Sometimes there’ll be a player you really like that you just kinda lose touch with after you both lose the connective tissue of the game you were on at any given time. MUSHing is a transitory hobby, I try not to get too down about it.

Then 15 years will pass.

Then you meet a player you really like a new game and you both think you’re a TOTALLY NEW FUN PERSON.

Then one day you’re talking about old games and you realize that, in fact, you played together quite a lot on that one random game 15 years ago, and the internet has now brought you back into proximity for the first time in this decade+.

Sometimes the smallness of the hobby is actually nice.

Thank you BMD mods for making it easier to rubberneck and preserve this trashfire…I mean stay informed.

NGL the thing I’m trying to wrap my head around is this pile of refuse passing as a game not having a WORA/MSB thread prior to this.

I voted no due to the potential for abuse by bad actors but get why the Magicians guy deleted his post and think the kind of reception is worth reflecting upon.

@mietze said in MU Peeves Thread:

I wish people didn’t always turn this into “if you’re not in action/plot its because you just prefer social things” that is honest far from the truth a lot of the time.

I was once told - by someone in control of plot stuff - that because I was a ‘social RPer’ and in a decent number of scenes (many of which I asked for) that I didn’t need plot involvement. It was a hell of a thing and like five years later I’m still mad about it.

I have no interest in this game and shall never be present upon it but my friend in Beelezebub I do not think this proves the point you think it does.

@Cobalt
Whatever worked or didn’t work about The Pack, I really hope the experience wasn’t too discouraging for you. Like I said lots of posts back, it DID seem like a game a lot of players responded to in positive ways, and I am really impressed with how you responded to an atmosphere that you didn’t feel good about being the gamerunner of anymore, because that was obviously really hard and Unfun to deal with this directly. I think it’s always constructive to reflect on why something didn’t work, or didn’t work for you personally, or get across what you wanted to get across, but I hope that doesn’t mean it was as wholly negative experience because you are a gamerunner lots of people like and respect and it’d be awesome to see another project from you in the MUSH space when you were excited to do it.

@Narrator
lol my dude did you just compare yourself to Jesus on a message board? Is that where we are now?

I thought about going back but end of the day I came to the same conclusion I did a while ago: I left my most active period on Arx on a really good note and that’s the experience I want as my strongest memory of the game. It’s cool to see a chapter of it get a conclusion, though, a lot of MUs don’t, and I’ll be interested to see how it ties it up.

@Selira said in Macha Awareness (And Unappreciation) thread:

I’m still pretty shocked Derp made up a multiparagraph theory wholecloth and tried so hard to sell it. Why? What was the benefit of that kind of speculation? I realize I’m speculating here, myself, but he’s more than welcome to come here and provide the answers.

That was the first moment I was sorry I was banned (apart from every time I try to find something on that mess of a board because the bad search is even worse if you aren’t logged in) because I would’ve enjoyed enthusiastically and repeatedly reporting Derp’s own post for violating his ‘you need to bring receipts’ and ‘no personal attacks’ rules.

@Roz said in Bad Stuff Happening IC:

I answered “if I have control over it” which isn’t EXACTLY right, I don’t want to be needing to dictate the details. But it’s moreso a level of – understanding the risk I’m getting into, and also that I definitely trust some GMs more than others.

This was both how I voted and I feel. I wax nostalgic about The Greatest Generation MUSH a lot and all my characters dying, but that was only fun because of how OOCly clear the risks going in were. I’m not sure I’ve ever played in an environment with what I consider ‘real’ social consequences but I doubt it’d change my opinion. I’m the type of person who tries to play characters that have pretty baseline IC opinions about stuff and it’s sometimes really frustrating when that’s not reflected in everyone else’s play and you just feel like a meanie while staff doesn’t do any enforcement of people wilding out IC, or spotty enforcement that seems to miss their buddies.

@Trashcan said in AI In Poses:
IDK how to feel about how closely the ‘great, now write a description’ prompt ended up eerily similar to the Age Old Nymeria Desc we’ve all read for ages and understood was bad and overwrought and that ended in one of the WORAs getting hosted in Malaysia.

I guess in my heart of hearts I hope LLM was trained on it, over and over again.

@Faraday said in AI In Poses:

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.

Make not mistake, I agree with this and agree with it more the more I play with the detectors, both the one I value enough to pay actual money for and the various other ones out there. I think Grammar Checks are one of the better comparisons that’ve come up, because I both use them and frequently just ignore what they’re highlighting.

Gonna be real real here, and apologies if this sounds dismissive to the people who say they can’t tell or don’t care about this stuff. I honestly do trust my gut more at this point, especially if my gut is confirmed by three or four other acquaintances of mine who I think have a really good sense of this stuff. My experience with false positives has been pretty minimal and limited to sets of text I’ve come to the conclusion teh detectors aren’t well-equipped to read. But the false negatives, and they happen not-infrequently, drive me a little batty. Because at that point I feel like I just have to accept probably being lied to by this person I’m playing with and shrugging my shoulders. But, idk, maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world.

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.

@Hobbie
LOLOLOL. I also work at a Fintech, in compliance, and the direction on AI is incredibly schizophrenic. They’re like WE LOVE AI THE CEO WANTS MORE AI…but also don’t put ANY of your work into public AI, and probably not even the proprietary ChatGPT rip-off we have internally, because you’re probably gonna violate personally identifiable information agreements. I just don’t use it and am doing all right. There have been some nice internal robotics enhancements that’ve come out of this whole mess but none of them have given me any confidence this stuff will take my job anytime soon.

@Clarion said in AI In Poses:

Also +1000 to @Faraday’s point that you cannot trust AI detectors to detect AI. They just absolutely are not trustable, and I think human intuition of “wait, this writing feels wordy and bland and disconnected from what’s actually happening in the scene” is both more accurate and more useful right now, because if a person isn’t using AI but does sound wordy and bland and disconnected from the scene, that’s still worth checking in about.

On a personal level I agree with and I’m guided primarily by my intuition as I try to navigate this stuff. When I pull up a detector it’s to have a second sanity check. Because what else have we got, ya know? The idea of relying purely on my feels is worse to me, because I think it does open the door to people get way too confident about being The Em Dash Police with people they haven’t played with much, while being totally blind to their buddy who’s writing style suddenly morphs into nine paragraph purple sycophancy. It also feels very easy to invalidate when someone says, ‘Well it looks fine to me! Who cares lol’ I mean…maybe it is fine? And plenty of people don’t care, which is all well and good and they can figure that out for themselves. But I do care! And I am trying to navigate this stuff.

I also don’t think players should be getting into ‘nu-uh’ fights about this among themselves while staff is just hands off. I increasingly want a game to be very clear on what its stance on AI is because players policing this themselves is a fucking nightmare. If staff doesn’t allow LLM writing, players should respect that, and potential LLM posers should imo be reported so staff can sort it out with whatever process they manage to cobble together. If a game straight-up doesn’t care they should say they straight-up don’t care and people should leave it be, and then players can decide for themselves whether the environment is OK with them.

@Jumpscare said in AI In Poses:

I put some of my writing for room descs into an AI detector. Almost every one was marked as AI. Then I tried some from a former builder who I know was using AI (but I hadn’t honed my personal detection methods well enough to spot it, and we’ve since removed all of her descs). And it came back as not AI. This was back in early 2024, though, so maybe detection methods have improved in almost 2 years.

From playing with both the various detectors and LLMs, it’s gonna vary depending on which one you use and how much text you have to work with (I’ve found it a lot wonkier for descs because they’re a short sample size). I have a paid subscription to one that’s been reliable for me in the past but I haven’t dug into its methodology for false positive/negative rates in a while. At the end of the day it’s mostly a gut check so I’m not just going off pure Vibes when I get to the point where I want to ask somebody if they’re using an LLM. I really, really don’t want to interact with LLM as much as possible in my travels through this hobby. If that seems unfair or Luddite-y? IDK, maybe I am those things. But I would straight-up stop playing at all if this stuff came to dominate the MUSH space. And, while I think I’ve gotten a better sense of it over the years, particularly in creative writing, I don’t want to just go off my gut because my gut is inevitably going to go easier on my friends/players I like than randos I meet in the wild. There is stuff I am 90% sure is from ChatGPT that didn’t ping as it from a Non-Vibes source and I just shrugged and said ‘fair enough.’

@Tez said in AI In Poses:

I saw a lot of people going ‘oh no, people might think I’m AI’ on the other thread but no examples of anyone actually getting incorrectly flagged. I think these are strawmen. Have we seen it happen?

I haven’t seen it directly but I’ve heard an anecdotal story from someone I trust and play with enough to be pretty confident they aren’t an LLM poser. My understanding is someone ask them if one pose was AI based on Em Dash Paranoia.

@Ashkuri said in AI In Poses:

You ask them if they’ve used AI and they say ‘no that’s my writing.’ Which seems super unlikely, but rare is the confronted player who just says “ya got me.”

I came across this periodically on Shattered (which didn’t allow LLM generated poses) and, while I do think dishonesty is a common response, my experience was more nuanced than that. My first step if I thought something had been generated by LLM (and my experience is it’s never a one-pose thing, it’s something that consistently reads ‘huh a little bit off’ or 'something I made a 90% copy of with the right prompt on ChatGPT), was to page them and ask, ‘Your content <with examples> reads like it was generated by an LLM. What’s going on here?’

If it got to this point, and it did rarely because for me it had to be pretty blatant or chronic, I never got a straight-up ‘no.’ What I got was more answers I think minimizing something as a blatant ChatGPT-copy-paste job. ‘I use editing software I guess it rewrote that’ or ‘I used it to make something longer and better.’ The latter, btw, is the one I think was the most honest and it was ABSOLUTELY an untrue description of what they’d submitted. The LLM background they originally sent in had like three thematic errors that ChatGPT appeared to have just randomed into existence. The shorter (for the better) BG they rewrote was fine.

@Trashcan said in Empire Discussion Thread:

I don’t know, man. The last game I was on, somebody was rude to staff and got banned for it right away, right after the game opened. That game went on to have over 4000 scenes, so it seemed to work out to me, and everyone was pretty chill in their dealings with staff after that, at least to my knowledge.

LOL I REMEMBER THIS PERSON.

For what it’s worth, this wasn’t a ‘first offense’ kind of banning, this person had been a nightmare to deal with in CG and been given a ‘second chance’ after they finally managed to take some feedback and get themselves in shape for approval.

That’s a case where it actually might’ve been better to just show this person the door before they got out of CG because that’s often less of a headache and waste of time for everyone involved if someone is giving off ‘bad fit’ signals, but you make your choices.

I think this is what a lot of these bannings for what appears to be ‘borderline’ behavior actually are. Staff take a lot of shit the player populace never sees.

I have no interest in this game and shall never be present upon it but my friend in Beelezebub I do not think this proves the point you think it does.