@somasatori said in AI In Poses:

I have a question. What do you get out of MUSHing, a hobby wherein you write paragraphs at people in a turn-based format, when you’re not actually doing the writing? What’s the end goal there?

I’ve had this conversation with more than a few people and one of the most common themes that came up: an experience as close to tabletop gaming as possible, but without being crapped on because of not being able to put out AP English writing or wait 20 minutes per exchange for all the editing.

MU*ers can be catty, judgemental, petty, elitist, etc… to a higher degree than any I’ve ever known, probably to do with internet anonymity, which is one of the reasons the hobby continues to grow smaller and smaller. I’ve never known a community so highly motivated/invested in killing itself off as intensely as this one, and I’ve known some pretty shitty communities in my life (I’m old… er now.)

People show up to MU*s for very different reasons and it sometimes seems like a large number of people assume that everyone else around them is there for the exact same reason as them then get frustrated/confused when they don’t play the way they would.

I’ve had the conversation on other threads, so I won’t get into it again here if people reply back to tell me all the ways I’m wrong, but taking a tool that improves writing and using it on text based game seems like it would be a godsend to cure many of the ills that people have complained endlessly about for decades - bad writing, lack of storytellers, no interesting plots.

But to each, their own. People will feel how they feel about it and that’s okay, I guess. Its just sad for me cause I loved this hobby and I really thought this might actually put some life back into it, like CPR. So it was disappointing/sad/whatever when all the villagers pointed at the thing that could bring someone back to life thereby improving the outlook/prosperity of the entire community, called it a witch, and want it burned at the stake.

ETA: Not for nothing, but to go along with the analogy, some non-small portion of the thread is basically a witch hunt - with dubious degrees of accuracy.

@Pavel said in AI In Poses:

I can understand people using it as a translator.

I know you mean that it takes Spanish and makes it English. But it seems like that also could apply to taking Shitty English and translating that to English.

@Roz said in Numetal/Retromux:

@MisterBoring Absolutely don’t do a three strike system for blatant, overt, and purposeful flouting of rules like that. Like, at most give the player one single warning.

But the real answer is the first option: ban them. There’s absolutely no need to entertain that sort of OOC sneakery.

Doing anything else will encourage some people to do it until they get caught, knowing they had a freebie.

@Trashcan said in AI PBs:

@Warma-Sheen
This

it won’t work today.

is

But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track.

defeatism

Is it “mealy-mouthed”? You seem to have a habit of leaving off the parts that are relevant to the point you’re trying to counter, as though the posts aren’t all above to be referenced.

Your obvious omission of it shows that even you know it was wrong.

But again, you can be insulting if you need to. That’s how these conversations go on this forum. I just don’t know why you do, instead of just having a conversation with an exchange of ideas with someone who might have different thoughts than you. But you do what you need to do.

I don’t have all the answers. I never claimed to. But I can see when 2 + 2 does not equal 5 and I don’t have a problem speaking when I see people trying to make that math work. If the answer was that simple, somebody else would have figured it out by now.

Rather than looking for a solution that actually has a chance in hell of working, if you want to take a 200 year old solution that takes 50-70 years and apply it to a modern problem that will be irreversible in no more than 10 years absolute max (as if it isn’t basically already there now) and ignore all the very obvious issues between the two so you can pat yourself on the back and get all the upvotes, go for it.

Problem solved. “You got it, dude.”

See you in 70 years when we will all most definitely be AI free of the problem that became ubiquitous 65 years prior.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

You are vastly underestimating the quantity of creative people who currently make a living with their creative skills.

Possibly. But I also think you are overestimating how many jobs GenAI is currently affecting - the key word being currently. Those jobs still exist. Some are affected. But others are not. My mother is a voiceover narrator. She doesn’t make a living off of it but she does make side income. She hasn’t seen much drop off of work YET, because, based on the conversations she’s had with the people she works with, the companies that pay for voiceover narration don’t find that AI quality is sufficient to stop hiring real people. AI can’t get the right amount of emotional range and proper inflections when it needs to. But what AI has done is allow people/companies who were not paying for it before to add GenAI robotic voicerovers to their service or business model for free. But these were people who wouldn’t have paid for real voicever anyway. The worry is that in the future as AI improve, it will get better and be good enough to stop hiring real people. The companies have told her when she’s asked, that more than likely that will be the case. It just isn’t at that point yet.

I think there could/would/should be some kind of graph with a line representing the quality of “creative” work (some creatives produce a more quality product than others, they just do) and the ability of AI to replicate that creative work to a specific degree. And as AI gets better, the more it will eclipse people and the more people will be put out of work as companies cut payroll to make more profits. That’s what companies do.

And I’m not arguing that its not bad and its not wrong. AI was trained on the cesspool that is the internet. The good stuff and the bad and everything in between. But ignoring the realities of it won’t make it go away. Railing about how bad it is for people won’t make it go away. Moar defeatism, I know…

At this point, I think there’s value in being able to use GenAI to enhance what you do for as long as you can do it. If you’re a technical writer, use AI to make you a better technical writer so that you can stay working longer than other technical writers who ignore it and do not increase in quality or production.

People have to adapt to changes in order to survive. Get on board the train or get run over by it. As I said above, I don’t have all the answers. But I think it is obvious that this thing is gonna be here to stay. So at this point, it is a matter of using it to your advantage and staying ahead of others who cannot/will not evolve along with it.

It has been said ad nauseam, but GenAI is tool. And the better you can use that tool, the better off you will be. But you can’t get better if you don’t practice with it. There is an art and a talent to using AI and some people don’t understand that. And in the current climate and the foreseeable future, being able to use AI skillfully is quickly becoming a survival skill in the job market. Early adapters will benefit.

Do I think that’s a solution to the problem? No, its just an adaptation to it. And a lackluster one at that. But that’s as much as I have right now.

@Trashcan It isn’t a misrepresentation. Its just a retelling. You’re saying the same thing I did, but with a different, antagonistic slant for no other reason than to be mean and nasty, presumably because I don’t agree with you.

You quoted the first part of what I wrote, then left out the rest.

@Warma-Sheen said in AI PBs:

In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.

But if helps you to give a more detailed picture restating and supporting my points, then insult me anyway, you do you. That is definitely a pretty common response these days.

If your argument is that we should start the march against AI now so that in 70 years we might have a chance of winning the fight like we did during the Industrial Revolution, feel free. As I agreed, regulation is an option.

But the rest of my point remains that this isn’t a fight that will last 70 years and the same tactics won’t work because the circumstances are drastically different and the thing we’re trying to stop is moving much, much faster.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

but that doesn’t mean we have to let tech companies run rampant either.

That’s a tricky phrase. I’m not sure the context you mean it in.

At this point it is highly unlikely, in any practical sense, that we can do anything about tech companies running rampant.

When has that ever happened before in any meaningful way?

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

and it’s not good for the world if artists have no incentive to share their art.

The artist issue is one that I have an unpopular opinion about, at least on this forum, but that statement is definitely a problematic opinion.

It suggests that the only, or main, incentive for creating art is financial gain. But there are many other reasons that art is created. The trope of the starving artist is a trope for a reason. Many artists do art just for art’s sake, even if there is no money in it, which, in most cases, there is not. Art for art’s sake is the motto of MGM Studios, despite the mountains of cash they make in entertainment. If you’re only creating art for financial incentive, you’re not being displaced by AI, you’re just competing with it in a market that’s historically been brutal for artists. It just means that your art has to be subjectively better than what AI can produce - by any possible metric. You have a soul. AI doesn’t. You can truly create. AI can’t. These are all the arguments made, but at the end of the day, does that make your art more marketable than AI art? If the reason you do art it is financial, you better hope so.

Is it easier to do art when you’re getting paid for it? Sure. 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. So I don’t do it. The world I live in sets the reality I have to operate within. And AI is now part of the world that we live in.

But on the flip side, there are plenty of venues where computers are better but haven’t taken over. Computers can play chess and beat grand masters, but they haven’t stopped chess tournaments. AI can outplay most people in competitive video games, but e-sports hasn’t crumbled.

Again, the problem isn’t AI. The problem is people. When people value human work/creation/skill, there will be money to follow. If they don’t, there won’t be. There are tons of concern for artists put out of work by AI, but not much for the customer service reps that are being cut at a far higher rate. Hasbro’s Dungeon’s and Dragons tribulations are a battle ground for that right now. They first said they wouldn’t use AI art, then they got caught using AI art, then they pretty much abandoned their pledge to not use AI. There was a big ado and calls for boycotts. But do people still buy their product? Yes. Absolutely.

If people value art made by other people, they’ll find it and pay for it. If they don’t, no amount of regulation or gatekeeping will save it. AI doesn’t kill art. People choosing convenience, price, or novelty does. And because people are the worst, artists suffer.

And copyright law… well, that’s also a joke, like most laws. The punchline here is that the “law” is heavily favored to big corporations and companies with expensive legal teams that make it increasingly easy to steal from individuals who can’t afford to fight back in court. It definitely does not favor the majority of artists, most of whom are forced to sell the rights to their art to some soulless company or corporation “in perpetuity and throughout the universe” in order to make scraps of money from it.

@Faraday said in AI PBs:

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.

I agree.

The Industrial Revolution happened over many decades. But it took just as many decades for laws and regulations to catch up to what has happening - for many of the same reasons it won’t work today. Too much money and influence on the side of the people with the new toys. In the meantime people were brutally and inhumanly pushed past their limits for generations with what we’d today consider abuses in order to feed the industrial machine. But here, today, AI isn’t playing out over decades, it’s evolving over months, across dozens of industries.

Governments are barely able to define what an LLM is, let alone agree on how to regulate it. Meanwhile, companies are training new models, with trillions of parameters, trained on questionable data sources, and putting them out before the public even understands the risks.

So yes, regulation is an option. But trying to regulate AI is like putting a rookie traffic cop on a Formula 1 track. They can try to slow things down, but no one’s gonna listen. In the absolute worst case scenario, they move their servers to another country with less scruples without missing more than a beat.

@Yam said in AI PBs:

I’m confused. Is genAI a fun, harmless tool to be more efficient at creating art, or is it the catalyst for the race to the bottom, a “painful and violent” future for humanity? I feel like the original argument deviated a bit.

It can be both.

I think it is both. Especially since AI continues to grow and evolve.

I find AI exceptionally helpful and useful. It has saved me time, effort, and energy and has allowed me to finish menial task faster (work and fun related) so that I have more free time to enjoy other things. and it has allowed other enjoyable things to be even more enjoyable than they were before. To me, AI has been amazing and exciting.

I laugh at the people who complain about AI’s faults and errors. It is like criticizing a toddler for making errors on the bar exam. AI is still in its infancy and will continue to grow better at everything, for good or ill. Just like a child.

Remember dial up? How is internet now? Remember Pong? How’s that compare to Balder’s Gate 3? Knock it and get your jokes in now while you can. It’s just going to get better at everything by orders of magnitude. (Meanwhile, companies are also improving quantum computing at an alarming rate. Don’t even consider if these two paths meet…)

That being said…

I also think that it will bring more harm than good the more it evolves.

I think this, not because of what AI can do or will do, but because of what people will do with it. I don’t think the problem is AI. As with most things, the problem is people.

We don’t need AI to solve world hunger. We could do that, easily, already if the right people wanted to. They just don’t. The same issues of what people will do with power will only worsen with AI, but that isn’t the fault of the technology.

People are the worst. Plain and simple.

You can argue about the legality of what AI does all day long, but the law is a joke. If anything, we’ve learned over the last decade that the law is whatever the people in power decide it is. Laundering cartel money is a crime. The punishment is paying a fine that doesn’t even scratch the surface of the profits made from it. OpenAI is being sued by god knows how many people. Even if they all win (they won’t), is the punishment fine gonna shut down OpenAI? Even if it did (it won’t), would that even put a dent in the AI community considering how many other AI companies are out there and how many continue to be formed every month/week/day?

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

If AI can solve that problem, the world will be better off.

(And yes, I know that this is not a new conclusion. This is the plot of many a sci-fi movie. And for good reason. I’m just not sure that they got the hero/villain roles correct.)

@chorus Agreed. I hadn’t considered that there might still be places without the ability to jump to a hangout spot directly. Its 2025.

@tsar said in MU Peeves Thread:

I personally am not a fan of big massive grids. I’d rather build exactly the places I think people will go and no streets and call it a day.

Fully serious question. How do you really expect staff to build a limited number of places people want to go to when you have a constantly shifting player base who all want different things?

I think the grids are there because staff wants to put all possible options out there for people and people can pick for themselves and ignore the ones that don’t. In theory it seems easy enough for a player to pick the places they like and use them, and ignore anything they don’t want to use. If there are 5 places you want to use and 1000 that you don’t, the other 1000 are irrelevant anyway. Just ignored them.

But reading the thread I see people saying that it is a negative if a game has rooms they don’t want to use. I don’t understand that, personally.

@MisterBoring Technological Darwinism.

@Wizz said in Numetal/Retromux:

a motorcycle that turns into a break-dancing robot, it was kind of amazing.

I agree. That is kind of amazing…

@Cygnus I understand. And I get it. I’ve actually been there myself, probably more times than I can remember. It just kind of sucks at the state of things.

@Pavel said in Liberation Drama!?:

@Cygnus said in Liberation Drama!?:

I still have faith that Sundance is the person to make it happen if she comes back and puts in the effort

How can this be your conclusion after all of the things you just said?

This is just a repackaged request/plea/wish that Sundance come back at her previously level of engagement, done in a way as though she might do so if only she realized the effects that her absence as had.

As if she doesn’t know.

If she wanted to come back and do her thing and was able to, she would. She either can’t or won’t. It is what it is.

@Faraday said in Star Trek Games:

The default Trek would play like a FC-driven game, with the department heads as coveted positions and everyone else feeling like second fiddle. That was also how the old-school Trek games I tried felt, and why I believe they were never as popular as some of the other genres.

I feel compelled to point out that while this is a problem in many games, I can only imagine that on a Star Trek game this would only be amplified considering the series has a very popular similarly themed meme about being a red-shirt.

So even if your character was not actually wearing a red shirt, it would feel like you were - much faster, given the setting.

@Juniper I hear you. I do. But… a game where there’s danger around every corner that’ll get you if you slip up for a moment SHOULD make characters risk avoidant. The problem is that most games don’t provide a reward that is worth characters overcoming that risk avoidance. The flip side is the player that constantly throws caution to the wind because there’s never an outcome bad enough to stop them. Solo attack 20 ninjas? Sure. Why not? Oh no, I lost. But I just got knocked out. Oh well. Wake up and try it again tomorrow!

One of the things I’ve noticed is that when the above is true on a MU*, it negates a very strong reason for people to RP with other people. If you need others to accomplish goals it fuels RP and discussions and planning and IC collaboration. But if you can get everything on your own, why bother wasting your time with people outside your play group that might not be a perfect fit for what you want when you can get it on your own anyway if you just try it enough times???

A big difficulty with theme that gets overlooked is what is the MU* even about? Is it a game? Is it collaborative storytelling? Something in between? I’ve mentioned it before, but so many people show up to a MU* with their own notions of what this hobby is or what it should be or what it is supposed to be and most of those different ideas are conflicting.

So one person shows up for a game, another person shows up for collaborative storytelling experience and the MU* hasn’t been explicit and concrete in what it is supposed to be so when these two players encounter each other, they clash and problems begin between players instead of characters because the other person is a <insert insult here>. When really they just showed up to the same space for very different experiences. And these experiences range from game mechanic die-hards to the artistic wannabe novelists.

One type of player is there to play a game and they crunched the numbers and the game mechanics to perfectly engineer their character’s sheet to their liking and the dice rolls just ARE what they ARE and if someone dies, then they just DIE, even if its in the prep to a scene, instead of the actual scene. Too bad so sad. Go chargen again.

The other type wants full autonomy of their character and their writing and is insulted if you don’t understand that their writing is works of art and their IP and you need their permission to even look at it and only they dictate if anything bad ever happens to their characters. Ultimately, they just end up using the MU* to write fanfic for their characters and conning other people into reading it by pretending to MU*.

Obviously most people are not on these extremes, but most seem to be on one side or the other. And if you have both of these types on your MU* with no direction or expectation of what that site is supposed to be, there will be continuous clashes that fracture the stability of the player base on the MU*. We’ve all seen it multiple times before, I’m sure. A lot of it just comes down to setting expectations at the start.

So when it comes to the World Tone / Feeling, it is about more than just describing what you want. You have to set the expectations for players in multiple areas (theme, plots, mechanics, descriptions, HRs, policies, etc.) in a way that guides everything back to what the tone / feeling is supposed to be so that the way the MU* actually plays out organically stops players from hijacking that tone / feeling for their own purposes to make it what they want for themselves (intentionally or unintentionally). Pretty much every WoD MU* is a perfect example of how this goes wrong consistently.

@Raistlin To be fair, I think it started with the intent to have meaningful discussion. But it just devolved into hyperbolic rhetoric with all the name calling and shaming after a while. Sometimes people who “feel passionately” about a subject justify less-than-great actions with their emotions.

Maybe that’s most threads that go on long enough. But I do think it started with good intent.

@Tapewyrm said in The 3-Month Players:

Okay, then we’re talking about BarRP, by those terms, and the question then is: can BarRP alone sustain activity? Not in my personal experience or observation.

But even using such terms, what actually sets Social RP apart from BarRP, aside from the existence of a plot?

Meaning.

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.

But you don’t always know the difference because 1) you aren’t in control of all the players so you don’t know what has meaning/value and what doesn’t and 2) you don’t always know what will come next for any of the characters. All you know (usually) is what it means to you and the enjoyment you get from it.

Just shooting the shit with someone in a bar because you’re filling time and waiting for plot or more meaningful RP can sometimes turn into something that creates meaning for your character or between the characters. This ‘nothing’ scene could actually be the very important meeting of two characters that end up saving the world! Now more often than not, this doesn’t happen, but sometimes it does turn out to be more important than it seemed at first, especially with follow up - which usually requires intent and interest on both sides to do so, which is why most times that doesn’t happen AND why BarRP doesn’t sustain a MU*. If the RP happening on a game doesn’t spur interest and/or intent, its doomed to fail.

Which, IMHO, is why Social RP can sustain a game, but BarRP can’t, even though they can seem very similar a lot.

@Faraday said in AI Megathread:

@InkGolem said in AI Megathread:

I don’t think there is any harm.

Generative AI is harmful to artists. It’s harmful to the environment. It’s harmful to students. It’s harmful to teachers. It’s harmful to critical thinking.

I understand that most people don’t realize this, so I try not to hold a grudge against the people who use it “for fun”, but it’s really hard when it’s destroying so many good things.

ETA: I’m speaking specifically about the mainstream GenAI implementations. The underlying technology itself could (theoretically) be used for good. It just currently isn’t.

I don’t necessarily disagree…

I just think the same thing can be said for so many other things that exist in the modern world and are used constantly. Cars. Planes. Pharmaceuticals. Food. The list kind of goes on and on. We all still use them (if we can afford them). It just seems very -insert appropriate word here so no one is too offended, but you get my meaning- to drill down on this one thing. (Add drilling and oil to the list if you haven’t already…)

Admittedly, I haven’t looked too far down the rabbit hole but…

I get that one of the big objections it is trained on other people’s work… but isn’t everyone? What school teaches stuff that isn’t based on other peoples’ works? Haven’t artists looked at other people’s works and been influenced? It seems like the actual problem is just that it does it better, wider, and faster than a normal person can.

I’m certainly open to changing my opinion with more info, but the issue that it is just better at learning and reproducing than people… well I’m very ‘meh’ about it. I’m not a big fan of people to begin with and that’s where the problem is. People. Hunger could be easily erased. Diseases could be far more eradicated than they are. Look at COVID and how fast that was addressed when it was deemed necessary. If we did use what we have as a planet for good, things would be so much better in the world. But we don’t. Not to go too much into politics, but people in the US voted and look what is happening and remember that people voted for that - everything happening was campaign promised.

People complain that AI “steals” jobs. But it doesn’t. People do that. They use this tech the way they want, then they keep the profits for themselves. Until AI starts doing things itself without a person directing it to do so, I’m not going to blame it for what’s happening in the world, no more than I blame a car or a plane. The epi pen didn’t jack up its own price a bajillion percent. A person did that. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop using an epi-pen (unless I just can’t afford it). Its just an example, but you get my meaning, I’m sure.

Using AI to make my funtimes more fun, I don’t have a problem with that. I also know its just my opinion and I respect everyone else’s for what they want and believe.

@Pavel Sorry, I didn’t mean that part about you, specifically, though I should have been more clear about that cause I can see how it came off that way. You have your preferences, that’s fine. But I’ve definitely seen people on games be very shame-y towards OTHER people about it saying things like “people that use AI are…” “if you’re using AI, then you are…” and those kinds of phrases and phrasings.

Just saying, “I don’t want AI anywhere near me.” is, to me perfectly acceptable, because everyone is entitled to their opinion about what they want in their own RP, even if it is kinda harsh because that affects your fun, but it doesn’t make judgements on anyone else.

There definitely should be a section in the +finger categories about whether people want to RP with others who use it so no one gets triggered.

I’ve actually had a great time with AI and I’ve never been able to run so many PRPs and plots for so many people in such quick succession at such a high level thanks to AI and in an age of plot runners becoming an endangered species, I think this is a pretty useful lifeline - if used well.

Prompt engineering is a very necessary thing with LLMs if you are going to try to use them with RP to get ideas, develop dynamic NPCs, or branch out story or even character ideas. If you don’t know what prompt engineering is or how to do it well, your results may not be well received. If you just hop on a free LLM and tell it to write you a pose or write a background, it will scream “written by AI” and people may look at you sideways - which would be understandable.

@InkGolem I agree with that in principle. The problem, as Pavel illustrated, is that some people dislike AI on principle so they’re violently opposed to better writing because it was created with technology, so you can’t always tell if it will enhance it for your scene partner without asking. And with the way some people react to it, there’s this elitist/shaming quality people are espousing about using it that makes it risky to even ask.

Personally, I prefer better writing over shittier writing, but when it comes to RP, the writing isn’t nearly as important to me as the story. If the AI can help create better, more interesting story, bring it on. If its going off on weird tangents that aren’t in the flow of the story, which inexperienced AI users often do, then its horrid. I could care less if the AI is writing the poses or playing the whole damn character, I have 0 problem with fun, interesting character interactions regardless of the source. Its one of the reasons I don’t mind play -insert any fun video game here-.

But that’s just me. I show up to RP for the fun of playing my character without may restrictions on that. Other people show up for different reasons and everyone has fun in their own way. Some people want a connection to another person. Some people just want to know their effort and creativity are being respected, if not matched, by the person on the other end of the character bit. I get that. Everyone has their own thing.

Overall, though, I don’t view it much differently than I view most artificial things. I see it like plastic surgery. It can enhance things naturally and beautifully, but it can also be grotesque and wildly unnatural, depending on the artistry with which people use it. For me, I don’t mind it at all, but I proportionally dislike it the more I can tell it is artificial. If you are using AI, but I don’t know (or even if I’m just not sure), then you’re probably doing it right and we’re having a blast. But being able to use it that way is a skill, like anything else. Some people do it well and its awesome. Others do not and its awkward and uncomfortable.

@SqeakyClean said in MU Peeves Thread:

Internet friends are fake. Don’t ever trust them. (A lesson I keep having to learn.)

As it turns out, MOST internet friends are people. And people are the worst…