MU Peeves Thread

[Roz]

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:

I do make use of AI detection tools, both free versions and a paid one I subscribed to after Too Many Of These Incidents For Me, but mostly they’re confirmation for me when something feels REALLY off. There’s tons of AI generated stuff that’s actually been edited or was just a touch-up on something a human wrote that I don’t and would never notice. I associate LLM with being over-long and flat yet also weirdly effusive, mainly, but it’s usually not ‘bad’ writing, as such. It’s weird because it’s not ‘written’ at all, it’s word-generated-after-word. ‘Simple’ language that’s also repetitive due to that generation is probably the rhythm of it that twigs me the most. This article mentions it and some other tells.

https://readwrite.com/how-to-tell-if-something-is-written-by-chatgpt/

IDK, I think there’s also a ‘scales falling from your eyes’ quality when you know this stuff is becoming widespread (presuming it bothers you, I guess). Once you actually start to look for it, you start to see it when it’s obvious, and a lot of the time people don’t bother not to make it obvious.

AI detection tools are only really useful when you’re operating in a culture where use of generative AI is considered inappropriate in the first place.

Yeah, and I think the point of this specific conversation is that a lot of people want it to be culturally inappropriate in this hobby. There are already games that make it explicitly not allowed to use generative AI in writing, and so sometimes they have to use tools to help confirm suspicions.

The above issue in particular paid my mortgage that month. Since then, our editing has gotten way better. We’re – and it is a we since I’m not the only person here – of the view that AI-generated content is the future, but that it will also never replace human editorial vision. It’s here to stay, and so are us humans.

So AI can replace writers, just not editors???

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Trashcan said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator
Of course using AI tools is expedient. At this point, everyone involved in the conversation recognizes two things: AI tools are expedient to use and they stand to make the people creating and using them a lot of money. No one is arguing these points.

I’m glad you’re being transparent about your business practices, but the complaint in this thread is about people who are not being transparent. To use your Whole Foods analogy, you may not care where your eggs come from and that’s fine. Keep buying your 5 dozen egg trays. However, if someone thinks they’re buying the pasture-raised free range eggs and when they open the carton, they are, in fact, the same eggs from the factory farm, that just ain’t right.

Yeah. Well, that’s an issue of false advertising, which is a form of fraud. So there’s definitely basis for outrage there, or at a minimum irritation depending on how much it really matters.

It was pretty much the whole point of this particular conversation thread on this particular board: this is MU Peeves, it’s about people using LLM on a MU, not LLM in general.

If you want a real critique of generative AI, it’s that the out-of-the-box solutions right now aren’t very good. If your goal is to make something cool and interesting, they’ll produce something formulaic to the point of being droll. Quite a bit of effort goes into wrangling and contorting them to produce that interesting thing, which requires editorial vision.

You can still automate away the drudgery of production, though, if you do go through that trouble. That’s for certain.

Is “the drugery of production” here…writing? Writing words in our writing hobby?

And it’s also definitely not going away no matter how angry people get about it.

ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Pavel Honestly I’m just impressed. You have to really work at it to get ChatGPT to come up with anything smutty, after aggressively reassuring it that all parties are consenting to the joyous experience.

This is because the entire GPT line of LLMs is designed to be inoffensive. OpenAI’s content moderation philosophy is basically that the produced text must be safe according to an HR or PR executive. This means no graphic violence. It means no sex. It means no -isms or -phobias. And so on. Its output comes off as sanitized, because it IS sanitized. This is great if you’re a corporation who wants to automate job rejection letters that feel somewhat personalized without running afoul of anti-discrimination law, but it’s awful if you’re a novelist trying to make it take the broad strokes of your plot and fill in the blanks, because everything interesting in the human experience is all-but-guaranteed to piss hall monitor bureaucrats off.

There are LLMs that can be run locally with a commercial-grade GPU, like those downloadable GGUF models. However, in order to use them effectively for a purpose other than an HR-safe one, you need to fine-tune it on the kind of content you want. If you want smut, you’ll need to fine-tune it on bodice rippers. If you want violence, you’ll have to fine-tune it on military science fiction or horror. If you want -isms or -phobias, you’ll have to train it on /pol/ or your uncle’s bowling alley GC. If you want some mix of all of the above, you’ll need to train it on all of the above.

There is a similar issue with commercial image generation models like Midjourney and DALL-E, where they refuse to make explicit violence or pornography, and to an extent don’t like making women with certain body types because they’re too titillating. If you’re hoping to make an avatar of a woman with a Christina Hendricks build, that’s an uphill battle. It’s so frustrating that in our circle we’ve come to calling Midjourney “Midjanny,” since it’s acting as the fun police.

Buddy, it was just one person making a joke, it doesn’t need paragraphs of explanation.

[hellfrog]

Please no LLM proselytizing in this MU forum, jfc. Get it out of here.

[Testament]

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I am begging game-runners to stop using ChatGPT.

I AM BEGGING PLAYERS TO STOP USING CHATGPT.

I’LL STOP USING IT WHEN GAMES STOP ASKING FOR DESCS

Disclaimer: If it wasn’t obvious; this is a joke, I use it to get ideas for a desc and then actually write one. As much as I absolutely loath to write it.

[Jennkryst]

@Testament said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Tez said in MU Peeves Thread:

I am begging game-runners to stop using ChatGPT.

I AM BEGGING PLAYERS TO STOP USING CHATGPT.

I’LL STOP USING IT WHEN GAMES STOP ASKING FOR DESCS

This is a solved problem if you recycle the same PBs and the same @descs over and over again!

[watno]

Using ChatGPT in online role-playing games can enhance the gaming experience by creating dynamic and responsive non-player characters (NPCs). Unlike pre-scripted NPCs, ChatGPT provides unique and varied responses based on player interactions, making the game world more immersive and engaging.

ChatGPT also assists game masters (GMs) by generating creative content on the fly, such as detailed descriptions, side quests, and resolving unexpected player actions. This support allows GMs to focus more on the overarching narrative and players’ enjoyment, inspiring new ideas and directions for the game.

Moreover, incorporating ChatGPT can make RPGs more accessible by guiding players who may struggle with improvisation or dialogue. This lowers the barrier to entry for new players and encourages a diverse range of participants, fostering a more inclusive and supportive gaming community. Overall, ChatGPT enriches the narrative depth and flexibility of RPGs, creating captivating and dynamic gaming experiences.

[ham]

@watno

[Third Eye]

@watno
I got a LOL out of the joke of what looks like an AI generated post defending AI. The comedy has many layers.

[Ashkuri]

@Testament I will write every desc for you forever if you want

You still have to do the drudgery of editing my filthy human writing tho, and it will be a lot of work

[Jennkryst]

@watno Alright fine, I’ll RP with the chat bot and turn it into a Mummy and/or EDGELORD DARKSIDE WRONGFUN-obsessed intelligence so when skynet takes over, things are gonna get EXTRA weird!

[Narrator]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yeah, and I think the point of this specific conversation is that a lot of people want it to be culturally inappropriate in this hobby. There are already games that make it explicitly not allowed to use generative AI in writing, and so sometimes they have to use tools to help confirm suspicions.

Those tools are basically useless. They have a success rate of about 60%, which is to say 40% of the time they give either a false positive or a false negative. They’re only marginally better than using a magic 8-ball. You’re wasting GPU cycles by relying on them.

Also, the “MU*” segment of RPG players, what’s left of it, is notoriously backward in culture. Your culture needs fixing. I watched MUDs, which had legitimately sophisticated game design, get gradually replaced by MUSHes, which are basically just glorified Telnet chat rooms. It was done because they wanted to get rid of the Game part of Roleplaying Game, especially when it came to the Game part of Game Design. Through the 1990s, the conceit was that there was an automated GM that managed the world and did all the rules accounting involved in that. You could treat the rules almost like a strategy game, especially when it came to combat. More advanced MUDs had committees designed to better balance this element of the game and to add new features, to make the game richer. There was a potential to gradually build up a system so sophisticated that it basically was an automated GM, in all respects. But that was discarded in favor of World of Darkness MUSHes where most of the game is in the character application process and in making sure you never offend the right clique in the OOC foyer, and not in the scenes your character is in.

LLMs have a similar potential to function as an automated GM, although there are some issues with the prose they generate, most notably a lack of something called “perplexity.” The current thinking is that the programmer feeds it all of the facts of the gamestate, all of the game rules, and what the players intend to attempt to do in that scenario, and the LLM uses its advanced reading comprehension to determine which rules to invoke, which gets returned to the programmer. They then evaluate the outcome of those invoked rules and feed the outcome tot he LLM, asking it to write some prose to describe what happens. That workflow has already been implemented in some limited contexts, it just needs work and refinement.

And you’re doing what people did with MUDs again, here. Instead of seeing something with all of this potential and going, “How could we improve this? How could we identify its flaws and mitigate or remove them?” you think, “How can we make sure this never gets utilized at all?” It’s not conservative thought, it’s literally regressive thought.

So AI can replace writers, just not editors???

To an extent, yeah. An LLM needs direction, but you need to give it the right context, and there are still flaws in most of these models, most notably there’s a balancing act between reading comprehension and logic and being able to display the kind of high perplexity that a human writer does.

Is “the drugery of production” here…writing? Writing words in our writing hobby?

RPGs entail a lot more than just “writing.” Remember the “game” part of “roleplaying game”? That thing MUSHers gradually excised from MUDs because it might entail a little bit of logic, a little bit of math? That’s pretty key here. “Writing” is one aspect of many in RPGs. There’s also game balance, mechanical flavor, simulation accuracy, ensuring choices players make are consequential, game depth (players have more than one avenue that could lean to a “win”) over game complexity (having a bunch of rules to memorize), and the list goes on and on. Calling RPGs a “writing hobby” really tells me quite a bit about what you think the whole point of this is. It also probably explains the contempt I recall for a certain class of players I met in the 1990s and 2000s, who didn’t have the best English skills, but boy oh boy, did they display a lot of creativity and cunning in the warfare/combat modes of MUDs back then, and why they were gradually pushed out in the 2000s and were basically gone by 2010. It also explains why what’s left of the MU* sphere has a dearth of good programmers. As I demonstrated above, this isn’t just a “writing hobbby.” It’s also a design hobby and an engineering hobby. It’s a hobby for people who know how things work, and want to make things.

You got rid of the grognards and the math geeks and now all you have are people who think RPGs are about purple prose and pronouns.

ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.

By “ChatGPT” do you mean “LLMs”? They aren’t all interchangeable. But like I said. It’s not going away no matter how mad you get about it.

Buddy, it was just one person making a joke, it doesn’t need paragraphs of explanation.

My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.

[tsar]

@Narrator This is a storytelling hobby. I want to tell stories with other storytellers. I don’t want to tell stories with AI. I want the human connection. I don’t want the human putting an AI between us.

[hellfrog]

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

[Narrator]

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.

[sao]

Yeah I have no desire to engage with people using AI to write their poses. That’s not regressive, it is people wanting to play a different game than me. The game about teaching AI to play let’s pretend may be fun but it is not this game. It is not what I signed up for and it is not what the staffers who built the games I am on designed or choose to maintain. If a game encouraged people to use AI, or used AI to run npcs, and was open about it, it would probably not be the game for me, but it could probably be fun for others and this would trouble me not. Because we are literally talking about pretendy funtime games here and I thought it was cute when someone taught AI to play d&d but that didn’t mean I wanted to invite it into my longstanding weekend group.

This is value neutral, despite your condescending attitude. I also don’t think it is either conservative or progressive; I do not wish to play any game where I am not aware of what we are playing and other players get to change the rules without my knowledge because that is not how gaming works.

[Roz]

What in the world.

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Yeah, and I think the point of this specific conversation is that a lot of people want it to be culturally inappropriate in this hobby. There are already games that make it explicitly not allowed to use generative AI in writing, and so sometimes they have to use tools to help confirm suspicions.

Those tools are basically useless. They have a success rate of about 60%, which is to say 40% of the time they give either a false positive or a false negative. They’re only marginally better than using a magic 8-ball. You’re wasting GPU cycles by relying on them.

Lol nobody’s pulling these out for every piece of text that comes in. They’re pulling them out when something is already obvious enough that it twigs people’s senses of “this feels off.” And then the results are inevitably like 99% because if it pings someone’s gut, it’s because it’s a pretty terrible example.

They’re not wasting nearly as many resources as the generative AI itself.

Also, the “MU*” segment of RPG players, what’s left of it, is notoriously backward in culture. Your culture needs fixing. I watched MUDs, which had legitimately sophisticated game design, get gradually replaced by MUSHes, which are basically just glorified Telnet chat rooms. It was done because they wanted to get rid of the Game part of Roleplaying Game, especially when it came to the Game part of Game Design. Through the 1990s, the conceit was that there was an automated GM that managed the world and did all the rules accounting involved in that. You could treat the rules almost like a strategy game, especially when it came to combat. More advanced MUDs had committees designed to better balance this element of the game and to add new features, to make the game richer. There was a potential to gradually build up a system so sophisticated that it basically was an automated GM, in all respects. But that was discarded in favor of World of Darkness MUSHes where most of the game is in the character application process and in making sure you never offend the right clique in the OOC foyer, and not in the scenes your character is in.

What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”

(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)

LLMs have a similar potential to function as an automated GM, although there are some issues with the prose they generate, most notably a lack of something called “perplexity.” The current thinking is that the programmer feeds it all of the facts of the gamestate, all of the game rules, and what the players intend to attempt to do in that scenario, and the LLM uses its advanced reading comprehension to determine which rules to invoke, which gets returned to the programmer. They then evaluate the outcome of those invoked rules and feed the outcome tot he LLM, asking it to write some prose to describe what happens. That workflow has already been implemented in some limited contexts, it just needs work and refinement.

And you’re doing what people did with MUDs again, here. Instead of seeing something with all of this potential and going, “How could we improve this? How could we identify its flaws and mitigate or remove them?” you think, “How can we make sure this never gets utilized at all?” It’s not conservative thought, it’s literally regressive thought.

??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.

Is “the drugery of production” here…writing? Writing words in our writing hobby?

RPGs entail a lot more than just “writing.” Remember the “game” part of “roleplaying game”? That thing MUSHers gradually excised from MUDs because it might entail a little bit of logic, a little bit of math? That’s pretty key here. “Writing” is one aspect of many in RPGs. There’s also game balance, mechanical flavor, simulation accuracy, ensuring choices players make are consequential, game depth (players have more than one avenue that could lean to a “win”) over game complexity (having a bunch of rules to memorize), and the list goes on and on. Calling RPGs a “writing hobby” really tells me quite a bit about what you think the whole point of this is.

Yeah, could it possibly mean that different parts of the MU* hobby spheres have different focuses? That different types of players have different interests?

I wasn’t saying anything about RPGs in general. I’m sorry if I didn’t specify that I was talking about a subset of games within the MU* sphere that this board tends to discuss most often.

It also probably explains the contempt I recall for a certain class of players I met in the 1990s and 2000s, who didn’t have the best English skills, but boy oh boy, did they display a lot of creativity and cunning in the warfare/combat modes of MUDs back then, and why they were gradually pushed out in the 2000s and were basically gone by 2010. It also explains why what’s left of the MU* sphere has a dearth of good programmers. As I demonstrated above, this isn’t just a “writing hobbby.” It’s also a design hobby and an engineering hobby. It’s a hobby for people who know how things work, and want to make things.

I’m pretty sure people are still making things!

You got rid of the grognards and the math geeks and now all you have are people who think RPGs are about purple prose and pronouns.

Oh Jesus Christ.

ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.

By “ChatGPT” do you mean “LLMs”? They aren’t all interchangeable. But like I said. It’s not going away no matter how mad you get about it.

Buddy, it was just one person making a joke, it doesn’t need paragraphs of explanation.

My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.

It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.

[NotSanni]

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

@hellfrog said in MU Peeves Thread:

@Narrator this has nothing to do with this thread, please shut up

This is the MU Peeves thread. “You replaced smart people with purple prose and pronouns” is a pretty scathing peeve. But no wonder you want me to shut up. That peeve applies to you, personally.

lmao i can’t imagine why someone wouldn’t want you listen to you.

[watno]

Right now the biggest benefit of LLMs I see for this community would be in editing arguments made for their inclusion less wordy, more concise and compendious.

[Narrator]

@Roz said in MU Peeves Thread:

Lol nobody’s pulling these out for every piece of text that comes in. They’re pulling them out when something is already obvious enough that it twigs people’s senses of “this feels off.” And then the results are inevitably like 99% because if it pings someone’s gut, it’s because it’s a pretty terrible example.

They’re not wasting nearly as many resources as the generative AI itself.

Cope.

What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”

(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)

The kind of people into the sort of thing I’m talking about by and large graduated from MUDs into things like EVE Online, which often don’t rely on roleplaying at all.

??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.

You could also use them as automated builders in the MUSH sense. You could have a blank room that’s earmarked for generation, and then when a player first enters it, the room, and all of the adjacent rooms, and all of the mobs and items and so on in those rooms, get fed into an LLM, and it generates a new room for you, with new mobs and new items and exits, and between 0 and 10 new rooms that are also earmarked for generation, iteratively.

That would be really cool. It could be done with API use of an LLM, but I’d prefer a locally-run one fine-tuned on the right materials than a commercial one like Claude2 or GPT-4.

You got rid of the grognards and the math geeks and now all you have are people who think RPGs are about purple prose and pronouns.

Oh Jesus Christ.

Not an argument.

ChatGPT doesn’t need you veering off in a conversation just to shill for it.

By “ChatGPT” do you mean “LLMs”? They aren’t all interchangeable. But like I said. It’s not going away no matter how mad you get about it.

Not an argument.

My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.

It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.

Please post the games you staff on so I can avoid them at all costs.

[Roz]

@Narrator said in MU Peeves Thread:

What in the world are you talking about? The MUSH style of game has never replaced MUDs, and they’ve basically coexisted alongside each other for decades. MUDs are still plentiful now, probably moreso than MUSH style games. They serve different audiences and fulfill different niches. This is not a matter of “one is right and one is wrong.”

(And the idea that MUDs never have weird OOC issues with cliques is…a strange take.)

The kind of people into the sort of thing I’m talking about graduated from MUDs into things like EVE Online, which often don’t rely on roleplaying at all.

Wow sounds like they had some different interests in their hobby life! Wild that different people are interested in different things.

??? I literally don’t care if some code-heavy MUDs want to make use of LLMs to generate automated responses in their code. I don’t want generative AI writing on the games that are specifically focused on collaborative writing.

You could also use them as automated builders in the MUSH sense. You could have a blank room that’s earmarked for generation, and then when a player first enters it, the room, and all of the adjacent rooms, and all of the mobs and items and so on in those rooms, get fed into an LLM, and it generates a new room for you, with new mobs and new items and exits, and between 0 and 10 new rooms that are also earmarked for generation, iteratively.

Yeah, having mobs and items and generated rooms are – not actually the point of some games. Because, again, different games have different focuses and audiences.

My guy, to the crowd who thinks that it’s actually a better use of time and resources trying to detect LLMs so you can squelch them than it is to fiddle with them and make them serve your purposes better, it absolutely does need paragraphs of explanation.

It’s literally been like 0.5% of the time spent on the game I help staff on. This is not actually a big investment.

Please post the games you staff on so I can avoid them at all costs.

Has your deep technical expertise left you overlooking the publicly-posted playlist linked in the signature of literally all my forum posts?

Or were you too scared to look in the face of terrifying pronouns preceding it? I know, I know – basic parts of speech are pretty scary to think about.

[watno]

@Narrator Dismissing the “MU*” segment of RPG players as backward overlooks their preference for narrative-driven experiences. The shift from MUDs to MUSHes reflects a desire for deeper storytelling and social interaction, not a regression. While AI like LLMs may offer potential as automated GMs, they lack the nuanced understanding and emotional depth of human game masters, risking a loss of the human touch essential to RPGs.

Introducing AI into RPGs could alienate players who value traditional, hands-on approaches. RPGs are social experiences that thrive on human creativity and spontaneity, which AI cannot replicate. Instead of relying on AI, the community should focus on nurturing talent, encouraging creativity, and embracing diverse play styles. Preserving the core values of collaboration and personal engagement is crucial to maintaining what makes RPGs special.