AI

[OzzyKP]

Has anyone started using AI (either for text or images) in their games?  How have your experiences been so far?  Any recommendations?

[Vladim]

I've considered it as they are cool, from a technological point of view at least. But I haven't. Writing is part of the fun aspects of the hobby; if I start outsourcing it to chatGPT doesn't that mean that I am treating the whole thing more as a chore than a fun thing to do? I don't know 🙂

As for art... I don't know. I like to add art to some posts, but sometimes I have to wonder: does it really add anything significant? If I start doing it more (powered by AI), does it add more, or detract focus from the actual game?

Others will probably have different, perhaps more positive, views.

[Malkavian Grin]

I've tried to use ChatGPT to roleplay with me but I just can't get it to work right. There's no danger or pizzazz. It's always "You did the thing!" with no consequences. A GM it is not (yet).

But I've used DALLe to create scenes of art for things that legitimately don't/can't exist. It worked out pretty well, despite not being true-to-the-lore.

For instance, I created a scene of what a village might look like on the Star Wars planet Felucia (made of giant mushrooms and strange rock formations).

What A.I. thinks a Felucian village looks like

I don't think this program is quite ready to make characters for you yet. Other A.I. can do better, like Midjourney, but that one doesn't offer a free account version (that I'm aware of).

[DarkisNotEvil]

Solo games with an AI is like having a twelve-year-old DM: It follows the basic concepts but executes really poorly and likes to change the rules on a whim.

Personally do not recommend, though it might be useful for things you really can't get elsewhere or when you want to filter through gallons of sand for the chance at a diamond.

Edited May 9, 2023 by DarkisNotEvil (see edit history)

[cailano]

I use it for proofreading. You can ask ChatGPT to do things like finding all the instances of passive voice in a big block of text, or to find opportunities for stronger word choice. It's not really an editor per se, but it is a powerful tool.

I also used AI to generate the dragonship image on the header for my Sailors on the Starless Sea game.

[Rune Knight]

I'm with Vladim on the text generation front: I'd consider it if I really needed to catch up on posts, or maybe if I ran a game where frequent posting was a requirement, but I'd rather not put myself in those kinds of situations in the first place, generally.

As for art, that's where AI really helps me: I can't afford to commission art from a true artist, so I've been messing around with AI to see the characters and environments I really like from my games.

I always tell my players up front that I don't use images for my GM posts, whether I find them or make them. It's an interesting idea to try generating quick environment shots with AI, but AI has a tendency to make me want to keep rerolling for the best result.

Personally, I'd say there's a time and a place for it. If you're really struggling with a post, or if you're trying to visualize something you can't quite get a grasp on, then AI can really help with regular posts. The key is to remember that AI is an assistant, not a replacement.

It does make me imagine, though, a GM using AI to really pump out content and manage a game with a high post frequency, or one of those games where lots of players are moving around the world and going on adventures at the same time. 🤔 On the flip side, I'd imagine a player could keep up with such games using AI when they normally couldn't.

[BBK]

14 minutes ago, Rune Knight said:

I'm with Vladim on the text generation front: I'd consider it if I really needed to catch up on posts, or maybe if I ran a game where frequent posting was a requirement, but I'd rather not put myself in those kinds of situations in the first place, generally.

As for art, that's where AI really helps me: I can't afford to commission art from a true artist, so I've been messing around with AI to see the characters and environments I really like from my games.

I always tell my players up front that I don't use images for my GM posts, whether I find them or make them. It's an interesting idea to try generating quick environment shots with AI, but AI has a tendency to make me want to keep rerolling for the best result.

Personally, I'd say there's a time and a place for it. If you're really struggling with a post, or if you're trying to visualize something you can't quite get a grasp on, then AI can really help with regular posts. The key is to remember that AI is an assistant, not a replacement.

It does make me imagine, though, a GM using AI to really pump out content and manage a game with a high post frequency, or one of those games where lots of players are moving around the world and going on adventures at the same time. 🤔 On the flip side, I'd imagine a player could keep up with such games using AI when they normally couldn't.

I actually use an AI app on my phone called Dream to generate random NPC portraits, generic fantasy settings, etc. I churn out and save a few when I'm bored and so I can whip one out at a moment's notice. Here, have some portraits I generated in about 2 minutes while brainstorming ideas for a character for an application to an 'all-gunslinger' game:

Are they amazing? No, not really - look close enough and you'll find a hundred tiny flaws. But the details don't mean much when you shrink it down on a character sheet anyway. Yes, you can 'reroll' endlessly to get something closer to perfect...but AI isn't about perfection. It's about convenience and expediency. It works great for NPCs, generic backgrounds, and even some objects.

[OzzyKP]

For my part, I'm rather excited about the possibilities of image generation.  I've played around with https://www.artbreeder.com for NPC and character portraits.  You can feed it some images you find, and then blend different elements of pictures or adjust however you like. And, of course, if I ever get into a serious campaign where I need a lot of images I'll probably pay for Midjourney.  I am continually blown away by the capabilities of it. Personally I love adding art and images to my posts, and maps.  Even if it is just a portrait of who is speaking, I can't just leave a post with just text. 

As for text, I just dipped my toe into that the other day, and was similarly impressed.  I'm running the Reign of Winter AP and there is a bard that happened upon the players.  The AP says she entertains the camp.  I wanted to flesh it out more than just say "she plays a lively song and tells several tales of yore" or something.  So I had ChatGPT spit out a poem.  I could feed it a style, a moral, various elements, and even have it switch to rhymed verse.  It started out very simple, but then I asked for more flowery language and it delivered.  It was just right for providing some extra color for the players without requiring much investment from me. 

I don't think I'd ever just let AI run a scene or advance the plot or anything, but I'm considerably more open to exploring what it can do after this good experience.

Edited May 10, 2023 by OzzyKP (see edit history)

[TheFred]

There was a thread on this back on OGMW.

Generative AI is at the point where it's pretty good if you don't really care about the quality. That sounds kind of silly but there are lots of things where you actually don't (for example, you're getting it to generate some marketing spiel, clickbait, or a speech for a politician), or you don't care about perfection, at least. Or, you do a lot of work yourself to filter, select, and tweak. Nevertheless, AI-assisted generation is looking pretty impressive now.

An AI DM actually sounds eminently possible, but I wonder if you'd need something slightly specialised which probably doesn't exist currently (even though I reckon the technology is there).

I guess I'm interested to see what people could come up with using it as part of procedural game generation - something which I think hasn't really been explored as fully as it could be. I remember messing around with such a concept myself and using a Markov model to generate random names, which is really the baby version of the same idea, and that's something that's been around for ages. Whether a general-purpose "AI" model is actually better than a more specialised generation algorithm, though, it's hard to say.

[Suzuki Stumpy]

53 minutes ago, TheFred said:

... you're getting it to generate some marketing spiel, clickbait, or a speech for a politician.

Aren't they all one and the same thing though? 😜

[Antares90]

I've been using AI images with Midjourney and so far it's hit and miss. 60:40 ratio, I'd say. I definitely like it but not everyone shares my enthusiasm so I had to make my own Discord server for my campaign setting. Worth it.

Personally, I use it for character portraits. You'll find a bunch of tiny flaws if you take the time to look at them, but I end up turning them into tokens for Roll20, anyway which brings those portraits close to perfection when you're only focused on the face. It has given my campaign some semblance of life and I'm more open to exploring what else it can do.

Link to example image: https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1071544773724352554/1092940963028152411/Lator_Gator_90s_anime_still_halfling_scholar_64bd05fb-e682-4546-9349-59eb56fd3947.png

I personally enjoy the anime bot for Midjourney, but even that is flawed. There comes a point where it'll regurgitate the same images no matter how many different rerolls and prompts you use. I'm a bit of a perfectionist, and plan to commission one of my players for actual portraits once I have enough references and money. But if you want something decent for the price given, I'd recommend Midjourney for sure.

Edited May 24, 2023 by Antares90
Inserting image. Image too large; modified. (see edit history)

[shawnhcorey]

Despite the hype, there is no intelligence in AI. What it is is machine learning. It is given a lot of data and it finds patterns in them. After training when you give it a prompt, it will respond with a pattern it found. For example, if you ask for an image of a face, it will give you a white, male face because that's the type of face it has seen the most often. This despite the fact that more than half the world's population is female.

The biggest limitation of this so-called AI is it cannot respond with to a prompt for which it has no pattern. Try asking it to show some hands for you. WARNING: images may be disfigured; viewer discretion is advised.

Edited May 24, 2023 by shawnhcorey (see edit history)

[Neopopulas]

Actually, its getting really, really good at hands, another one you can look for is teeth.

[TheFred]

To be fair, most human artists struggle with hands.

I’ve been running Stable Diffusion locally on my own PC. You need an OK GPU to do this, but nothing unusually amazing; mine is barely good enough (4Gb), but it is. This also gives a lot of options and flexibility in terms of things like fiddling with the prompt strength, img2img, inpainting, and so on.

[Malkavian Grin]

You think hands are bad, try getting a figure that's actually holding something. A.I. cannot figure out held items like a sword, staff, lantern, etc.

@shawnhcorey True, what we currently have isn't yet intelligent. However, we ourselves are organic machines by definition who learn "proper" patterns. I'd say the only difference is using what we as Humans consider "proper interpretation" of things such as how physics will interact with objects and the like. There are subsystems involved that create a true interpretation of a scene (unless you're going full blast abstract). These things A.I. still doesn't understand (but things like chatGPT4 is starting to, rudimentarily).