this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2023
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Dear sweet Oghma. We can't even get rid of it on TTRPGs.

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[–] gosling 41 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Living in the golden age of AI kinda sucks. At first it was interesting to have these new tools to play around with, but then people start using it on things that definitely shouldn't use AI

[–] spittingimage -3 points 1 year ago

Less of a golden age, more of a golden shower age.

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 year ago (1 children)

We can’t even get rid of it on TTRPGs.

It's really really easy to do so. Just... don't use it. It's not like Hasbro can force you to play with their AI. Just get together with your friends and play D&D the old fashioned way if you prefer.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Well for what it's worth they're likely changing the license of D&D in the upcoming edition which will be more restrictive. There are also leaks from inside the company that they are basically considering the pen & paper market dead and are going to move to focusing on the online game in their proprietary VTT app in that edition.

So existing editions under the OGL or CC are safe, but the future edition is going to be much more of a walled garden.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The proposed change to the OGL caused such an inferno of negative reactions that Wizards of the Coast backed off of the license change. If they go through with it in the future anyway, though, then it's still really easy to avoid. Just don't play that version of D&D, use one of the existing ones. Or one of the innumerable other systems for TTRPGs.

Really, it's not hard to not use a particular tool for this stuff. Dig out the old paper books if you want to go really old school.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

They backed off of making any retroactive changes to existing editions. Given the information that was leaked in January, I highly doubt they will release the new edition under any open license. They've made it clear that they are investing hard in a proprietary VTT experience and their goal is to monetize that VTT heavily.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Then go with the second half of what I recommended above and continue using one of the older editions.

You don't have to use the most recent version of D&D. You don't have to use D&D at all.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I wholeheartedly agree. In fact I'm about to start running a PF2e session in about 10 minutes lol.

[–] Zeron 5 points 1 year ago

Yep, they backed off because people are starting to realize WOTC needs the players more than the players need WOTC. It's a very odd reversal compared to most industries. WOTC could explode tomorrow and people could keep happily playing D&D for years to come without any issues.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Well Pathfinder was created for this reason, time to move on.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

That remains to be seen since one dnd isn't licensed at all yet. The possibility is there for them to use a different license for the next SRD, but it given the backlash they got at the beginning of the year, I think it's as likely they continue with Creative Commons on mechanics (which debatably aren't copyrightable in the first place).

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 year ago

WotC have been kind of dicks so they can do what they want, I won't be buying anything

[–] CharlestonChewbacca 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Ever since I started studying AI back in 2015, this has been my #1 interest and end goal for AI.

I don't think LLMs are quite good enough for what I want yet, but in a few years I think we may be there.

I really don't understand why anyone would be complaining about this. No one is going to force you to use it. You can still run your own campaigns, this will just be an amazing tool to make it more accessible to new players, and take a lot of the work off of a DM that doesn't have the time or want to put in the effort.

Imagine being able to select a setting and a ruleset, and having an AI generate an entire campaign for you along with music, location art, character art, etc, then be able to handle the rules for you, track your stats and equipment, etc and maybe even generate art for cool moments when you roll a crit.

It's currently a great tool for a DM. I always end up being the DM for my groups and I've really enjoyed using LLMs and Art generators as tools, but if I could have a competent AI DM run the game for us so I could play, I would be SO happy.

This is amazing, and the negative response just seems like elitist, gatekeepy, crotchety bitter old man syndrome.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Eh, there's a lot of valid things to be skeptical about. Using these tools as a DM is fundamentally different from using them as a massive corporation, as you're not considering replacing your team of talented artists and writers to cut costs.

That said, done right, I also think this could be amazing. Legally train these models on the wealth of historical D&D art, and provide it to DMs to use during their campaigns to make maps, art for places the DM is describing on the fly, all of these things that no artist could possibly make because these locations are being invented on the fly as the players throw a skilled DM curveballs. D&D feels like an ideal "problem" for a lot of the "solutions" AI has to offer.

[–] CharlestonChewbacca 3 points 1 year ago

The article specifically addresses limiting the publishing of AI generated content.

But yeah, I agree that's absolutely not something I'm interested in. I'm more interested in using generative AI to make custom, context dependent content on the fly.

[–] DM_ME_SQUIRRELS 3 points 1 year ago

Exactly. I've been using AI (mainly ChatGPT and Midjourney) for my current campaign and it's great. While I make up most of the campaign myself, ChatGPT is like a supercharged contextually aware DM app. "Come up with a monster that would fit x situation", "make up a riddle for the players", "what do the rules say about x?" and so on. It's like having another person to discuss the creative choices with, but that person is an expert that knows every rule, monster, place and so on.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (2 children)

My group doesn't strictly follow the rules anyway, but this is still dumb. To me the whole point of playing DnD is to have real human interaction!

[–] jesterraiin 13 points 1 year ago (2 children)

The inclusion of AI doesn't lead to the lack of human interaction.

We're using plenty of random generators and software to provide content since years...

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Sure, I'll still be sitting with my friends and we can ignore the ML crap.

I could be wrong, but this just reeks of Hasbro trying to cash in on the "AI" hype. With this and the recent licensing thing I'm hoping to switch to a different system anyway.

The nice thing with DnD though is you can play in your own way. If you like all the ML stuff, go for it and enjoy it! :)

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Indeed. There are plenty of groups of people who would love to play together but who just don't have anyone who's willing or able to act as the dungeon master. If AI gets good enough then this could lead to a great expansion of social interaction over a D&D table.

And if someone wants to play solo, why not support that too?

The key to it all is the if AI gets good enough part. If it doesn't then all this is moot.

[–] jesterraiin 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

As of now, plenty of people use "solo" games (not DM + a single player, but pure solo), or Mythic GM Emulator/Oracle.

If they are ok with such a crude solution, then I guess they will perceive ChatGPT DM as way superior engine.

[–] CharlestonChewbacca 3 points 1 year ago

Nothing about this will limit your human interaction.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

&

HTML escape sequence for &. Does this always happen when embedding articles on Lemmy?

Edit: I wanted to write a single ampersand of course, so it’s definitely Lemmy’s fault. Testing some other characters in in-line code: &lt; > [ ] { } | ~ ^ # outside: < > [ ] { } | ~ ^ # &

Edit: so "<" and "&" in code are affected; also I see the comment like this when editing:

Testing some other characters in in-line code: `&lt;` `>` `[` `]` `{` `}` `|` `~` `^` `#` outside: &lt; > [ ] { } | ~ ^ # &amp;

Someone likely implemented crude input sanitation and did not account for everything. I would prefer a closer-to-WYSIWYG editor where the user never sees escape sequences.

[–] FlyingSquid 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't know. I tried to edit it but it wouldn't let me.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

As things stand now, it would likely not help until the issue is addressed.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's a github issue about this if you want to add anything to it, this separate issue also has some details about the sanitation. The issue seems to have been introduced in v0.18.3.

[–] FangedWyvern42 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Oh for God’s sake.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If I can have ai generate npcs and monsters that would be awesome

[–] FlyingSquid 9 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Dice tables. They've existed forever and they work just fine without an internet connection.

[–] DM_ME_SQUIRRELS 2 points 1 year ago

Yes, but what's nice about using AI for it is that it's contextually aware. If my players are in a major city I want a dice table that fits that context, if they're in a small seaside village I want one for that context. I may also want to customize it with very easy or very hard monsters, NPC's with certain backgrounds or traits and so on. I've been using ChatGPT for exactly that and it really helps make the campaigns less repetitive.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

sure but If I need something fast and don’t want to roll dice and raise suspicions

[–] candyman337 8 points 1 year ago

Fuck hasbro for what they've done to WOTC

[–] TheOneWithTheHair 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

In the 1980's DC's Legion of Superheroes (set in the future) basically played D&D around a computer and presumably with AI. So this time, the Simpsons didn't predict it first.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Why do posters keep writing &Amp instead of just &?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

EDIT: seems it wont render ampersand correctly at all.. so the below is just has everything escaped when I didn't mean it to be and more confusing than it should be because of this... not sure how to get ampersand to display correctly in a code block, seems to be bugged.

&amp; is the HTML escape code for ~~&amp;~~ ampersand. As ~~&amp;~~ ampersand is a special character in HTML which means entity reference and should you can use the escaped form to get the browser to render just &amp; rather than treating it as a reference. The same goes for other characters like ~~&lt;~~ less than or > etc. However a lot of browsers still treat ~~&amp;~~ ampersand as a literal in places where it does not look like a reference so the literal still works in a lot of places. But the escaped form always works.

But when you copy html from a page your browser is probably copying the escaped form the page used in its source rather then the rendered form. It does this to let you get rich markup when pasting into documents - the app you paste into understands the html and knows when you are using heading or bolding text etc.

But in this case the app just pasted in the escaped form with no conversation. And for security reasons likely escaped it again as you don't want users to be able to post any old html formatting in a comment, so any html special characters in the input get escaped leaving you with a double escaped char, which the browser only unescapes one layer of when rendering.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Heh, well, look at that... seems it is also escaping chars inside backticks, but then not undoing that on the render when it conveys them to a pre tag... Which IMO seems like a bug in lemmy.

Let's test some things: &amp; \&amp; &amp;

I typed: It previous as I would expect:

But renders it escaped on the mobile app at least, disappointing...

[–] FlyingSquid 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

It did it without my wanting it to. It won't let me edit it either.

[–] ProfessorZhu 4 points 1 year ago

Next up, people flip out because their baulder gate enemies make actions without another person's input!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not only am I ok with it, I loon forward to it. I've only had the chance to play the starter box and a bit of curse of strahd. Both games I was the DM, and the group was my wife, step kid(teenager) and my sister in law.

I don't have the time to get with a normal group of non-existent friends. I've tried and tried to use most of the llms to DM even short adventures for just my self, and it quickly falls apart.

So if they can find tune one for ttrpgs it would be a divine intervention XD