@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.

@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.

@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.

@somasatori said in AI In Poses:

I am apparently in Reviewer #2 brain these days whenever I look at any research work.

I’m right there with you. I literally did a whole homeschool lesson with my kids on that whitepaper, showing how to think critically about the potential biases and how the company frames the results.

Anyway, I didn’t dive too deep into the underlying studies themselves, focusing on the meta-analysis part. @Trashcan was right to point out that some of them were pretty dated.

@somasatori said in AI In Poses:

while I’m not disputing that Originality.ai is good as I’ve never used it, this is the same vibe as “we have investigated ourselves and found that we’re the best”

Good to be skeptical, but I don’t think it’s quite that bad. More like “5 out of 6 doctors agree!” advertising. It is a meta-analysis of studies that (as far as I can tell) were done by other people. There are still a host of potential biases in play. My general point was that even with all those potential biases, they’re still admitting that sometimes they’re only getting a “B”.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

“I don’t want to RP with GenAI because I’m here to RP with real people.”

This. But also: “I think GenAI is terrible and I don’t want to have anything to do with it. I especially don’t want my poses fed into their plagiarism machine.”

I don’t really care how good it is. Even if they fixed every single one of its flaws and it was a better RPer than everyone else I’d ever played with, I still wouldn’t want to play with someone using it.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

@somasatori Or even if you do recognise those as “problems,” it reads more like the typical wannabe Wordsworth or Hemingway crap that I attempt whenever I get too big for my britches.

Yeah exactly. When I ran some old “overdramatically wordsmithy” poses through the AI checkers, it flagged those too. I just question their methodology.

@Trashcan said in AI In Poses:

Not a huge sample size, of course, but I thought it was interesting.

That is interesting, thanks for sharing.

And look, even as a skeptic I’m not saying that the AI checkers don’t work at all. That’s clearly not the case. But I did find this interesting whitepaper from Originality.AI. A couple things that stood out to me:

1. No single tool was the best in every study, and there was significant variance in tool performance across studies. This suggests that the effectiveness of these tools may vary greatly by how you’re using it. (which isn’t great if you want something reliable)

2. Even the tool that’s claiming it’s the best only got a B+ in a couple of the studies. Maybe that’s good enough for some purposes, but it gives me pause.

@Hobbie said in AI In Poses:

it takes only ten minutes to train the damn thing to write passable poses?

Sure, as long as you don’t mind when it can’t keep the details of Evelyn’s backstory straight, forgets that she has a fan in her hand from one pose to the next, doesn’t take into account how the scene she had last month would affect her dealings with Edward, etc. And heaven help you with theme consistency if the RP is happening in an original or lesser-known setting.

GenAI is good at generating plausible text - that’s literally its one job. It still isn’t very good at generating a coherent story.

I look at those example poses and they make me cringe. While I’d be reasonably confident they were AI-generated, to @Yam’s point about being a gamerunner, I don’t know that I’d be confident enough to ban somebody over it. And the AI generators aren’t trustworthy enough for me. (Some I tried insisted that some poses from 2001 had a better-than-average chance of being AI-generated, lol.)

I dunno. It sucks. I hate GenAI.

@Yam said in AI In Poses:

Aight so we can’t use tools to check, and we can’t use our guts to check,

I’m not sure where you’re getting that from.

Some people think it’s perfectly fine to use the AI detectors.

Other people think it’s better to use your gut.

A third group of people prefer to use the detector to back up their gut.

You do you.

Personally I’m in the same camp as @KDraygo . If your vibe is off-putting to me, or I’m reasonably convinced you’re using AI, I’m not going to RP with you. I’m sure we’ll both survive.

When I spoke of “structural change”, it was in regards to education. There I think it’s a bit more complicated, but that’s kinda irrelevant from a gaming perspective.

This English professor asserting that em-dashes are the biggest tell-tale sign of her students using AI is what I’m talking about when I complain about people picking on the dashes.

@Third-Eye said in AI In Poses:

I also really cringe at ‘vibes man’ becoming the way to figure this out, though, because I see some people spot ‘AI’ and I think they’re wrong, have terrible instincts, and are fixating on stuff I don’t think is relevant.

Just to be clear on my stance - I can absolutely believe that there are people whose gut is worse than the detectors, and people whose gut is better than the detectors. I’m just critiquing the detectors in isolation and the danger of someone who already has a bad gut relying on them.

Much the same stance I have with self-driving cars, incidentally. They are definitely better than the worst drivers, and worse than the best drivers. But that aside, they are nowhere near reliable enough that I would trust myself or my loved ones to their care.

@Third-Eye said in AI In Poses:

When I pull up a detector it’s to have a second sanity check. Because what else have we got, ya know?

Yeah I totally get that impulse. My concern is rooted in psychology more than the technology itself.

Here’s a different example that maybe illustrates my point better: Grammar checkers. They are sometimes useful and very often completely, utterly wrong. As a professional writer, I have the skill to sift through the chaff to find the suggestions that are actually correct and useful. But the teen homeschoolers I work with don’t. If I hadn’t taken the time to teach them why one should be skeptical of the suggestions from a grammar checker, it would be completely understandable for them to just be like: “Well, this thing obviously knows more than me; I should do what it says.” (Here’s a neat video essay about the problems with someone who doesn’t know grammar well using Grammarly, btw)

So I’m not saying “never use grammar checkers because they suck and have no value”. I’m just saying that they don’t work well enough to be relied upon, and anybody who uses them needs to be well aware of their limitations. This just doesn’t happen when you’re a layperson whose only info is their marketing hype.

Now that’s grammar checkers, where we have a tangible baseline to compare it to (e.g., CMS style guide, etc.) Plagiarism detectors are the same. It’ll tell me: “Hey, this seems like it’s ripping off (this article)” and I can go look at the article and decide if it’s right.

With AI detectors, you don’t have that capability. You just have to take its word for it. If it lines up with your vibe, you’re probably likely to take that as confirmation even if it’s wrong. If it doesn’t line up with your vibe, you have no way to tell whether it’s wrong or you’re wrong.

I also have concerns about the fundamental way these detectors work. GPTZero analyzes factors like “Burstiness”. Yes, sometimes AI writing has low burstiness because it’s overly uniform. But sometimes human writing has low burstiness too, and sometimes AI writing can be massaged to make it bursiter.

These tools are new, there hasn’t been a lot of sound research into the subject (even that big article from U of Chicago was a “working paper” that hasn’t been peer-reviewed (as far as I can tell). Their methodology might suck or it might be brilliant, but until more folks have reproduced the research, it can’t be taken as gospel.

@Pavel Which GenAI will almost certainly never be able to because there isn’t enough COBOL stuff out there for it to steal for training data.

@Aria said in AI Megathread:

I’m just sitting here watching this with a look of vague horror on my face

Oh dear heavens, all the sympathy. That sounds like my worst nightmare.

I worked in FDA-regulated software for awhile. I’m sure @Aria knows this well, but for non-software folks: In safety-critical, regulated industries, it is a well-known fact—learned through bitter experience, horrific recalls, and lost lives—that it is utterly impossible to test software thoroughly enough to ensure it’s safe once it’s already been built. There are just too many edge cases and permutations. Safety/quality has to be baked in through sound design practices.

AI has no concept of this. You can ask it to “write secure code” or whatever, but it fundamentally doesn’t know how to do that. I sincerely hope it does not take a rash of Therac 25 level disasters to teach the software industry that lesson again.