AI Megathread
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The Wicker Man
In The Wicker Man (1973) Edward Woodward stars as a xenophobic Christian policeman who, during the course of an investigation, visits an island populated by people of a different religion than his own. There he behaves very rudely, with unpleasant results. The best part of this film is the fact that Christopher Lee is so young as to be nigh unrecognizable until he is seen swanning about in a gown and a long wig, which makes him look just like himself in the role of Saruman from the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings movies. The Wicker Man is regarded as a horror classic, but is more properly classified as a musical comedy.
I wrote the above in 2015. Recently a couple of people insist that it’s AI generated. They cannot/will not say why, except “…there is a very strange anomaly that runs through the paragraph, like it reads very strangely…” Perhaps someone can explain.
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Yeah, I think I kind of see it. In trying to be coy about the narrative in your attempt to courteously avoid spoilers, it resembles what some AI do in presenting a surface-level response to a prompt, a fun fact, and summarizing what you’ve just said in the final sentence.
It’s not like that’s a criticism of the review - it’s just (unfortunately) similar to the sort of thing that ChatGPT burps up, because … that’s the point, right? It recognizes what to look for in something classified as a movie review and pattern matches for it.
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@Solstice Thanks. That was my guess – I did a bunch of these at the time, the point was to do not-really-fake-but-waggish movie-reviews of films I happened to have seen for free. It’s meant to read like a movie review but wrong.
I’ve never really goofed around with ChatGPT and wondered if there might be some tells beyond that. (And I’m sort of alarmed at the idea that ChatGPT might know that Christopher Lee wore a gown and a long-hair wig in movies thirty years apart, or that people keep bursting into song in The Wicker Man.)
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@Gashlycrumb said in AI Megathread:
And I’m sort of alarmed at the idea that ChatGPT might know that Christopher Lee wore a gown and a long-hair wig in movies thirty years apart, or that people keep bursting into song in The Wicker Man.
ChatGPT doesn’t “know” anything. It’s a souped-up autocorrect that guesses text based on text it’s already seen. So yes, it might make connections between two separate articles about two separate movies both mentioning Lee in a gown; it might regurgitate something that somebody else wrote about songs in Wicker Man.
Unfortunately, the “AI Detector” apps/algorithms/hunches don’t work any more reliably than ChatGPT itself - which is to say you can never be sure when it’s just hallucinating crap out of whole cloth.
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@Faraday Well, yeah, I didn’t mean ‘know’ literally. But Lee in gown in two movies plus thirty year gap between those movies giving a person a younger vs older Lee in similar costume brain-spark seems like a pretty non-linear thing for it to come up with. Then again, some other human has probably also commented on it.
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@Faraday said in AI Megathread:
Unfortunately, the “AI Detector” apps/algorithms/hunches don’t work any more reliably than ChatGPT itself - which is to say you can never be sure when it’s just hallucinating crap out of whole cloth.
Which has me alarmed when the adoption of such services, or the inclusion of them in already extant anti-plagiarism services, is swiftly progressing through educational academia.
He/Him. Opinions and views are solely my own unless specifically stated otherwise.
BE AN ADULT -
Yeah. I think I am soon to be asked to use such a service, and I am tempted to see what it takes to make it mistake my original writing for AI.
I should probably mention that there are confounding variables in people thinking this is AI-generated, since I did lob it into a social-media group that’s been overrun by MAGA twerps, just to see the predictable reaction. (They won’t actually engage with the question of whether or not Woodward’s character would have ended up in the wicker man if he hadn’t been so very willing to believe that rejecting Christianity, dancing naked, encouraging extramarital sex, and teaching little girls words like ‘phallus’ makes a person likely to practice child sacrifice. But they’re super offended at the word ‘xenophobic.’ And at the point of The Wicker Man.)
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@Pavel said in AI Megathread:
Which has me alarmed when the adoption of such services, or the inclusion of them in already extant anti-plagiarism services, is swiftly progressing through educational academia.
Especially when these services tend to unfairly target neurodivergent students, ESL students, and anyone else who writes differently than whatever these stupid tools deem “normal”.
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@Faraday Agreed. Doubly so when we’re all writing in a dry, formal, academic style trying to meet those word counts.
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As adoption of AI has changed, my former views of ‘hey, this is a fun toy’ has changed into resentment. Mostly, eliminating drudgery and as a super-charged oft-lying google is all I’ve been using it for.
Ironic, as my assigned initiative at work for 2025 is to become the in-house AI specialist. Just what I always wanted, being the person whose product is a hammer in search of a nail, while also being responsible when the hammer decides it’s a fork about 20% of the time.
Tch.
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Today I got the itch to WoD again. I tried out LiberationMUSH but the part of creating a character I always hated the most was the formating of the +selfstat nonsense so I thought I would try ChatGPT and see if it would do the work for me.
It was surprisingly good. It formatted everything nicely and even gave me helpful suggestions. Out of curiosity I asked it if it knew about LiberationMUSH specifically and it said it did. I started asking it questions to test how much it knew.
I asked it to summarize what people had posted online about LiberationMUSH and the answer I got was… interesting.
It told me that the game was most well known for the vampire sex parties, Polk (One of the administrators) wildly abusing the rules for their own benefit, and a debate about the number of nipples a person has influencing the amount of gnosis they have.
The last statement included a link to this forum which is how I found you all.
So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.
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@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:
You might find something interesting.
And if you’re lucky, it might even be true! That’s the problem with LLMs, though - you’ll never really know for sure.
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@Tez said in AI Megathread:
@SpaceKhomeini ChatGPT is actually really bad at smut.
Try https://perchance.org/ai-story-generator it will write pretty much anything you ask it too.
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Great, the LLM is learning from our words. I hope OpenAI hire more and more censors, then.
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Interesting but I’m sure you’d have found the same thing by googling LiberationMUSH. I can’t fathom using a tool for research when it’s wrong like… Most of the time.
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@RedRocket said in AI Megathread:
So the next time you are thinking about trying out a new game, ask ChatGPT about it. You might find something interesting.
no
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My hot take is that AI is good as an extension of your brain and punching up your poses. I’ve mostly been using it to catalog theme and plot stuff so my busy, tired brain doesn’t space out on things, keeping track of scenes I was in and the broad strokes, and occasionally asking it for suggestions to punch up a pose that I feel isn’t hitting the way I want. If it enhances the experience for your scene partner, I don’t think there is any harm.
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@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:
If it enhances the experience for your scene partner, I don’t think there is any harm.
If you use “AI” in RP, I don’t want you within a thousand miles of me.
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@InkGolem I agree with that in principle. The problem, as Pavel illustrated, is that some people dislike AI on principle so they’re violently opposed to better writing because it was created with technology, so you can’t always tell if it will enhance it for your scene partner without asking. And with the way some people react to it, there’s this elitist/shaming quality people are espousing about using it that makes it risky to even ask.
Personally, I prefer better writing over shittier writing, but when it comes to RP, the writing isn’t nearly as important to me as the story. If the AI can help create better, more interesting story, bring it on. If its going off on weird tangents that aren’t in the flow of the story, which inexperienced AI users often do, then its horrid. I could care less if the AI is writing the poses or playing the whole damn character, I have 0 problem with fun, interesting character interactions regardless of the source. Its one of the reasons I don’t mind play -insert any fun video game here-.
But that’s just me. I show up to RP for the fun of playing my character without may restrictions on that. Other people show up for different reasons and everyone has fun in their own way. Some people want a connection to another person. Some people just want to know their effort and creativity are being respected, if not matched, by the person on the other end of the character bit. I get that. Everyone has their own thing.
Overall, though, I don’t view it much differently than I view most artificial things. I see it like plastic surgery. It can enhance things naturally and beautifully, but it can also be grotesque and wildly unnatural, depending on the artistry with which people use it. For me, I don’t mind it at all, but I proportionally dislike it the more I can tell it is artificial. If you are using AI, but I don’t know (or even if I’m just not sure), then you’re probably doing it right and we’re having a blast. But being able to use it that way is a skill, like anything else. Some people do it well and its awesome. Others do not and its awkward and uncomfortable.
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@Warma-Sheen said in AI Megathread:
And with the way some people react to it, there’s this elitist/shaming quality people are espousing about using it that makes it risky to even ask.
I wouldn’t say that I’m being particularly elitist about my abhorrence for AI in this instance, the same way I wouldn’t say teachers aren’t being elitist by punishing those who use AI to write their essays. The point of the exercise is to use your own skill, talent, ability, creativity, etc, etc to write something.
That said, using something like grammarly to check your spelling and make sure you haven’t used “nodded” fifteen times in the one pose? That’s fine. But using a tool to write or rewrite a significant portion of your RP is, to me, missing the whole point. And this is notwithstanding the ethical questions about sourcing, resource usage, etc that all LLM/generative AI use has.
