Do you use AI to (help) build your Character and/or Campaign?

You know what else can produce story ideas, taverns, and NPCs with just a little training?

Your imagination! 

And your imagination doesn't require data centers that poison groundwater and jack up the price of electricity 1000%.

Quote from Perringaiden >>

AI can work well as a prompt for story ideas.  It's not that great on making them good for a campaign, and seems to want to write stories not situations, but it can be useful to ask it to throw out 50 random taverns with some flavour, or a bunch of simple NPCs that you can flesh out when they're used.

Even if that's the case, and even setting aside all the many other issues with the technology in general, I will never understand why anyone would want to ask a machine to do the interesting parts.

No, it cheats on the party’s favor. Also, who gave the first answer the extra 2.8%?

I haven't voted myself as neither option really suits my answer. But before I actually explain my viewpoint, trust me that I do know the issues of AI in terms of ethics, creativity, and resource consumption. I agree with pretty much everyone on this thread on how AI kills creativity, wastes resources, and is largely trained by illegitimate data.

Yes, I've used AI to some extent, but I try to avoid using it as much as possible. No, I haven't created it to create the story for my campaign or my characters. That's the fun part and that's the thing I want to do myself. But what I can't do (that well) is proper phrasing (especially in English, which isn't my native language). I've created a bunch of homebrew items, monsters, feats, spells, and other content. Once I've got the idea ready, I've used AI to help me phrase that idea into an actual item/spell/monster/feat. Yes, it gets the rules wrong and tries to explain the things super verbosely and it takes some skimming to get the relevant information.

A few times I've tried to use AI help me bridge a gap between two encounters/events, but it doesn't really provide proper valuable answers. It mixes contexts, occasionally ignores clear instructions, and makes bold assumptions. It has given me a spark of an idea from yet-another-not-great-response that helped me create an encounter for my party. So, even if what AI gave me as a suggestion wasn't usable in itself, it still helped me build my campaign. I've much rather asked my friends or this forum if I've required creative help.

So my answer isn't "Yes, it's great!" because... it's not great. And it's not "No, it doesn't understand the rules properly", because even though I agree with the latter part, my first part would have to be "yes". Have I used AI? Yes. Do I hate using AI? Yes. Will I continue using AI? I'd love to say no, but unfortunately I think the answer to this is also yes, but not for the creative parts.

Quote from Scruvy >>

I haven't voted myself as neither option really suits my answer. But before I actually explain my viewpoint, trust me that I do know the issues of AI in terms of ethics, creativity, and resource consumption. I agree with pretty much everyone on this thread on how AI kills creativity, wastes resources, and is largely trained by illegitimate data.

Yes, I've used AI to some extent, but I try to avoid using it as much as possible. No, I haven't created it to create the story for my campaign or my characters. That's the fun part and that's the thing I want to do myself. But what I can't do (that well) is proper phrasing (especially in English, which isn't my native language). I've created a bunch of homebrew items, monsters, feats, spells, and other content. Once I've got the idea ready, I've used AI to help me phrase that idea into an actual item/spell/monster/feat. Yes, it gets the rules wrong and tries to explain the things super verbosely and it takes some skimming to get the relevant information.

A few times I've tried to use AI help me bridge a gap between two encounters/events, but it doesn't really provide proper valuable answers. It mixes contexts, occasionally ignores clear instructions, and makes bold assumptions. It has given me a spark of an idea from yet-another-not-great-response that helped me create an encounter for my party. So, even if what AI gave me as a suggestion wasn't usable in itself, it still helped me build my campaign. I've much rather asked my friends or this forum if I've required creative help.

So my answer isn't "Yes, it's great!" because... it's not great. And it's not "No, it doesn't understand the rules properly", because even though I agree with the latter part, my first part would have to be "yes". Have I used AI? Yes. Do I hate using AI? Yes. Will I continue using AI? I'd love to say no, but unfortunately I think the answer to this is also yes, but not for the creative parts.

 I feel like I’ve done something similar.

The point of creation isn't the end product, but the process. I would rather not have something do all the thinking for me.

Tools can be great, the GPS has helped many people who struggle to read maps or memorize roads. But what people haven't noticed is because we off load so much of our thinking to the GPS, most of us are completely ****ed without one.

GPS is fine because it ends there. I'm not losing part of myself because I can't remember where Washington St. is. Being able to navigate without a GPS is a useful skill, but I have zero attachment to losing that skill.

If I offloaded my thinking to Gen AI and LMMs I would be losing part of myself and also making myself completely inept at something I love and adore: Creating.

Brains are like muscles in this way, if you don't use it, you'll lose it. Artis gratia artis.

And then there's also all the moral reasons too which also make it easy to say no. It's a product born of stealing other's work. LMMs don't "think" they only guess based on things that have been stolen and put into it. If I went to an LMM and asked it for DM help and got an answer I liked, that wasn't it thinking, that was it regurgitating something it scraped and was fed into it off the internet. And 99.99% of it's content churning has been taken without permission.

Anyone giving excuses for this tech is a useful moron

Nope. AI=Altered Intelligence LLM=Looks Like Morons

I actually did try using one to generate ideas for a swathe of the world which I was feeling uninspired by, back before I understood how it worked and how much energy/water/IQ it used to run. The short story is that I ended up not using anything it created. 90% of what I did went along the lines of:

"I need something for the desert"

"why not >AI SLOP<?"

"No, I need a route through the desert."

"Ok, how about >MORE AI SLOP<?"

"No, I need somewhere for the merchants to have safe rest en-route through the desert..."

And after a short while of that I realised I was basically recreating the scene from Zootopia where the Yak is asking the Elephant for all the information he already knows, then wishing he was like her, despite her offering no help.

The sections it spat out for the 10%, which I vaguely remember thinking "Ok, that's quite cool", I put in a document ,which I subsequently never went back to because of being completely detached from the ideas, and then later deleted.

My recommendation: Give yourself more time, and use the forums to ask for help. There's hundreds of people who can and will help fill in the gaps in your ideas, when things just don't flow right, and those ideas are real, unique, and offered freely instead of plagiarised.

The forums used to be full of such questions. It piqued my interest, fuelled my creative juices, and let me think about new ideas without starting new projects. They're a lot less busy these days, and I bet the quality of things people are making has, on average, plummeted.

To learn a system and how it works, it is best to do it yourself, that is how you learn.  You can even do it the easy way. Take a Pre-gen character, then start tweaking and see how it effects the build. 

Building characters is tiring, i have been doing it for 30+ years and it is still tiring, but that doesn't mean i should give up and let the Algorithmic liar box do it for me. AI is not useful for this, even though it has been marketed to me constantly. I have a dyscalculia ( Think dyslexia with numbers ) and numbers have always been a problem, but D&D and understanding its systems helped me get better if not great with math.  Offloading that process would not have helped me learn. 

So... you know it doesn't work... you know how much damage it causes, both to the environment and the economy... but you're going to keep using it anyhow?

What am I missing?

It is right to give suggestions in the brainstorm phase but it shouldn't do all the work, among other reasons because you could have new ideas later, for example to add a new character in the plot.

Some times it gives relatively original but inintetionally weird ideas. 

Quote from LuisCarlos17f >>

Some times it gives relatively original but inintetionally weird ideas. 

It cannot create original ideas.

"Some times it gives relatively original but inintetionally weird ideas."

Except that it literally does not give ANY original ideas! Literally every single word, image, or idea that has ever been presented to anyone by any AI program has been either "borrowed" or just flat out stolen from an actual human being out there somewhere who used their imagination to create that idea. AI cannot produce anything original. All it can do is show you an amalgamation of stolen ideas.

AI is theft. Plain and simple. There is no way around that. AI companies steal your information, compile it with information stolen from millions of other people, and show you a broken reflection of that data, and you confuse the cracks in the mirror with "originality". 

I'm sorry if this sounds like a rant, but there are actual living human beings out there who are being physically, mentally, and economically injured by this. Millions of acres of groundwater are being poisoned by this. Entire towns are seeing their electricity rates quintuple because of this. People are losing their jobs because of this. People are losing their homes because of this. The flora and fauna of huge swaths of land are being decimated by this. Every time you ask AI for an idea, you are hurting someone.

All because a handful of people refuse to use their imagination for a fantasy game.  Again . . . what am I missing here?

Quote from AnzioFaro >>

So... you know it doesn't work... you know how much damage it causes, both to the environment and the economy... but you're going to keep using it anyhow?

What am I missing?

 Sigh... There is absolutely no explanation I can give that could or would satisfy people no matter what I say on a topic as volatile as this.

If I try to keep it brief, let's just say that as a software engineer I'm nowadays pretty much forced to constantly use AI in my daily work if I want to stay "relevant" and not get fired. This has eventually lead into a situation where it just feels like any other tool. Combine this with a busy family life, limited experience as a DM, and the fact that my two most valuable brainstorming buddies (my wife and my brother) are both players in my campaign, so I can't bounce ideas with them if I want to keep the story a secret. I've asked aid on this forum a few times for encounter ideas without receiving that many useful ideas. The easy way out has been to use AI.

You can compare it to alocholism if you want. There's no addiction involved in this, however. But an alcoholic might know how much damage alcohol can do to them, but still they drink. Why? Because they can't help it. Alcohol was the easy way out for them at some point and eventually it became a drink among other drinks.

I hate discussing AI on my free time. I hate that it's taking over my career. I'm already pretty much on my own amongst my (software engineer) friends who are all aboard the AI hype train. I don't want to use it for creative work, but AI has become a tool to outsource the mundane issues.

And as a final (side) comment, I'm pretty sure even this website is partially developed by AI, especially new or upcoming features whether you like it or not.

(And no, I didn't use AI to compose this message).

Quote from Scruvy >>

I'm already pretty much on my own amongst my (software engineer) friends who are all aboard the AI hype train. I don't want to use it for creative work, but AI has become a tool to outsource the mundane issues.

 Having to use it for work and allowing it in your private life are two very different things. 

Also, nothing about creative work is mundane, so there is no reason to allow it into the creative space.

The scary thing is how many jobs are being lost to it, I think the most recent count is 80k in the tech sector. Based on many of the answers you guys posted above I believe many of these jobs will be available again to humans in a short time frame when it is discovered just how much stuff gets broken when trusted to non-humans...

Quote from Erik_Soong >>

Quote from Scruvy >>

I'm already pretty much on my own amongst my (software engineer) friends who are all aboard the AI hype train. I don't want to use it for creative work, but AI has become a tool to outsource the mundane issues.

 Having to use it for work and allowing it in your private life are two very different things. 

Also, nothing about creative work is mundane, so there is no reason to allow it into the creative space.

 Especially since the "AI" used in most business settings (except for art generation and "vibe coding") is actually an entirely different set of programs than the LLMs that are available for public use.

ML has been around for decades and is incredibly useful. LLMs... not so much.

There's a difference between "does X work" and "should I use X" -- if the answer to the first is no the second is obviously also no, but the answer to the first can be yes and the answer to the second be no. Discussing entirely the first

• Can AI be used to answer rules questions? Answer: it isn't entirely ineffective but generally does a poor job. Hallucinations are a well known problem with no current solution.
• Can AI be used to create a character? Answer: even if an LLM has been trained on both character sheets and rules, it has no idea how to apply one to the other. Use a tool designed for the purpose.
• Can AI be used to create descriptive blurbs? Answer: AI can do a competent job at describing individuals, though it will have an extremely generic feel and won't do a good job making them fit together in a broader setting unless you provide it with a lot of hints. However, unless your goal is to hide clues in a mountain of chaff, this tends to not be very useful text -- yes, if you've got a village of eighty people an AI can churn out descriptions for every one of them, which would be a giant PITA for a human, but that mostly turns into a giant pile of slop for you and your PCs to dig through searching for information of actual value.
• Can AI be used to create character portraits? Answer: yes, if you aren't picky -- it's hard to avoid them looking very generic, and the more specific the image you have in mind, the worse a job it will do. I've seen a lot of AI portraits in games, and while they look good the first few times you see them, they all start blurring together at a certain point.

Quote from Pantagruel666>>

• Can AI be used to create descriptive blurbs? Answer: AI can do a competent job at describing individuals, though it will have an extremely generic feel and won't do a good job making them fit together in a broader setting unless you provide it with a lot of hints. However, unless your goal is to hide clues in a mountain of chaff, this tends to not be very useful text -- yes, if you've got a village of eighty people an AI can churn out descriptions for every one of them, which would be a giant PITA for a human, but that mostly turns into a giant pile of slop for you and your PCs to dig through searching for information of actual value.

• Can AI be used to create character portraits? Answer: yes, if you aren't picky -- it's hard to avoid them looking very generic, and the more specific the image you have in mind, the worse a job it will do. I've seen a lot of AI portraits in games, and while they look good the first few times you see them, they all start blurring together at a certain point.

They're also not going to look right. Controlled iteration is something the image generators are still not good at AFAIK. You'll get a face that sort of looks like what you want, but attempts to get it closer are going to be very hit or miss, and it likely won't be able to hold most things constant while just adjusting the eyes, like you can with something like the BG3 character creator or Hero Forge.

Or maybe you can. I haven't touched them in years. (I toyed briefly with the image generators early on, before I really understood the ethical issues with generative "AI", and rapidly discovered how badly they fail when you have ideas that aren't in the training set. I then gave up.)