It really, really sucks feeling like it might be time to let go of something that’s been with you for a very long time.
Don’t forget we moved!
https://brandmu.day/
Best posts made by Roz
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
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RE: Star Wars Age of Alliances: Hadrix and Cujo
Congrats, everyone! We have people joining just to toss around ambiguous JAQs and comments about echo chambers without making any concrete or direct refutes to the actual accusations, which means we’ve officially arrived as a MU* forum.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
Meta peeve because it’s more about the forum, but.
Being snarky on ad posts. Just, man. It’s usually the first time people are putting something out there. It really doesn’t do the community any favors – especially with the constant worries about the hobby dying – to put out an immediate response of snark.
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RE: People Doing Things
@Tez is basically my platonic life partner and is SO cognizant and concerned about being as fair an authority as she can, and protecting people who need protecting
@sao can invent a character out of THIN AIR in the space of a SNEEZE and they will be so vibrant and alive and real in just an instant
have you ever seen @Meg theorize about how a plot is going to go? she has a MAGIC ABILITY to either come up with the accurate answer, or something even more fantastic.
@deadscribe’s RP is ridiculously evocative and he is a chill motherfucker
@Third-Eye is one of the people that i use as a, like. chill barometer. she is more capable than most at healthily disengaging from bad vibes and bad folks. if you rile her up, i will raise my eyebrows
Eit is not here but you will never, EVER mistake her writing style for anyone else in the world.
@farfalla has such a strong sense of internal fairness and justice and does such good work trying to actively keep herself accountable, which is the hardest thing to do
@glitch quietly works in the background to do SO MUCH to support the community. he doesn’t like being perceived. but i see u
@Narson is a ridiculous motherfucker but good lord is he also a delight
@Pyrephox is such a vivid and specific RPer, and so consistently safe in her IC and OOC separation. that is the case for EVERY incarnation of hers, but i will forever treasure the specific delight of one particular RP friendship that was so rich
i hope @Rathenhope never stops making the jokes he makes because holy shit. playing himbos together is A+++
@hellfrog deserves more credit than she ever gets for all that she did to build Arx, its theme, and most especially its culture into what it is today
@Apos deserves so much credit for the amount of work and the depth of world-building he has done for Arx over the years
@ham is another who is consistently interesting and specific in his RP, but who i will always treasure a very particular PC connection we got to explore. it is rare to find people that you can safely RP through something ICly messy, unhealthy, and even a bit toxic, but i always felt safe playing that with you
@tsar is so conscientious about her positions, and such a warm and generous RP partner. whenever i’ve needed a sounding board, she’s always been a voice of reason
@Tat did something honestly remarkable in the design, build, and reinvention of the magic system of Spirit Lake
i cannot even remember the last time @Yam and i got to rp but she is honestly motherfucking hilarious and i love her even though she drinks crunchy milk
Tehom is also not here but, i mean. guys. the arx codebase. and the fact that he put in the time and work to make it accessible to others.
i miss playing faith family of that specific era with @Snackness but i’m so delighted whenever we get to play again
@Tori has built numerous guides and helpers for Arx stuff, specifically all her crafting work, that has helped a TON of people
@IoleRae is so open about mistakes and learning from them in a way that takes so much courage. we have managed to have big scuffles on MSB and come out on the other side
i want @Herja to drop meteors on me every day of the week. i want the richness of her trauma. but also, when one storyline hit too deep and too close to something difficult, she was so kind and generous about working around it
i don’t know if most arx folks have noticed the number of code contributions @dvoraen has made to arx, but i have
@crawfish draws the best fkn cats you guys. i am so excited for my tarot deck. and i’m so excited that she found the perfect audience for her art and seems to be enjoying it so much
@mietze is such a kind and warm RP partner, and i’m really excited to be exploring such an interesting character dynamic with her again!!
@helvetica is just. man. life goals amount of attitude. one of the most remarkable things i’ve seen her do is just – recognize when a situation was no good for her and walked away.
@Mosephine has DEADLY ACCURACY in her detective skills and everyone should fear her
@Dreampipe introduced me to NOBLMAN, SWERV and he will die a hero for that
i once saw @kalakh face an IC situation that could very well have been the end of her character, and she chose to move forward ICly because it was what was true to her character. it was so great, and not everyone has the guts to fully own that
@moth flits in and out of my RP circles just like their username suggests and it is always SO EXCITING when it happens. we got to play one of my favorite character friendships
@MarsGrad and i have gotten to write some pretty delightful character pairings and is always open to talking stuff out
@Faraday just deserves a ridiculous amount of credit for Ares. and not just the huge amount of work, but i have such respect for her having a clear vision and intention from the start and staying true to it.
i legitimately have no idea who @pisscat is, i just know that every couple months i’d have a flood of upvotes as they clearly caught up on MSB posts, and it always warms my heart
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RE: Liberation MUSH
@Tchotchke said in Liberation MUSH:
I’m not going to kid myself into expecting change, but I can hope.
Don’t. Like – this thread has pages of shittery, the MSB had way more pages of shittery. After pages and pages of shittery, you’re just fooling yourself. Just stop playing. These things don’t change.
#StopPlayingOnGamesWithShittyStaff2023
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RE: An Arx Peeve Thread
@anonymouse jesus that’s all fucking GROSS
I can absolutely see how his attempted OOC overtures with me a few years back would have lead down that road; it must have been me shutting him down so firmly that had him scampering off with his tail between his legs.
Basically my character mentioned something in a scene referencing a prior interaction from a good time prior. The player tried to intimate that I was remembering this detail because I must have been rereading prior logs. I’m not an idiot, so grasped the pretty obvious connotation that he was saying I was rereading his TS logs to get off on. I told him that OOCly sexual comments were absolutely not okay to make to me. He backed off and emphasized his good boundaries!! A few days later, he asked if he could send me a light-hearted “build a sub” meme. I said sure because I didn’t realize what type of sub he meant and I literally didn’t stop to realize this was gonna be about subs in the sexual sense of things. He sent me this meme (sexual joke, but no NSFW imagery or anything, for clarity for anyone who clicks) which, tbh, if one of my actual good friends sent it to me about my character or a TS scene or something, would have been funny. From a guy I barely knew that I had just told days before not to make OOCly sexual comments? Nope. I shut it down, he tried to apologize a bit later, and I said I didn’t want any contact with him.
Anyways here’s the full convo: https://pastebin.com/CwSr99Pj (This was with Michael; I censored the name at the time because I just wanted to show it to a friend to roll my eyes at the behavior, and at the time I didn’t feel like I needed anyone rallying to my defense in regards to an individual.)
I’m gonna say this as a general offer to everyone: if someone is getting iffy like this, starting to fish for OOC intimacy like this, and you want someone to be a sounding board or help you shut shit down? If you want someone to look at something and be like “no, you are RIGHT to find that weird, it is VALID to be uncomfortable, this person is trying to pull shit,” I will be that person. If they’re trying to hold some kinky TS over you or make you feel weird about boundaries because you RPed some weird sex shit? I absolutely don’t care. I TS! I RP weird sex shit! It’s okay to do this. If you feel weird or shamed because you feel like you were dumb for already getting involved or lowering your boundaries some? You’re not dumb!! You’re not dumb for connecting a little with another human being just because they abused the fact.
I am a pro at stating boundaries clearly and effectively, and if anyone EVER needs help doing this, I will help. Creepers deserve to be kicked to the curb. Fuck that shit, life is too short.
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RE: Bannings
@Testament said in Bannings:
Banning someone on a game is kind of a, well, it’s not all that effective. Or I guess, it’s effective, to a point. Unless you want to get into IP banning, and even that can be mitigated if you’re really determined and/or feel like paying the money for a NordVPN.
Thinking about it, and how I view it, if someone was banned for really shitty behavior and then they eventually sneak back on unnoticed by any and all who they might’ve wronged. It tells me one of two things.
Either A, they’re sociopath who lacks social skills to realize they aren’t wanted and simply doesn’t care. In this case, their behavior will eventually show up and they’ll be caught, banned, rinse/repeat. See; Cullen, DWOPP, etc etc.
Or B, they realize the error of what they were doing wrong, did some kind of self-evaluation and changed their behavior. In light of B, that doesn’t make them coming back to the game right, but unless you get really draconian about tracking people, it’s just something that most games have to deal with.
Bans – especially public bans – do have an additional value to a game or community beyond the immediate “get rid of the person doing the bad thing.”
They also make a public show of what a community will or won’t tolerate. They provide evidence to regular players of what behaviors won’t fly, which helps make it easier and safer for players to report bad behavior – which, as we all know, is always an ongoing struggle.
Bans aren’t technologically foolproof, and we all know that. But their value to a community, I’d say, goes far beyond that.
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RE: Bannings
Man, so. My serious of thoughts rattling around in no particular order.
MSB staff can share whatever they want of their justification for my continued ban. I don’t care.
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BMD is not a protest of MSB. Nor was it made in response to the Hogpit on MSB being renamed and having a new Code of Conduct issued for the site. BMD was made before that happened. It was made because a bunch of folks were banned and a bunch of other folks lost confidence in MSB moderation, so they made a new community. At most you could call it a vote of no confidence in MSB. But the repeated idea that a bunch of people were just mad at MSB saying everyone has to be nicer, that all these people just wanted the ability to be cruel and so they left, is bullshit. The timeline doesn’t hold up. People left because…
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The social contract between administration and a large portion of the active userbase was broken. Pretty much every other time I can recall an MSB staffer asking folks to chill out, move threads, take a breath, etc., it’s been respected. Or if it hasn’t been, people haven’t been affronted at seeing others get warnings. So why was this instance different? The popular answer I see trotted out on MSB is that it was all about Derp’s appointment, that people couldn’t stop arguing about Derp. Except, if you go back and reread the actual thread, that’s not what happened. Sure, some people were making quiet exits, because they didn’t trust Derp in an administrative capacity. But the reason people started getting vocally angry was one single ban that appeared to be entirely without merit. Two users had what could at most be called a tiff over DMs, they yelled some Last Words at each other over their shoulders, and then one side – the one who opened and continually extended the conversation – decided to report this under the guise that it was some sort of harassment. So you had someone who, at most, got a bit snarky in their exit, now being presented as someone guilty of actual harassment, and the community takes harassment pretty seriously. A number of people, myself included, had access to the log of the conversation, and found it a wildly out of touch response on the part of staff. And, when frustrations were voiced, staff doubled down.
There’s a social contract in every community, and when one side is seen to break it, it has a destructive effect on the community at large. That is why you saw such a strong reaction from a lot of posters who have never caused issues before and who only engage in debate rarely on the board. (I’m not talking about me here, as I know I’m argumentative, but people like tsar, Third Eye, etc.) If you lose the confidence of your userbase as a staffer, if you are no longer trusted to treat people fairly, then it is no surprise when your requests for silence aren’t respected. When people are angry about staff misconduct, then requests to not speak about the staff misconduct will be taken as silencing tactics.
That is what happened.
Had that first ban not occurred, I do think you would have seen some people leaving MSB due to not trusting Derp in an administrative position, but I don’t think it would have shaken out the same way.
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People who don’t even know Mietze, who aren’t even friends with her, should stop using her name as some sort of tool or proof or justification. Her name isn’t a weapon for you to wield, and it makes it very clear you have no idea what’s going on there.
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It is very, very clear that the decisions of who to unban were not based in any reasonable justification. The reasoning for not sharing anything about why some people were unbanned while others weren’t – and no, a general “we made reasons based on things” is not a reason – is thin enough to be transparent. If Derp had shit on me, he’d share it. There’s been talk at other times about keeping out the “line-pushers” now that MSB has a new Code of Conduct, except you can’t possibly make that argument for the vast majority of those who remain banned.
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The fact that MSB staff openly asked people what they could do better and then disparaged the responses before eventually splitting the thread (fine, makes sense) and locking it (not fine) just makes a public declaration that offering criticism of MSB staff is unwelcome and will be treated with hostility. If you actually want to engender trust, you are doing the opposite.
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You have not managed to cultivate some safe, polite atmosphere. There’s open snark over there, most particularly from the mods. Some of the people talking about how safe they feel now do so because the people who will call out others when they do shitty, creepy things are now gone. VulgarKitten changed her username to Hella and slipped right back on the board. She had previously disappeared after it came to light how she had been lying about her identity on Arx for months, manipulating others, and engaging in romantic and sexual RP with players who had NCOs against her. The safety she praises you all for now is the safety of a predator who knows that a lot of the people who would publicly point out their egregious behavior are now gone, so she can pretend everything’s fine and slip back in (to eventually do it again).
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Refusing to talk about any of the offending DMs of the banned parties, but then sharing a random anonymous DM talking about not liking three people speaking up, and then acting like it’s not about the three people who had been talking critically about MSB that night is – wow. Hugely manipulative.
Moreover, as indicated in the above point, the people who might feel safer are those who would prefer an environment where they are not held accountable for their actions. This isn’t actually a healthy environment. It is a pretense at civility. It’s surface deep.
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Also, if you’re going to hold the position that you “can’t speak to” the idea that Derp is bad at “women’s issues” because you yourself are a man, maybe you should listen to the numerous women who have said it? Maybe?
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Finally, good lord, if you are going to repeatedly harp on the necessity of irrefutable evidence and the ability of people to doctor logs, you cannot also then be confused as to why ANYONE would EVER hesitate to report ANYTHING to staff, Jesus Christ, please use a modicum of logic.
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Okay. That’s it. I am done. I have just had all these thoughts writhing around in my brain since last night.
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RE: Bannings
Even if I want to yell at someone about how they’re being a total shitty asshole, I want to yell at them with the right pronouns.
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RE: Bannings
The one person who actually seems to have been emboldened to speak due to the absence of many of the banned users – is someone who was called out on the boards for their gross lies and manipulations that got them banned from a game, who declared she was never logging into MSB again and was probably leaving the hobby forever, who then rolled back when it was “safe,” changed her username, and acted as if everything was normal.
Latest posts made by Roz
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
I can understand someone getting annoyed at their IP accidentally being caught up in a blacklist, but I agree that it’s weird to go off on someone and ragequit over it. Unless the person has some sort of other issues going on.
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RE: Pax Republica May 20245
Maybe I could convince you to put your updates in one thread instead of making a new one every time? It’ll still pop up as new forum activity for people.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
@Third-Eye said in MU Peeves Thread:
@NotSanni said in MU Peeves Thread:
dude is producing internet content for incels on 4chan, so, not a big surprise there
I have seriously been wondering if this was a 4chan guy but he seemed different than the standard 4chan guy? IDK, maybe they contain multitudes.
nah i found the “zine” they’re publishing, including the zine’s social media presence on the fediverse (and one of the two main contributors to the zine’s accounts/handles).
there’s a reason they weren’t loud and proud with the fact that they publish IDDQD Magazine and instead did a soft sell (probably trying to find likeminded people here to DM them to grift for money).
ah yes, our old friend NEETzsche, we meet again
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@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.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
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.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@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.
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RE: Good Systems to use in 2024?
@Mr-Johnson I’ve never handled the server side of stuff before, but from the documentation, it looks like the basic Digital Ocean droplet recommended for Ares is $12 a month. Others probably have better info there!
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RE: Good Systems to use in 2024?
I’d imagine that Ares + one of the various Traits or RPG plugins from here would be your best bet? Like if you just want to list out a few superpower traits for a given character, then I think ESH Traits is fairly designed for that.
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RE: MU Peeves Thread
@STD said in MU Peeves Thread:
… Dare I ask, who is this Jill the Guest?
Jill has been around the MU* community for over a decade now. I’m not sure when the earliest Jill sightings were, but I remember becoming aware of her in the early 2010s?
She connects to games as a guest and pages people with female-sounding names. The conversation tends to start off innocuous: saying hi, maybe asking about the game, etc. Small talk. Eventually it tends to get steered to hobbies, and usually athletics in some fashion, and then it’s about high school athletics, and then it’s about the weird physicals her girls sports team all had to undergo to play sports.
She’ll dip fast if you push back or act weirded out at any point in the conversation, especially if you actively identify her as Jill or guess where the thread of conversation is going. It’s weird conversation, and it’s definitely not an appropriate line to bring up with strangers, but I think because of how quick she is to bolt, most people tend to find her more vaguely baffling but not threatening.
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RE: Comic Games Are Still Fun!
@renaveleigh said in Comic Games Are Still Fun!:
But divorced from all of that, my gut feeling is that Rogue is some kind of weirdo chud or consciously covering for the feelings of one, so while I’m happy to not get wildly political in public, I am also never not going to find it funny that her knee-jerk reaction was to clutch her pearls over the very controversial statement that Alex Jones Is Bad, Actually.
From an outside perspective entirely divorced from any behavioral patterns here, this specific conversation pasted doesn’t look like someone clutching their pearls, it looks like someone asking for a subject change and getting guff about it. Like, in this specific instance, she looks like the reasonable one, not the people snarking about it.
All that said, my jumping into this conversation was literally only about finding it strange that people would not consider this a political topic, but I’ve never met a minor disagreement I couldn’t talk about at length. (This is probably not my best trait.) But I also don’t have the other logs anymore.
To be clear, I do remember the drama around this person from back in the MSB days of the preceding game this one came from? And I absolutely believe they’re not someone I’d want to play with or be on a game they’d staff on. Just to make that part clear!
I’ll also note that there are players who have cart blanche to whine about how sensitive people are nowadays, and how there are too many genders, and pronouns are hard - all of which feel like more inherently political dog whistles and/or statements than acknowledging that a lying scam artist is a lying scam artist - so while I do appreciate the value of not talking about certain subjects because they can cause friction, it’d be nice if that standard was applied more evenly.
That is absolutely really shitty. That sort of thing definitely wouldn’t fly in numerous other places with similar “let’s avoid political conversation” policies. I’m confident that the mods here would shut it down, for instance, and I’d have no interest in entertaining it on the one game I’m staffing on (nor would any of the other staffers).