she/they
KB is right. There is nothing to be gained. There is no understanding to reach. There is no communication to be had. The other night I was so profoundly disappointed in what has become of a good place that I was honestly pretty bummed out.
It is what it is. They are what they are. Let them be. And leave them there.
Hi, guys:
Any posts elsewhere will be moved to this thread.
This is not a thread for arguments or nasty debates. We will be closely monitoring and moderating this thread in a way that we usually do not.
This is a thread for grieving, sharing resources and help for people who are impacted by all of this (which is all of us, but some more than others).
I’m just glad Ghost is there to lead the way to a brighter, more positive future.
Let’s not be reductive genitalia-essentialists about gender no matter where we are in the forum.
I think it’s pretty obvious why HannahBanana has been banned, but just in case it’s not obvious, I don’t care where you are: ablelist language isn’t okay, gatekeeping sexuality isn’t okay, none of this is okay.
https://forum.aresmush.com/t/v1-0-0-released/923
I don’t know if you guys have heard about this new fangled MUSH server called Ares–
Ares has brought a lot of new life into the hobby. I’ve watched people who hadn’t even logged into a MU* in their life launch and run games. Congratulations to @Faraday, and THANK YOU!!
While users can create new threads, they cannot create new categories. I believe that’s what you mean when you say new boards, yeah? We made a conscious choice not to include a politics category when we created this forum and right now that is not changing.
Politics isn’t a team sport. It’s life or death for many of us.
It’s not that we don’t think it’s important, so we won’t make space for it; in many ways, it is TOO IMPORTANT. This is especially true given the hands-off moderation stance I’d rather see on this board. We just don’t have the time, bandwidth, expertise, capacity, etc. to be able to moderate those discussions.
I’m sorry.
@Dreampipe said in Bannings:
There are actually a fuckton of literal fascists in this hobby;
There are fascists in a lot of places, alas. Fascists in gaming is an interesting area people are working on, but the far right were early adopters of online spaces (including back in the BBS days). Their methods will only ever get a small percentage of the population, but if you have so many people you can access, you can get to a much greater proportion of that small number and…well.
As someone who is super into history, Norse mythology, Crusader Kings, punk rock, and RPGs, the amount of time I have to spend squinting at people with common interests and going “Okay, but are you a fucking Nazi?” is both alarming and exhausting.
Seconded. I’m a white dude and it’s sometimes really anxiety inducing to talk about those kinds of interests without feeling like, “guys I swear I just like the stories, I’m not a white supremacist”. Double whammy because I also like power metal.
At least a lot of them usually don’t take long to go mask-off. I remember people using SS designs in medieval games like Mordhau or Chivalry. No it’s not a pair of lightning bolts, I know what you are.
Look, I can’t lie. I would use a pair of lightning bolts because I think lightning bolts look cool.
AND THEN I WOULD BE FUCKING MORTIFIED WHEN SOMEONE TOLD ME.
Pour one out for everyone born in 1988 who is innocently making very poor choices about their usernames.
I am glad that we have largely left behind all-white games in the L&L space. I think the expectation that most people have is that you will see a diverse cast of characters. I appreciate that about Concordia, particularly where they have course-corrected with their pantheon. I think they are doing some other interesting things in that space, too.
There is maybe no perfect way to handle the issue of cultural diversity and real-world inspirations, but I still think that what they are doing is worth an upnod. You got your Targaryens, sure, and your red-heads, and your Romans–
But there is also a house that has clear East Asian influences and one with South Asian influences. I grabbed one of those from the roster because I am always dying to see something – anything, please, god – that isn’t just your standard Western French-British-Something take on fantasy. Then I ran into players who maybe had been expecting something more Western in the house, so I popped in a request to get more clarity. I wanted to know what staff’s intent actually was, and I like the answer I got.
Rather than directly copy and paste real-world cultures into the game, they’ve made a choice to draw on multiple places for inspiration to avoid generalizing, tokenizing, or fetishizing any real-world culture. In this case, yes, the house has elements of North India, but also Moorish Spain. I’m kind of curious if there’s a connecting thread of thought in that they were both extension of Islamic power at times, what with the Delhi Sultanate and Mughal Empire in North India, but I haven’t sat them down for details – and I actually enjoy classical India better so DON’T FEEL THE NEED TO DRAW THAT LINE ON MY ACCOUNT.
Right now, at this moment, all I really care about is that they are doing something different, something interesting, and something coming from a place of curiosity and thoughtfulness. I wouldn’t say that they are a perfect game, and there’s choices I wouldn’t have made, but holy fuck please I hope more fantasy L&L games in the future draw from a wider well than the tiny Western European fantasy well.
@somasatori Yeah. It looked like AI to me and it’s not the only game out there that looked like it had AI content to me. I don’t personally care as much about code, probably bc I’m not a coder, but the content is the heart and soul of it for me, and it sucks to see.
@Jumpscare said in AI In Poses:
@Tez said in AI In Poses:
I saw a lot of people going ‘oh no, people might think I’m AI’ on the other thread but no examples of anyone actually getting incorrectly flagged. I think these are strawmen. Have we seen it happen?
I put some of my writing for room descs into an AI detector. Almost every one was marked as AI. Then I tried some from a former builder who I know was using AI (but I hadn’t honed my personal detection methods well enough to spot it, and we’ve since removed all of her descs). And it came back as not AI. This was back in early 2024, though, so maybe detection methods have improved in almost 2 years.
I think a lot of us can say this about things we’ve written. Sometimes, especially because as a hobby we do often write a lot , and often in the areas these datasets are trained on, the way that we write CAN look sus. Lord knows we do, and have, and did raise this concern in the other thread.
But has anyone actually disciplined you for the things you’ve sincerely written, though? That’s the case I’m actually interested in, not the anxieties people have that they might accidentally get flagged as AI and banned on an off day. I just don’t think that’s happening.
I saw a lot of people going ‘oh no, people might think I’m AI’ on the other thread but no examples of anyone actually getting incorrectly flagged. I think these are strawmen. Have we seen it happen?
@Ashkuri said in AI In Poses:
You ask them if they’ve used AI and they say ‘no that’s my writing.’ Which seems super unlikely, but rare is the confronted player who just says “ya got me.”
What happens next?
You’re right that players rarely admit to using LLMs. Fundamentally in your scenario you have a player who has broken a rule. If someone breaks a rule, I would ban them. There’s not a lot of nuance in that.
The nuance, of course, is in the question on whether or not you can truly accurately determine whether or not someone is using LLM.
I strongly believe that you can. I honestly have found the conversation in the other thread sort of baffling on a fundamental level. I won’t say that it is always obvious – and this is something I will touch on in a moment – but between AI detectors and human intelligence, you can tell.
Have I caught everyone who uses LLM? Maybe not. Am I confident that everyone I’ve caught using LLM truly did? Yes.
@Faraday said in AI In Poses:
@Ashkuri I doubt I would try to enforce such a policy for individual poses, just as I don’t routinely run other peoples’ poses through a plagiarism checker. But speaking hypothetically…
I might not run things through a plagiarism checker, but I literally have seen people steal descriptions from other people and reuse them on other games. (@Roz for example. Someone stole her character desc from Arx and tried to use it on Concordia. As I recall, the player was disciplined. I am not sure if they were banned.)
We can and do punish players for plagiarism in this hobby, so if we treat them as equivalent, then why wouldn’t we punish them?
If their poses are that nonsensical, probably others will too. Feels like kind of a self-limiting problem to me.
I think you fail to understand how far LLM have come. You aren’t going to get absolute nonsense poses. LLMs are producing writing that grows more and more sophisticated. Like it or not, the technology evolves quickly. I don’t think you can dismiss it by saying that it is going to be obvious nonsense.
I’ve been thinking about how noticeable this will be going forward. As the technology grows more sophisticated, it may become more difficult to detect. It may slip past a threshold where I am confident in my ability to detect. I don’t know. I’ve spitballed ideas about how to deal with it in my head. Some of them are so silly that I won’t derail this thread with them.
For now, though, I can tell. I ban for plagiarism. I ban for LLM. Don’t break rules on my games.
No one post about em-dashes in this thread for the love of god. No one is coming for your em-dashes.
@Jumpscare Totally, but don’t let the perfect be the enemy of good.
@Rathenhope alerted me to this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signs_of_AI_writing
Made me think of the intermittent discussions we’ve had about how to identify AI writing. Maybe this will be helpful or interesting for some of you!
@Warma-Sheen said in Warma-Sheen:
The only time there’s been an accusation of cheating that was even close to true was on City of Glass. Another player who I knew RL and was close with at the time had my password and logged on my character to a social scene.
This is embarrassing. Please take time to reflect on your actions. If that’s impossible, please take time to come up with better excuses.
@Jennkryst That explains a lot about my household, including the faking coughing and ‘boo, you whore’ earlier today.
