@Pavel She was a good horse! I’m glad she had a nice retirement.

Love some cheese and crackers. Slice it up, get some good quality, rosemary and/or olive oil crackers, go to town. If I happen to have an apple or something, slice that up super thin to give a little sweet crunch layer.

But usually I’m lazy, so just cheese and crackers.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

Can LLMs be of benefit to people with disabilities? Fuckin’ probably, I dunno, I’m not an accessibility expert.

Honestly, I doubt it? If something existed that was what people who want to use LLMs THINK LLMs can do, then it would.

But an LLM is not that. They have no sense of accuracy, of understanding of the data they’re receiving or outputting. They’re often (like, sometimes higher than 50%) confidently wrong, which is the last thing you need to assist you with a processing or sensory disorder. They create a sense of deceptive empathy but don’t have the ability to consistently and accurately recognize distress or self-harm, so I sure wouldn’t use them for cognitive or emotional disorders.

Do some people probably use LLMs as disability assistance tools? Yes, and some people take horse deworming pills to cure COVID. In both cases, they should be stopped from doing that, because it very well may injure or kill them. “People do this” does not, in any way, equal “this is a good or effective thing to do”.

And I’m not even trying to be funny, or talking about MU*s anymore. An LLM cannot and should not be trusted with ANY situation where there’s a negative or harmful consequence to error, because they are fucking black boxes filled with errors.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Pyrephox said in AI In Poses:

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Ooh Ooh! I totally dismiss other people’s perspectives on things because I haven’t lived them and don’t believe they could exist.

Have you lived it?

Has anyone lived it? Can you cite a single actual case of someone needing, specifically, an LLM and not any of the other tools that have been outlined in this thread and that people with disabilities have been using with success for decades, using an LLM to “pose on time” and being removed from the hobby or shunned for it when people find out?

Or, instead, is this simply your building a torturous “what if” scenario to justify why it is Right and Good Ackshully for you to do what you plan to do anyway and just don’t want to experience any negative consequences from.

Just use your AI, man. If anyone gives a shit, it’s because what the LLM gave you to put out in the world is dreck, and people don’t like dreck. They won’t play with you, and that’s okay. No one owes you RP. Just find someone else who also uses LLMs, introduce your chatbots to one another, and discover that you can now use BOTH hands to fab to your TS.

There’s no witch hunt. Just people deciding what, and who, they do or do not want to play with. Find your fun, recognize it won’t match with others, and stop trying to make it a righteous crusade.

@MisterBoring said in AI In Poses:

@Muscle-Car said in AI In Poses:

I will never feel compelled morally or socially to treat software with humanity. Especially when it’s so environmentally and socially repugnant.

So if someone comes to you and explains that their particular economic and health situation force them to use ChatGPT to even come close to your level of expression and pose at a speed that isn’t offputting, you’d immediately tell them to get bent?

Ooh! Ooh! I’ve seen this movie! Would you kill a member of your family because the crazed cult that’s taken you hostage says it’s the only way to save the world? What if actual airplanes started crashing? What if, what if, what if a vision from a god said you had to plunge that knife into someone or the world would end?

Guess we all just hate the world and want it to die. It’s downright disrespectful to people who have reasons to murder their family members, but it is what it is.

@RightMeow said in MU Peeves Thread:

Not really what the conversation is about, but to find out if it’s AI, you post it to AI and basically say: Did you do this?

I don’t know why, but I find that both sad and completely hilarious.

And then the LLM gets it wrong, because it doesn’t actually know how to analyze anything.

I don’t spend too much thought worrying about if someone used an LLM to write their poses, their desc, or anything. I just ask myself ‘was this person fun to scene with’ and ‘do I want to scene with this person again’.

I suspect, if I’ve had LLM RP, my answers to the latter two questions are ‘no’ more often than they’re yes. And I don’t need to know that it’s because it’s an LLM: people have been boring and incoherent posers for decades without help. LLMs just, honestly, make the pablum spelled correctly and with better grammar.

(And, if anyone’s worried about being seen as posing-by-LLM, just focus on being reactive and attentive to other people’s characters and really present in the vibe of the scene, and you should be fine, more often than not. No one has ever said, “OMG, I had so much fun RPing with this person…what if they were using AI??”)

@tsar THANK YOU.

I have been using it since ChatGPT wasn’t even a twinkle in Eliza’s eye. It’s MINE. You can’t HAVE IT.

@MisterBoring If someone chooses to break a game’s rules, they are uninvited from the game. It’s not hard.

@Pavel Augh! That’s terrible; heal up soon!

@Juniper said in Numetal/Retromux:

Is it normal to view unpleasant, controversial or “dumb” in-character behaviour this negatively? If a character causes trouble, is that considered subversive to the community or even rude? Is disruption and conflict not the bread and butter of telling stories together?

I’m seeing why this character might have been a problem to other characters, but I guess I don’t see why that means the OOC actor was a problem. Seems like a lot of bleed.

There’s an issue, particularly with themes that have behavioral expectations that should be commonly understood among characters, where someone who plays a character who is relentless in breaking those expectations (especially in big, public events that are typically used to create touchbases for the IC group and convey plot) becomes disruptive and unpleasant no matter how pleasant the person is OOC.

Because everyone is forced to stop doing the things they came to the game to do and deal with this character’s bullshit. Once, that can be an interesting change of pace - a character having a genuine dispute or hard moment pushing against expectations of conformity. But when someone does it every single time, and particularly when it’s the same character every single time, it becomes clear that the player just desperately craves being the center of attention and holding the rest of the game effectively hostage until they’re satisfied. Or until they receive those “IC consequences” they usually claim to crave, only to then shift their temper tantrums to how they didn’t expect the consequences, the consequences aren’t fair, how no one understands their deep and complex character, and how if someone had just taken the time to understand the character everything would have been so good, how none of this is their fault, and usually some parting shots about ‘snowflakes’ and ‘roll players not role players’ before they go sulking off into the wilderness…or make a new character to try and pull the same shit again.

It’s just something that a whole lot of MU* players have seen over and over and over again. So as soon as someone says, “Oh, I’m playing a difficult character,” or “I’m playing a character who will spark a lot of RP for others,” there’s sort of a full-body shudder and a lot of us think not this bullshit again.

@junipersky Best of luck and my greatest wishes for your family.

@Pavel That one makes me very sad, although it’s been in the cards for a while.

MOD VOICE: Hey, all. Do not put up people’s Discords, emails, real names, or any other non-game identifying information on the board.

@Pavel said in MU Peeves Thread:

@MisterBoring To be honest, much of the time I feel that games have grids purely because games have grids.

I’ve also seen (and been a part of) arguments that say if you want to restrict who can play in a room, you must take your scene off the grid – and I imagine staff would want to limit numbers on any particular plot related scene so they don’t get overwhelmed.

Ugh.

In one of my few stints as staff, had a couple of players throw a passive aggressive fit because I wouldn’t let them join a GM scene run on-grid: it was the climax scene of a plot that had been running with a specific group for a couple of weeks, and it was on grid because a prominent feature in a room’s desc was the focal point of the plot. It just really killed my enjoyment of that plot (and, honestly, game). Worse yet: I’d run private/tailored scenes for these players ON GRID before this, and they had no problem with it then, of course.

So, yeah, there are some incentives NOT to use a grid room, even if I prefer it, because I do not want to either have everything open to everyone or deal with people whining about being excluded.

I’ll also say that you really do have to separate out two concepts:

In-character conflict, which may be between player characters

and

Player vs player conflict, where the PCs are mainly proxies for beating ‘the other guy’ on an ooc level.

I’ve had far more rich, rewarding, and intense conflict and competition between characters when there is no OOC masque, when players OOCly communicate about stakes, outcomes, desires, than when that conflict is treated as a competition between players. Like, I’ve had intrigue and espionage plots/scenes that could only happen BECAUSE we were talking OOC and cool with things happening. Also, being able to chat with people OOC about how we see this conflict helps me identify at a much earlier stage if this is a player who can handle conflict, or who it’s just not going to be fun trying to have these sorts of scenes with.

A secondary issue is something I learned as a newbie GM and which has never steered me wrong in the days since: “You can’t solve an OOC problem with an IC solution.” If the problem is “this player is playing their character in a way that makes the game unfun for other people”, then punishing/beating up/demoting/killing their character is never the solution. Having an adult conversation with them OOC about the effect their play is having on others’ fun is, and if that conversation doesn’t go well, then removing them from the game is.

Killing someone’s character because you’re OOCly annoyed with the player is one of the ways PvP gets real toxic, real fast. It’s not ‘policing the community’, it’s just taking your frustration out on someone who you usually know that you can beat and have often taken every measure to make sure that fight is as one-sided and humiliating as possible, because you’re there to ‘teach the player a lesson’, not to have fun with them.

I’d say…make a game. Make it how you want it, and hopefully it will attract the people that you want.

Currently, no one in the MU* community wants to run a strong PvP WoD game, and there are a whole lot of reasons for that, but only one cure: be the person who takes it on. If you don’t want that, or can’t find help to do that, then it sort of says its own story about whether that game is wanted by the community as it currently exists.

There are some PvP-heavy MUDs out there, there are, as you say, MMOs you can model design on. But the only time a game gets made is if someone has a real passion for doing the work of making that particular game. If you don’t like the games other people have passion for, then your only true remedy is to invest your own passion. Do it. Do it right. Create something you can be proud of.

@ten You can pry my em-dashes from my cold, dead hands. I’ve been (over)using them longer than LLMs have been in existence!

Honestly, I don’t think the vast majority of people care where someone’s PB comes from so long as it’s a reasonable image of the supposed character…and it’s hot enough to want to fuck, let’s be real.

I don’t think less of anyone who uses a Midjourney PB, and I’m pretty irritated that such a cool tool has been set up in a way that fucks over a lot of artists instead of licensing material or paying royalties or something. I don’t see it as a Big Ethical Question–I just wish the companies in question would be forced to pay the artists for the training data they’re profiting off of.

I wish that I could use AI and feel good about it - I love the idea of being able to craft a character’s face that really goes with what I want to describe, instead of always having to be “close enough” by searching google images for a public figure who kinda-sorta-maybe is close to the description I ACTUALLY want to have.

But, AI being what it is, I don’t feel comfortable doing that anymore. So back into the search engine mines it is.