@Hobbie What’s the point of the prefix though if the goofy autogenerated name already conveys the fact that they’re a temp name? Unless your game has a habit of new players naming themselves things like JadeWanderer.

Thanks for the feedback everyone.

@KarmaBum Yes, it will automatically log them in.

@Hobbie There won’t be any guest prefixes or suffixes, because that presumes that they provided a name. The whole point of this feature is that people don’t want to think of a name, or feel the perceived permanence of creating an account. The only difference between a temp character and a real character is that one has an autogenerated placeholder name (like ScarletVisitor or whatever) and the other has a name that you chose. There’s already a command/screen to rename an unapproved character.

@Tez said in Ares Tour Feature Feebdack:

Personally, I like the random combination of adjectives and nouns. I couldn’t tell you why, but I don’t love the numbering. This is 100% vibe and not logic-based.

Some games have requested specific names, and the config for combos turned out to be a bit ugly. So I’m currently leaning towards just a single list of guest names with some preset list of AdjNoun combos as the default.

@dvoraen These will be full-fledged characters, so there won’t be any separate data table/permissions/changing names/etc.

The only reason this feature even exists is that I’ve gotten feedback that expecting people to use the create command (or web equivalent) with a name/password is too much burden for a quick tour.

So this feature basically just does that part for them with an easier command/button. Otherwise these characters will be functionally equivalent to any other new character.

It is also worth noting that Ares allows players to change their own character names up to the point where they’re approved, so there’s no admin burden if they decide to stay.

Since I know not everyone who plays Ares games is on the Ares forums, I figured I’d cross post this here.

Ever since retiring the web client screen, I’ve been contemplating ways for someone to check out a game more easily from the web portal. Here is what I’ve come up with, and I’m interested in what y’all think.

Historically, guests have been pre-designated shared characters. connect guest (or tour in Ares) will connect you to the first available guest, so you can chat as Guest-1 or whatever. As soon as Guest-1 logs out, the next person who logs in as a guest can re-use Guest-1.

Having shared characters has always presented issues. For example, you don’t want the next Guest-1 to see what the prior Guest-1 had said in PMs. This also makes it impossible for guests to submit requests, receive mails, etc. since they can’t necessarily get back to the same character. Also there are security issues with this, because the first Guest-1 could cause mischief, but their IP would be overwritten by the second Guest-1. Finally, shared characters are unsuitable to a web app for many reasons.

But what if it was easy to make a temp character that wasn’t shared?

Here’s the pitch:

• connect guest/tour will now just auto-generate a character for you with a temporary name and password.
• A new ‘tour’ button on the web portal does the same thing.
• This is a regular character, same as if you’d created them yourself from the login screen.
• If you decide to stay, you can just rename them and keep on playing. Otherwise, that char will go into the idle queue for recycling.

I’m open to suggestions on how these temporary chars should be named. They’ll get recycled eventually by the idle system, but not necessarily right away. So any naming system needs to account for potentially a lot of different temp names. A few possible ideas:

• An easy system mirroring tradition would just be to let you configure a base temp name (“Guest”, “Visitor”, “Wanderer”, etc.) with a number onto the end. So the first guest ever would just be Guest-1 and eventually you’d work your way up to Guest-999 or whatnot.
• Common practice these days is having a big list of adjectives and nouns. Combine them to get a silly temp name like “TriumphantPanda” or “HappyWombat”.
• You could specify a list of guest names, like [ “RedGuest”, “BlueGuest”, “GreenGuest”…] but if all them had been taken and not yet recycled, it could tack a number on the end.

@Juniper The existing ad model sucks, but there are other ways to solve that problem. If someone is doing work to put out professional content, they shouldn’t be expected to give it away for free, and it certainly shouldn’t be stolen from them by a plagiarism machine. They deserve compensation, whether that’s through a subscription or ads. I have no problem with, for instance, YouTube’s model where you get to choose between the two.

But regardless of philosophy, what I’m talking about is simple cause and effect. ChatGPT has to get its information from human content creators. If OpenAI drives them all out of business, they’re just shooting themselves in the foot too. But by the time that happens, the damage to all the other creators will already have been done.

@Juniper said in AI Megathread:

If LLM chatbots weren’t so chronically wrong, using them to dodge adverts and engagement bombardment might actually be a decent use case.

Until there’s no more content for them to gobble up because all the websites they stole from have shut down.

Major newspapers post a summer section of AI slop that includes, among other things, a summer reading list for kids with imaginary books (complete with imagined summaries).

We’re Focused on the Wrong A.I. Problem in Journalism
It’s not bots writing the news. It’s the bots reading it

Apart from the obvious debacle, I think that article has a good take on the second-order effects of GenAI that many don’t consider.

• Most “free” internet sites are free because they have ads.
• As more people get their content from AI-generated slop like ChatGPT, the only people coming to sites are AI bots.
• Nobody’s going to pay to advertise to bots.
• Ad money dries up.
• Site goes behind a paywall, or (if it can’t sustain itself with subscriptions) no longer exists.

We’re already seeing more paywalls, and the problem will only get worse.

@Roz Seems like that would be a good standalone ares plugin if someone ever were so inclined.

@bear_necessities Even on their Pro plan, ChatGPT is losing money off every prompt their users send it. And a large chunk of their users are just using the free plan. Could they raise prices? Sure. The question is how much cost the market will bear for polishing up LinkedIn posts.

@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:

Not to get super nerdy here but it’s not that unusual for a company of that magnitude in early start-up phases to see significant losses, nor is looking at net loss vs gross revenue a great judge of financial performance for start-up companies. I could go into a lot of detail here but this is definitely not the place.

That’s true, but usually companies like that have a clear plan. Uber can operate at a loss because eventually it’ll drive all the taxis out of business. Then it jacks up the prices and has a profitable monopoly. Amazon operated at a loss for a long time to cement itself as a hub so that it can make a profit on razor-thin margins at tremendous scale.

The concern that has been raised in many economic circles is that these GenAI companies don’t have a coherent plan for how to become profitable. Now sure it’s possible they’ll stumble into some amazing thing that unlocks a huge profit center. It’s just unlikely to come from replacing wikipedia with a plagiarized information source or providing second-rate chat support. Time will tell.

@bear_necessities said in AI Megathread:

The world of finance and business is not exactly my small little circle here.

Many of the applications is fin/biz are using specific Machine Learning, rather than Generative AI. Whole different ballgame.

Though there certainly are some crappy GenAI uses (replacing blog post writers with shallow slop, replacing customer service agents with unhelpful bots, and the like), this is not a big profit center for anyone. OpenAI lost 5 billion last year while making only 3.7 billion in revenue. 3.7b is certainly not chump change for us normal folk, but for a megacorp like that it’s pitiful and unsustainable. In contrast, for example, Apple made 95 billion in the fourth quarter alone.

@Pavel said in AI Megathread:

@Third-Eye Agreed. I recall reading somewhere that an AI program could detect the very, very, very early stages of some kinds of cancers far more quickly and consistently than a human. That’s the sort of thing AI should be used for, not art.

There is research like that in the medical spaces, but that’s not the GenAI that this thread is complaining about. Those are specialized machine learning algorithms. “AI” is such an overbroad term, it’s like saying “the internet” and encompassing everything from 4chan to AP News.

@Third-Eye said in AI Megathread:

That’s not driving advertising dollars and making anyone’s money. ChatGPT does…somehow…

Actually, ChatGPT and most of the other GenAI platforms are a huge money pit. Ed Zitron writes about this a lot (example). The investors keep buying the hype that it’ll do a vague something revolutionary someday.

@Raistlin said in AI Megathread:

There’s a world of difference between “I prefer not to RP with people who use AI tools” and attacking others as “disrespectful” or their writing as “bullshit.”

I don’t personally feel that calling a behavior “disrespectful” is a personal attack. I feel that online piracy is disrespectful to creators. I push back against those who feel that it’s a “victimless crime”. That doesn’t mean I think everyone who pirated GoT rather than pay for HBO is evil incarnate.

In other news, ChatGPT fails hilariously at MapMaking 101.

@Jennkryst said in Best Games with Roster Characters?:

How well, if at all, does this handle the fancy dice?

The RPG plugin only handles numerical dice using a syntax of “5d6” or “3d4” or whatnot. You have to manually figure out what to do with the numbers - add them, count successes, figure out the difficulty, etc.

As Raistlin said, you could use custom code to make it roll whatever you wanted, you’d just have to figure out the syntax.

Ares also has a partial FFG Plugin based around the Genesys system. I don’t know how well it would adapt to L5R but you could probably at least steal some of the dice code.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

But a LLM itself is still ill-suited for such a task. And when we understand why, we can start to understand why it’s also ill-suited for giving other accurate information.

Sorry for double post, but wanted to add:

When we understand why it’s bad at giving accurate information, then we have to ask: So what IS it good for? And apart from a few niche word-parsing and pattern-matching tasks, the only answer I’ve seen is: replace the humans who generate content (artists, authors, customer support agents, narrators, etc.) with a machine that generates worse content. And that core idea is fundamentally the problem I have with GenAI.

@Roz said in AI Megathread:

If you program a calculator, you instruct it on immutable facts of how numbers work.

I mean… kinda? A calculator app doesn’t really know math facts the way a third grader does. It doesn’t intuitively know that 1x1=2. It just responds to keypresses, turns them into bits, and shuffles the bits around in a prescribed manner to get an answer.

I don’t point that out to be pedantic, but just to further contrast it with the way a LLM handles “what is 1+1”. Like you said, it’s based on statistical associations. It may conclude that 1+1=2 because that’s most common, but it could just as easily land on 1+1=3 because that’s a common joke on the internet. LLMs contain deliberate randomization to keep the outputs from being too repetitive. This is the exact opposite of the behavior you want in a calculator or fact-finder. And if you ask it some uncommon question, like 62.7x52.841, you’ll just get nonsense.

Now sure, some GenAI apps have put some scaffolding around their LLMs to specifically handle math problems. But a LLM itself is still ill-suited for such a task. And when we understand why, we can start to understand why it’s also ill-suited for giving other accurate information.

@Jynxbox said in AI Megathread:

But okay. Rant done. Get on your computer and tell me on the internet how AI is so problematic you won’t use it.

I can. I did in previous posts, but I’ll recap briefly: There is a benefit/harm ratio to every invention mankind has ever made.
Harnessing fire can bring warmth, but it can also destroy. Splitting the atom can power a nuclear power plant or wreck untold destruction. The internet contains filth, but it also powers information, education, and human connections.

We have to gauge tools based on how they are used. GenAI, by my estimation, brings tremendous harm and next to zero actual good. Every use case I’ve seen - from customer service chatbots to research - is terrible compared to the human counterparts it’s driving out of business.

We also, traditionally, have gauged tools based on their legality. Napster brought free music to millions. Some saw that as a good thing, but it was illegal, and it was stopped. The GenAI industry is committing copyright infringement on a scale that would make Napster blush.

There are many people who boycott Amazon, social media, or whatever based on the harms they perceive. There are environmentalists who would scold me for the plastic soda bottles I use. We’re all allowed to pick our battles. Fighting GenAI is one of mine.

@Roz

“They’re designed to produce statistically probable sentences.”

Exactly. Sometimes what is statistically probable is also correct: “What is the capital of France?” will most likely correctly tell you “Paris” because Paris has a high statistical association with “capital of France”.

But this methodology is inherently unreliable for giving facts. A LLM might confidently assert that George Washington cut down a cherry tree, just because there’s a common association between Washington and that story, even though historians largely believe it’s a myth. Elon Musk associated with Teslas + Teslas associated with car crashes + Elon Musk associated with a car crash leads to a LLM erroneously asserting that Elon Musk died in a fatal Tesla crash. Sure, it’s a statistically probable sentence, but it’s just not true. The LLM doesn’t know whether something is true, and it doesn’t care.

@Warma-Sheen said in The 3-Month Players:

If the RP means something to one of the characters or the plot, then it is Social RP rather than just BarRP. And what is BarRP to you might be Social RP for another player, or even Plot RP and you might not even know it.

This exactly. Through the years, I can’t count how many of my RP connections started with BarRP. These people went on to be the besties, significant others, rivals, and in one case adopted child of my various PCs. Those connections wouldn’t have happened without BarRP, and led to a lot of great Social RP and even Plots. Personally if ALL I had to do was BarRP I’d quit, but it still serves a useful purpose.

@Hobbie I love that one.

Friend quoted me this recently:

"It’s like ChatGPT has read everything on the internet, and kind of vaguely remembers some of it and is willing to make up the rest.”

There are so many documented instances of LLMs making up nonsense. Citing books that don’t exist. Making up fake lawsuit citations. Misrepresenting articles written by journalists. Making up fake biographical details. The code it spits out is often garbage (or, worse, wrong in subtle ways). And that’s not even touching on all the random stupidity where it tells people to use glue in their pizza or incorporate poison into their recipes.

The whole GenAI industry is most likely just a big bubble built on a con.