AI in RPG creation.

I chose this as my trend of 2022 for the indie RPG seminar at Dragonmeet 2022.

This whole area is surrounded by moral, ethical and financial issues and it is definitely the case that a lot has been released to the general public without a lot of thought about whether this is a good idea or has been done fairly.

However there’s no putting the genie back in the bottle so it’s important to engage with what is good or bad about these technologies. Artists and writers were already not being compensated appropriately for their work. We discussed this at the last seminar in 2021 and I suspect we’ll be discussing it again next year.

Data mining is just one dimension of exploitation and compensation. However there is genuinely a rich corpus of public domain material that can be legitimately used and if you want an NPC portrait in the style of Albrecht Dürer you can now create one in seconds.

Some of this technology is transformative; the average GM wouldn’t commission an artist for their one-shot scenario but they will use generative art and it will genuinely add something to the experience for the players.

The popularity of solo and journaling games in the Lockdowns also indicates that there is probably a market for the first chatbot that can generate a meaningful game narrative on demand or even provide a GM-style interaction that creates exciting and unexpected feedback to the player.

There are also interesting implications for DIY creators where they can create far more complex material through AI assistance than they were able to before. This is exciting and legitimate concerns should not blind people to the fact that some of this technology will be liberating for solo creators in the same way that the photocopier allowed bricolage as a creative form for zinesters.

I don’t believe that this generation of technology is going to put writers and artists out of work but it is going to bring the discussion about fair and sustainable compensation into sharper focus as well as control over what gets put into the learning corpus.

Flaws in AI creation

One of the reasons I think that some of the threat to real creators is overblown is that the flaws in these models are transparent, this isn’t genuinely intelligence. That’s why the models have found getting the right number of fingers on the human hand difficult. They don’t have a concept of hands, fingers or what humans truly are.

In text generation I’ve heard people describe the flaws in generation called “hallucination”, the current text models will generate whatever they are asked to and where there are gaps in their model they just start generating nonsense that seems plausible. This is dangerous if you trust the blend of true and false material and the user currently needs to be an expert themselves to understand whether the generated text is correct.

However in fantastical gaming all the flaws are material, we don’t care too much about fingers and we’re making stuff up anyway. This means that flawed models don’t matter to us as much.

I think the first really pressure of AI-assisted writing will be on the books that are written for “canon” fans. The attractive coffee table books that have a hundred settlements described but none of which stick in the mind. This kind of by the word rote writing really can be devolved to AI models in the same way that standard advertising copy can be. People are being paid to do it now but there isn’t any strong creativity required.