@helvetica said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine Logs are publicly available, their placement on the site just isn’t in a very obvious location.

I think their custom portal has a bug actually, because the “Recent” view on scene logs was initially blank for me. Once I switched it to “all” and back to “recent” it behaved itself. That might lead one to honestly believe there were no public logs.

But it’s oh-so-pretty. Seriously. Kudos for the aesthetics.

@Roz said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

@Serafine said in Wyrdhold Discusion:

True to its name, I’ve seen nothing but war and strife from ARES.

I mean, Ares is just a codebase, it doesn’t really have any influence on whether or not there’s drama on a MU*.

Whatever do you mean? I’m quite certain it’s the first and only MU codebase to ever see drama. I designed it special that way.

@tsar said in Los Angeles 2043: A Blade Runner MUSH - Discussion:

Man, thank you. Because this vague insinuation that Director bailed and crushed all these people’s hopes and dreams of stories really started to get my blood pressure up. He’s a really cool dude, who is engaging, funny, and a great time.

I don’t know Director from Adam, but even if they did completely bail, so what?

Staff are volunteers, and players are not entitled to anything from them that they are unwilling to give.

If they open a game and close it the very next day because some horrible experience caused them to reconsider the whole thing? That’s their prerogative. If they open a game and close it the very next week because RL got too hard? That’s their business.

Yes, it’s disappointing when games close. But guess what - even running YOUR OWN GAME doesn’t mean you’ll get a chance to finish the stories you imagined telling. Enjoy it while it lasts.

@GF said in New Concept:

if you can’t suspend your disbelief for less prejudice but can for God being a space squid who hates you, then maybe sit with that and really think about it.

If it’s a fictional setting? I absolutely can suspend my disbelief for that. But history is established. Someone (sorry can’t find the quote) mentioned “it’s just the 1920s but without discrimination.”

I don’t know what that means.

I’m not being snarky. I hate discrimination with a burning passion in RL, and I fully respect someone not wanting to deal with that in their pretendy funtimes.

The problem is that discrimination is so deeply baked into societal systems that it’s just not as simple to me as snapping your fingers and saying it doesn’t exist.

Everyone always points to Wild West settings and says: “If you can imagine a world where the PCs don’t die of dysentery, why can’t you imagine a world without discrimination?”

Easy. You’re not pretending dysentery doesn’t exist, you’re just saying the PCs are lucky enough to not contract it, or to contract it and survive – both of which actually happened.

“A world without discrimination” is just not the same thing. How did it get that way? Let’s start from that Wild West setting…if racism isn’t a thing, then logically slavery wouldn’t have been. There wouldn’t have been a Civil War (or it would have gone very differently). Heck, the entire economic basis of the south would probably be dramatically different. Oh and would America even exist at all if not for the genocide against the native peoples? How far back do we go with this?

If you want to do alt-history, that’s cool. That’s what Savage Skies did. They picked a divergence point (something about “when dragons appeared” IIRC) and then wrote the history from that point forward to explain why their imaginary world is different from our real world. It’s a bunch more work, but it addresses the issue cleanly.

Less clean is “racism exists but we don’t want stories about it here” because of systemic discrimination. What about the laws of the land? What about PCs who have discrimination in their backstories? It gets thorny.

I’m not telling people how they should RP. I just wish people would stop ascribing evil motivations to those of us who just have a hard time imagining a historical setting as an egalitarian utopia.

@De-Villefort said in But Why:

I’ve been thinking about it and maybe I’m just mad because the Lords and Ladies type games are glorifying some of the worst kinds of people to have ever existed on the face of the earth.

There have been Star Wars MUs where people play members/supporters of the literal fascist Empire; Wild West games where people play racists, outlaws, and robber barons; supernatural games where people play vampires and werewolves; and modern-day games where, indeed, people play super-rich elites.

This fixation that fantasy settings are bad and other genres are good seems weirdly out of step with what people actually do in those other settings.

People point to the staff tools and FS3 design in Ares as like: “This enables folks to run games with fewer staff,” and while that’s true, it’s backwards. Ares and FS3 were designed the way they are because games, including my own, were having trouble finding and keeping staff.

I personally experienced too many cases of staff blowups or abandonment through the years, some of which harmed relationships with friends. So for the last decade or so, I run games myself. That means not only do I need tools to support that (see: Ares and FS3), I need game design to support that. So generally I stick to single-sphere, PVE, narrowly-focused games. ETA: Also with de-centralized storytelling like @L-B-Heuschkel described.

@doodletilidie Be aware that if you allow players under 18 you’re subjecting yourself to the COPAA laws. Additionally, you may be opening yourself up to liability if you allow R-rated content on a wiki that is geared towards 13-year-olds (per your NSFW policy) or by allowing mature RP at all without the players involved having any means to verify the age of the people they’re playing with. Big can of worms. Don’t recommend.

ETA: COPAA is specifically for under-13 but other regional laws may still apply for under-18s, especially European players. Still don’t recommend.

@Kestrel That’s very interesting. I only skimmed the thread, so maybe I missed something, but I wouldn’t consider their attitude “disdain” so much as a different emphasis.

We want people to be able to emote with each other while focusing on one thing at a time, not doing that awkward thing that plagues MUSHes where you end up addressing five people in a single emote and having five conversations at the same time.
…
What we’re trying to do here is provide an immersive atmosphere for a playstyle that resembles improv acting more than collaborative writing. It’s difficult and jarring to immersion when these two styles clash.

Much as I enjoy MU RP, they’ve got a valid point, don’t they? I’ve literally had 1-on-1 MU scenes where there are three different conversation threads going simultaneously between the same two characters. Traditional MU paragraph style resembles neither organic character interaction nor normal creative writing.

TGG, for instance, had shorter poses during action scenes by the necessity of the code. Storytelling still occurred within those constraints.

Like they said, these are styles. Neither intrinsically better or worse than the other, but each having pros and cons. At least they’re up front about it and setting expectations about what they’re going for.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

Everything the a.i. makes is entirely original.

GenAI makes nothing original. Every single thing it does is algorithmically based on the work it’s been trained on. Without that trained work, they’ve got no product.

That trained work was used without the permission of the creators. That is the crux of the lawsuits, and while the results have been mixed so far, I believe ultimately the creators will prevail in some form or another (probably a watered-down global licensing pool, but it’s at least something). I believe this because one of the cornerstones of the fair use doctrine is that the transformative work does not replace or compete with the original. That is demonstrably not the case here. This has been theft and plagiarism on a scale that would make Napster blush.

ETA: The Getty and Disney lawsuits are probably the strongest, as they show pretty compelling evidence that their artwork/photos are baked into these GenAI tools to such a degree that it can faithfully reproduce them when prompted. It’s not just stylistic inspiration.

@RedRocket said in AI PBs:

The training process teaches it to draw in the same way humans learn to do art…

GenAI does not learn in the same way a human does. It’s a false equivalence. People keep wanting to anthropomorphize these things like they’re actually intelligent, but they’re not. They’re fancy word- and image-predicting algorithms. Autocomplete on steroids. They do not fundamentally understand the world the way a human does. They have no actual creativity, insight, or originality. They match patterns and generate similar ones. They do it really well, which is why the tools work, but that is not the way humans think or learn.

@Pyrephox said in D&D Licensing Agreement:

I don’t begrudge Hasbro making money off of D&D. There’s a lot of the merchandising and expansion of the IP that I love. I know it’s only there because it’s profitable, but as long as it’s fun, it’s good. However, I don’t like the way this thing has been played…

That’s where I land. D&D is their product and they’re entitled to stop letting other people make money off it without getting a cut. But their terms are utterly ridiculous.

It would be like me saying that not only was AresMUSH no longer free, but if you use it you have to send me all your game’s wiki/css/etc. that I can use for whatever I want without paying you a cent. That’s just absurd.

Some players will roll with things - I love that. But I’ve had some players quit over what I considered natural (non character-ending) consequences of their PCs’ actions, and others throw gigantic fits over the smallest of setbacks.

PC death is my personal hot-button because it ends the story and makes you start over from scratch. That’s not fun for me, so I don’t play (or run) games like that.

@SpaceKhomeini said in IC Consequences and OOC Acceptance:

I usually operate under the assumption that the character I’m helming is largely an idiot and does idiot things that will result in idiotic self-owns.

Sometimes I forget that I haven’t communicated this loudly enough with everyone around me and they get kind of cagey when I do stupid shit IC.

The fact that this needs to be communicated at all is kind of emblematic of the core issue. Most players in my experience don’t want their character to come off looking bad (in their opinion) because they think it makes them look bad. There’s such an over-investment in IC success, glory, and coolness that if someone is actively trying to embrace natural consequences or have their character do something stupid, it’s looked upon with suspicion or disdain.

@MisterBoring said in AI PBs:

This is an example of what I am hopeful AI will eventually do, which is help push scientific discovery forward.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cgr94xxye2lo

That is neat, though it’s worth noting that this doesn’t appear to be “Generative AI” in the usual sense of ChatGPT, etc., but a custom-trained model. With much of this, it’s not the technology itself that is the problem, it’s the way in which it’s being trained and used that people take issue with.

@dvoraen Heh I enjoyed that video, thanks.

That reminds me of this post: My new hobby: watching AI slowly drive Microsoft employees insane. It’s reactions to a series of Pull Requests (the programmer equivalent of “Hey, I did a thing, someone check it out please and make sure I didn’t mess up”) from Copilot AI. The top comment says it all:

I just looked at that first PR and I don’t know how you could trust any of it at some point. No real understanding of what it’s doing, it’s just guessing. So many errors, over and over again.

Can AI tools make coding easier? Sure. Just in my lifetime I’ve seen code go from assembly language (low-level instructions to the computer registers) to visual coding tools (like Scratch) that let my kid build a game like Frogger. But even with that astonishing advancement, we still need developers to figure out what to build in the first place, and then make sure what gets built does what the customer needs. AI is highly unlikely to replace that in the forseeable future.

In other news: AI industry horrified to face largest copyright class action ever certified

They’ve warned that a single lawsuit raised by three authors over Anthropic’s AI training now threatens to “financially ruin” the entire AI industry if up to 7 million claimants end up joining the litigation and forcing a settlement.

I know it’s unlikely to succeed, but one can dream.

@ProperPenguin said in AI PBs:

When I told a few dev friends this, they got surprised and then tested on other instances (not just ChatGPT) and found yeah, it spits out a whole mess or sometimes it suddenly veers into turning your request into Python or similar.

Knowing how these things work, it is not at all surprising that they are bad at generating a custom regex. If you want a well-known one, maybe, but GenAI doesn’t truly think or reason. It generates statistically likely responses. Not correct ones.

But vetting regex-es is as hard as writing them, so you’re still not getting out ahead.

@Trashcan said in AI PBs:

It doesn’t always do that either.

Yeah, there’s also this: Trust in AI Coding Tools is Falling.

The thing about GenAI is that it can make you seem more competent at a skill without actually having the competence. Maybe enough to fool a layperson, but not enough to actually BE competent. So someone without skill in programming can do some vibe coding, someone without skill in writing can write an article faster, etc.

But even setting aside the ethical/legal/environmental/etc. impacts, it just doesn’t work great. Programs are buggy and you don’t know how to fix them (or worse, don’t even realize they have gaping security flaws or subtle edge case conditions). Writing sounds same-y and cringe because it’s using statistics to generate the words instead of having a human voice.

There are certainly limited things when an ethical GenAI tool can be useful and increase productivity. It might give me the answer to a programming question faster than StackOverflow. But people on SO don’t generally hallucinate library functions that don’t exist. And if they did, the upvote/comment system would probably point that out.

A tool that makes up information and generates wrong answers might be useful in some situations, but it is not going to make you better or faster in general.

Rethinking the Luddites in the Age of AI

Brian Merchant’s new book, “Blood in the Machine,” argues that Luddism stood not against technology per se but for the rights of workers in the face of automation.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

But art is hardly the only medium that AI is taking over and I don’t know why it gets romanticized as a protected class that needs saving, exempt from the same pressures that affect every other job in a capitalist system. I’d love to game, or dance, or write all day instead of working a job, but there isn’t any money in it for 99.9% of people who can do it.

You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills. I’m not just talking about the starving artist trope making their own music in their garage. I’m talking about the graphic designers, the technical writers, the voiceover narrators, the people who write ad copy, the animators who make the Marvel movies, the musicians, the novelists, etc. There are a tremendous number of jobs impacted by GenAI.

And hey, if the AI companies had gotten their tech through legit means, that’d still suck, but it would be different. The printing press put the monks out of business, but it did not steal their work to do so. These companies are, in my opinion, crooks. You can say copyright law is a joke but I couldn’t disagree more. I think it is a cornerstone of society. Not just for financial reasons, but for moral ones. Because it’s one thing to not make money off your art. It’s quite another to make art and then have some company steal it so THEY can make money.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people.

Of course the problem is people, but imagine what the world would be like if we’d taken that stance with other technological advancements. We can’t un-invent LLMs any more than we can un-invent the steam engine, but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.

The industrial revolution caused a whole lot of chaos before we had reform and regulations to make it better. And for all the faults of the modern world, things are better in countless ways than they were in the 1870s.

Copyright law came about after the invention of the printing press, to recognize that just because you had a copy of a book, that didn’t give you the right to re-print it and sell your own copies. Those laws have evolved over time, but the core idea has remained the same: it’s not right to make money off of someone else’s creative work, and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.

@catzilla said in pvp vs pvp:

Movie theaters are going to die in our lifetime.
MUs definitely will.

I’m not so sure. My one kid asked for an old Gameboy for Christmas last year because they wanted to play an old game. My other kid loves playing 20+ year old PC games. Younger generations are making vinyl records increase in popularity. Storium, a close-cousin of MUs, raised 250k in a kickstarter a few years ago, though it suffered from some stumbles in execution since. Tabletop is growing in popularity again, and it’s a small leap from there to online play.

Servers like Evennia and Ares make MUs more approachable for newer generations, so I don’t think it’s impossible for the style to continue. We’ll see how it goes, I guess.

@RedRocket I see how you omitted the part of my quote where I said “per their branding” to clarify the air-quotes around intelligent, and specified that I was talking about the algorithm/data baked into the tool. I understand quite well how these tools work. I also understand copyright law. Your “it’s a dumb tool” argument holds little weight IMHO, legally or technically.

But even setting all that aside, I don’t even care if it’s fair use. It’s wrong to take somebody’s stuff, use it to make a product that makes you a zillion dollars—a product that wouldn’t work at all without their stuff—and give them nothing in return. It is exhausting and disheartening that this is even a debate.

@catzilla said in pvp vs pvp:

There’s this hot new phrase that all the kids are saying these days. “Quality over quantity.”

Quite true. But I seriously don’t know what games RR is referring to, because I’ve been on plenty of PVE games where there were multiple scenes going on nightly and I never had trouble finding RP.