Concordia Thread

[hellfrog]

@Coin I’ve asked it to 'edit" some text blocks and all it does is paraphrase or rephrase. Granted, I wasn’t asking it to change things to a british spelling.

Either way, I don’t think someone is bad or even wrong for using it to generate IC text for their game, I just don’t want to engage. So transparency is the ask.

[Faraday]

@Coin said in Concordia Thread:

You can describe Spider-Man and then tell it to ‘make the necessary changes so that this uses the British spelling for words’ for example, stuff like that.

Sure, but it’s doing that by looking through its language model for “SpiderMan writing” and “British writing” and then generating something new from the mashup of those things and your prompt. (Oversimplified and imperfect analogy)

The best description for ChatGPT I’ve heard is that it’s a word calculator. All it does is figure out “what word comes next given the last input” in the same way that a calculator solves one numeric operation at a time. Can you string things together? (7*(9+2)+4)? Absolutely. But it’s still at its core doing its calculation one word at a time. And so is ChatGPT. It doesn’t “edit” like a human does.

@dvoraen said in Concordia Thread:

@Tez I feel like I have an idea where @Faraday is coming from. (Faraday, apologies if I’m putting words into your mouth. Not intending to do so here.) I had a post in mind to reply to this thread, but my points related just to Concordia were super brief, and I realized what I had to say quickly began going diverging into general discussion about the uses of AI.

Yes, exactly.

[icanbeyourmuse]

I am just mildly confused… Why use AI to edit when Word/GoogleDocs/Spellcheckers in general have the capabilities to do that? To me, it seems like using something like ChatGPI or whatever version of the AI to ‘fix’ ideas takes away the personal touch a person gives. Like you’re telling it to ‘Fix this’ and from what I’ve gotten from the AI spit out is not really mild edits but complete rewrites with some common elements to what you asked for. I don’t really care if a person uses AI for their stuff, I am just confused to why use something for what many, many tools are already about for that has a different purpose.

The most I use AI stuff is to help me think of names for stuff like towns, cities, ‘groups’, and so on. OR a write up for a thing to get inspiration. Same as I use generators for.

[Rinel]

@icanbeyourmuse

I suspect it depends on how loose one’s definition of “edit” is. You can throw a moodboard of written vibes at chatgpt and have it “edit” that into a cohesive whole. I think most of us would call that drafting. I don’t know what the input was, here.

It’s a bummer, but it won’t drive me away from the game by itself. I’m here to play with other humans. Folks using AI for their roleplay is a total dealbreaker, of course.

[Prospero]

@Rinel said in Concordia Thread:

It’s a bummer, but it won’t drive me away from the game by itself. I’m here to play with other humans. Folks using AI for their roleplay is a total dealbreaker, of course.

Waaaaay back in the day (we’re talking late 90s) there was an AI experiment being run by a PhD student in Canada where he was training an AI to MUSH. After having “her” play a character on a couple, he started up his own Star Trek MUSH to have a more controlled environment, but never told any of the players.

I remember being shocked when I found out, because I had no idea (I wonder if I looked back now, knowing how ChatGPT and such works, if it’d be better able to do a Turing Test) and never would have suspected.

Probably not as shocked as the guy who was TSing “her” on the regular, though.

(I only dodged that bullet because apparently I wasn’t even interesting enough to get an AI to TS with me back then. Talk about a hit to the ol’ ego.)

[bored]

You can definitely improve your work by providing GPT with the text you have written, which will serve as the input for the editing process. (Requisite ‘I had ChatGPT edit my post for me’ joke. In this case, I let it fix absurdly bad grammar. Input: “Edit this into better language please: you can for sure get GPT to make some good edit on your work if you give it them things you did wrote first as what goes inside!”)

While the ChatGPT interface is designed for chatbot-style exchange, the underlying model (GPT-3/4) still involves feeding inputs through functions with parameters to generate a given output. You can give it anything for a prompt and ask for any length of output (or let it decide how much to give you), and you can control, in numerical terms, how much the input and output are correlated. If you set it to discard all but the most likely probabilities, you can get something that will resemble your initial text very closely (or exactly). Thus, while it isn’t going word by word or sentence by sentence and fixing things, it is instead creating a ‘novel’ text that may be 99% similar to the original.

This is easier to demonstrate with image generating AI, as they can operate with a text prompt or with another image. So you can ask for a dog, or you can give it a dog and ask it for a 95% similar dog. This is useful in photo editing as a blend pass on what would have previously been ‘obvious shops.’ But the idea is pretty much the same.

[Vulgar Boy]

@hellfrog said in Concordia Thread:

@Coin I’ve asked it to 'edit" some text blocks and all it does is paraphrase or rephrase. Granted, I wasn’t asking it to change things to a british spelling.

Either way, I don’t think someone is bad or even wrong for using it to generate IC text for their game, I just don’t want to engage. So transparency is the ask.

It really depends on what you’re after in terms of editing.

Even that’s not very good. It barely even mentions the bear!

I haven’t tried to have it do any grammatical editing: since my grammar is spotless. Maybe it’s good for that?

[Cobalt]

Can I get a tl;dr for those of us too depressed to read back a hundred or so pages?

[bear_necessities]

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
L&L games bad
L&L games good
AI art bad
AI art good
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

[Cobalt]

@bear_necessities perf, ty

[bear_necessities]

@Cobalt oh i forgot
is ok to ban w/o giving reason bc you shouldn’t have to have people on your game that you don’t like
unless it’s someone i want a reason for, in which case you better give me a 3 paragraph post w/ proof

[Tez]

@bear_necessities ChatGPT could never replace these summaries.

[bear_necessities]

@Tez jokes on you, I am an AI generated person to begin with!!!

[Cobalt]

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

I am guilty of using it for character desc’s because I hate character descs.

[Tributary]

@Cobalt said in Concordia Thread:

@bear_necessities said in Concordia Thread:

@Cobalt tl;dr summary
dont use chatgpt for poses
but is ok for descs maybe

I am guilty of using it for character desc’s because I hate character descs.

I suppose that’s more reliable than making me write your character descs because I’m prone to forgetting if I’m busy when you ask me.

[Evilgrayson]

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

[dvoraen]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

A bit of a peanut gallery comment on my part, but there is (at least?) one OC character that was ennobled by marriage that was approved, so. There’s that.

[Aria]

@Evilgrayson said in Concordia Thread:

@mietze said in Concordia Thread:

I love the fact there are no huge disparities, really. Everyone’s of roughly same social class. you see a little whisper of that with the distant bloodline people but I really REALLY hope that staff never tries to do a hard disparity in class. I have literally never seen that be sustainable long term on a game and it just seems to set up so many OOC resentments and fights I personally hope they keep it out of their scope of game. I really love that an org belongs to all its members. my experience on Arx is that while yes, all orgs on paper had to have multiple people in leadership, in practice and just by fiat it often fell solely to one person just because of rotating rerostering or life or whatever. Even worse, sometimes people would try to gatekeep each other sometimes between leadership pcs ICly and OOCly which was…not good. when it was bad, it was so so bad.

Where everyone’s a Prince or Princess, though, there’s a whole slew of things that just can’t be RP’d about. You can’t have someone ennobled in play if everyone’s already a noble, and there’s a whole slew of potential conflict just… missing.

A lack of disparity in class makes everything feel shallower, to me at least. But then I’m one of those players who thrives on IC conflict, so having it removed wholesale just makes the world feel flat.

If everyone’s a Prince, no-one’s a Prince.

I’m of two minds on this. Personally, I wouldn’t mind a little bit more variety in social rank for the sake of variation, especially if it were balanced out by other things…

“Well, yes, that House is a Duchy, but their power is all in the past. The real powers in the south are Count JohnDoe, who has more money than half the continent combined and Marquessa SallySmith, whose has the largest army we’ve seen in a generation and holds our border against the biggest rift we’ve seen since the Genesis Rift.”

That said, I’m also someone who spent actual literal real life years slowly grinding my way from “County that has stats that don’t technicaly qualify as a County” to “March that’s closer to Duchy than not in everything except Area” on Arx. And not just because this seemed like the goal everyone was supposed to want, but specifically so I wouldn’t have to deal with a single intolerable asshole of a player that was in my fealty chain and who took advantage of that while bullying me and a few other people.

Not having whatever luck of the draw rando that apps into a roster decide they’re my boss and that they want to be a jerk about it, no matter how may theme files said “that’s not how this works, that’s not how any of this is supposed to work”, is kind of… nice?

[Polk]

@Aria The model you want, in my opinion, is the Holy Roman Empire. A bunch of Kingdoms, Principalities, Archbishoprics, Bishoprics… and lots of other things that all had representation in the Reichstag.

Kings were more important than Princes, but a King of one Kingdom couldn’t order around a Prince of another Principality.

[SpaceKhomeini]

In terms of “What can we do with fantastic feudalism:”

Something that would evoke a twinge of familiarity while being “new and novel” to probably the majority of players would be something that was modelled after, say, the Parthian (or Sassanid but they kinda became a bit more dickish after endless beef with Rome) empires.

Frank Herbert toyed with this a little bit in Dune but mainly (IMO, I am happily proven wrong) limited such dabbling to terminology and flavor text.