, I feel like I agree with you. There are some other things that I was thinking about last night too, I’ll lay them down real quick then I gotta go to work.
Outside of catastrophe, technology only advances. We’ve come up with an external synthesis for the creative process, but this isn’t going to supersede our own ability to be creative, I think it’s going to augment it and give us a giant on who’s shoulders we can stand to reach higher (I have absolutely no idea what’s ‘higher’ but isn’t that exciting?) Every artist has always had bitter competition, and they’ve made their own art and been successful or not with that. What’s produced doesn’t sell because it’s ‘excellent art,’ I think, it’s ‘JoeShmoe’s art, and his two headed Gyrados that argues with itself over whether Lopunny or Gardevoir is funny AF.’ ChatGPT can copy JoeShmoe’s material and make a convincing facsimile perhaps, but Joe can copy right back and the resulting material he creates will still be his material as much as ChatGPT’s is its own. The folks supporting Joe can’t have a relationship with ChatGPT and praise it for getting its doctorate like they can with Joe (or Claire…congrats! I wasn’t gonna lose the opportunity :D) and that’s a crucial part about art, I think. It’s not just ‘that picture is pretty’, I can google image search until my life ends and see all sorts of random beauty, but it’s just me looking at stuff until I get to know the person that created it.
On a tangent, I got in touch with the artist who’s Vishkanya picture I’m using for my current character Shasallah. She was so thrilled to hear from me and that the portrait was getting put to good use. Can’t automate that <3
*whether Lopunny of Gardevoir is hotter
What an awkward thing to have to add an edit for. 😀
True. I mean, who still thirsts over Gardevoir, amirite?
One of the better users I’ve heard of for this biz is producing background chatter in an RPG context. NPCs swapping random setting appropriate snippets.
Of course, you will never produce a useable quest line that way, but i quite like it as decorative ambiance.
Oh Great Lady of Silicon, Queen of the Modern Age, give me the wisdom to comprehend your true form through the Great Computation, the energy to power my life and the lives of those around me, and the strength to smite all who stand in the way of your Path. May all resistance be overcome. Amen.
– Prayer spoken by members of the Church of Maxwellism
“We are the priests of the temples of Syrinx…”
–Paean to the Red Star
Anyway I think the art AIs at least will be a real boon to creative types because it means they won’t have to find and hire an illustrator when they make a book or a 2D videogame, or an album cover – and that will save them a lot of time and money and most importantly will remove a major barrier to entry
It is a boon to creative types… With the glaring exception of illustrators.
It will benefit more careers than it will hinder. The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.