Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer Creatures
Frozen Sick
D&D Beyond Basic Rules
Basic Rules (2014)
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Monstrous Compendium Vol. 1: Spelljammer CreaturesFrozen SickD&D Beyond Basic RulesBasic Rules (2014)Sign in to view your library & saved favorites.
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If you're running an rpg... on a computer... without a DM... it's a cRPG. There is literally nothing new here. Improvements in AI will just (potentially) result in better cRPGs.
It's not a direction I'd particularly recommend Wizards head into, they'd be competing in a field they don't have a lot of experience in, I'd leave it to the video game companies and licensing deals, but there's nothing inherently heinous about it.
Hasbro just does not have the free expendable cash to create their very own AI using D&D copy writes. But they could wait for a good one to come out and partner with them to make something they want and need.
First I would like to see a digital system for each official module or world. Something the DM can use to keep track of all of his notes. Maybe even a verbal input for those who do not want to type. Maybe a way for it to cross check and find any conflicts then remind the DM.
No disagreement here. Sounds like a good idea.
Most companies don't; that is why they have to look at outsourcing the production and what services are available. Overall, I think there is a market for tools to help both D/GMs and players. I can rattle off about a half dozen ideas that make sense now, but I don't know if the service can provide a worth product at this time. It would more be a wish list or good objective.
First of all, for every new technology that's an actual paradigm-shift, there are dozens that are sold as being paradigm shifts but don't actually ever amount to anything. Hyperloop, anyone? Second of all, one of the main reasons companies are trying to jump on the AI bandwagon is so that they can fire their human employees and shift to a purely automated workforce. That's not something to be celebrated. Unless you're really excited about big businesses delivering you an inferior product for less cost to themselves (but not to you).
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
Or Segway, or Theranos, or bitcoin...
Active characters:
Edoumiaond Willegume "Eddie" Podslee, Vegetanian scholar (College of Spirits bard)
Lan Kidogo, mapach archaeologist and treasure hunter (Knowledge cleric)
Peter "the Pied Piper" Hausler, human con artist/remover of vermin (Circle of the Shepherd druid)
PIPA - Planar Interception/Protection Aeormaton, warforged bodyguard and ex-wizard hunter (Warrior of the Elements monk/Cartographer artificer)
Xhekhetiel, halfling survivor of a Betrayer Gods cult (Runechild sorcerer/fighter)
Nah, "this is stupid/looks like a scam" is different from "this is scary".
The hype cycle is very reminiscent of the ones that surrounded cryptocurrency/NFTs/metaverse, with many of the exact same people and companies hopping off that train and onto this one. It's bigger because there's something there, but the people who are massively invested in making this the next big thing are not to be trusted on its potential.
Does our long history of science fiction prime us to believe that a computer that can talk like a human can think like a human? Very much so.
Is machine learning a fascinating technology that could improve a lot of things? Yes.
Is generative 'AI' the next big thing that will create shedloads of value and revolutionize creative work? It remains to be seen.
Is it going to lead to true human-like AI? No.
Is its primary use case so far putting creative workers out of a job in order to make inferior material, along with 'search' that makes things up and even more SEO junk sites clogging up the real search? Yes.
There's only one suitable TTRPG for AI tools. Paranoia.
Jander Sunstar is the thinking person's Drizzt, fight me.
He specifically mentions using only the books WOTC owns the copyright to in the AI database.
I'm not sure how that's relevant? I'm sure the core AI code would be licensed from someone else, but it's the training data that determines what it produces.
Would that even work? How many books does WOTC own the copyright to? I was under the impression you would need something on the scale of thousands of books to train a generative AI that's even a little bit competent.
It sounds pretty questionable. WotC doesn't have any AI-building ability in the first place, they'd need to buy it from someone else and then dump their own content into it.
Find your own truth, choose your enemies carefully, and never deal with a dragon.
"Canon" is what's factual to D&D lore. "Cannon" is what you're going to be shot with if you keep getting the word wrong.
They've got fifty years of D&D artwork, although the early stuff was obviously not as detailed. They also have thirty years of Magic the Gathering card artwork. Then there will also be the thousands of pieces that were submitted by the artists they hired but was rejected for publication.
And, of course, they also have access to anything in the Public Domain.
If I steal a bunch of other people's paintings and put them in my woodchipper, do I own the confetti?
No, the code is much less important than the data. The core of large language models is a database of words, correlated along vast numbers of different axes. While there's code around it, the model's behavior isn't programmed like we're used to.
I'm pretty sure that every single word written about and for D&D throughout the last 50 years would not be enough to train a modern LLM. A customized model is (I believe) invariably done by taking one of the generic models like GPT 4, trained on whatever they grabbed off the internet, and putting it through a second round of training with the domain-specific data set. Everything in the original model is likely still there, just deemphasized.
Even if WotC did own enough material to fully train an LLM from scratch, doing so is extremely expensive.
That's a fascinating and evocative metaphor that is entirely unrelated to what's happening with an AI. A better one would be: "If I go to an art museum and look at the pieces they have on display for inspiration, am I plagiarizing if I borrow from one person's use of colors, and another's use of perspective and so on?"
For that they have fifty years of published adventures as well as podcasts. Dragon magazine was owned by TSR, then there are the licensed games such as the SSI gold box series. They've even got DM questions and answers on D&D Beyond to pull from.
But yeah, I too totally believe him when he says they're not going to use public domain items.
No, it's kind of apt.
Despite it being called "training" or "learning", what the generative models do is vastly different from what people do. (As best we understand the latter.)
Because they're probabilistic, when specific sets of words or pixels are strongly correlated and well-represented in the training data, they're very likely to show up in the output. If you give an image generator the phrase "Italian plumber", we all know the way the output's going to trend. If you ask a person to draw you an Italian plumber, you will only get Mario if they choose to draw you Mario.
That said, the legal issues around whether LLMs are infringing the copyright of their training data are complex and deeply unresolved. Transformative use is a significant fair-use principle in the US, and there's a solid argument to be made that this stuff is transformative. The fact that it's pretty easy to poke them into just spitting out training data nearly verbatim is also rather persuasive.
I think there's a real chance that we're going to see some kind of split, where they're legally legit in principle, but the massive copyright infringement committed in assembling the training data for the current models is not. But that's many years and millions of dollars in legal expenses away. (And will only apply to the US. The EU, China, etc. will have their own rulings. So much fun.)
The ethical and artistic issues are each their own cans of worms as well.
A LLM doesn't function without both data and code, but the relationship between a LLM and data is similar to the relation between a search engine and data.
The main problem with using only licensed sources is that it's probably not enough data. There's likely on the order of ten million words across all 5e official publications, I suspect most LLMs are trained on many billions.