How do you feel about AI assistance in DMing?

I'm asking because I created a tool that let's an AI agent like Claude Desktop connect to a VTT and act as an assistant DM, spent a long time building it, but when I try to tell people about it I get hostile reactions.  I just did not expect this.

To me it's like a time saver, like if I want to generate a random encounter, I could say "Take a look at the active scene and generate a moderate difficulty encounter for the party with thematically appropriate monsters. Add the monsters to the combat tracker and place them near the cave entrance near the top left of the map. Roll NPC initiatives."

It will automatically take a screenshot, determine what the setting looks like, search my monster compendiums for thematically appropriate monsters, calculate the encounter difficulty for the party, determine where the cave entrance is from the screenshot and place the monsters there, then add them to the tracker, roll initiative and start combat.

It also has journal integration, so it can organize campaign notes, create quests, quest tracking logs, move things into appropriate folders, etc.. I can use it to help keep things organized, or split loot among the party.  

Is this too much AI?  I still have total authoritative control over the story, the combat, what monsters get placed, it's just so much less digging through compendiums or organizing notes.

You are of course free to do whatever you choose at your table, but there's no way our group would do so. Some of them have toyed around with getting ideas for encounters or storylines from A.I. and they all eventually abandoned the idea.

A.I. does not create, or is it creative. It is based on probabilities. It assigns probabilities to various choices then selects the one with the highest number.

Players will notice the lack of imagination, and the inconsistencies in the story, as well as the fact that a.i. is simply borrowing from its source material. D&D is a game in which the DM and players work together to craft a unique story. D&D is a game of imagination, why would you use something to circumvent imagination? Having A.I. 'craft' it for you defeats the entire purpose, IMHO.

In my games, the "random encounters" aren't actually random. They may appear in "random order", but every creature and every encounter is in my game for a specific reason. 

Once upon a time D&D texts contained charts where one could "roll" random encounters and treasure. Over the various editions, these were removed because they found that the vast majority of players/DMs didn't like using them because they made the game seem lacking in imagination. 5.5 is sort of an exception, they have started putting in some charts giving a limited number of choices that are numbered, but I suspect almost no one will actually use them that way.

There's also the environmental damage, mental health damage, & plagiarism.

Outsourcing your brain provably reduces your critical thinking skills(By design IMO), data centers drain water from those who actually need it(& tend to be placed in poor and/or PoC neighborhoods in the US, so there's classism & racism involved), & doesn't credit, let alone financially compensate, things &/or people it steals from.

You seem to think the only thing AI does is write stories or make pictures. I'm not even using it for that. It's like having a mega-macro for everything.  I don't have to click through compendiums, drag tokens around, manually enter information, etc.. I can craft custom gear, custom NPCs, automatically tune encounters, there's so much more that AI does than just write crappy roleplay narratives.

Quote from MaedraDawnkeeper >>

There's also the environmental damage, mental health damage, & plagiarism.

Outsourcing your brain provably reduces your critical thinking skills(By design IMO), data centers drain water from those who actually need it(& tend to be placed in poor and/or PoC neighborhoods in the US, so there's classism & racism involved), & doesn't credit, let alone financially compensate, things &/or people it steals from.

 True.

I'm definitely less sharp than I was, I like to attribute that to old age though lol.

I'll have to keep my eye on the data center locations that are popping up. xAI is planning to put them in space, so hopefully that at least solves the location and resource problems. 

Just my humble opinion:

The use of A.I. is intellectually, environmentally, and economically unethical. It requires massive data centers that force the prices of electricity in those regions to skyrocket, wreaking economic havoc on the people in the area. Each data center uses as much electricity as 25,000 to 100,000 homes. In just the year 2023 alone, US data centers used more electricity than the entire nation of Ireland. And that rate has nearly doubled since then, and is expected to double yet again by 2028. And by then, US data centers will be using enough water annually to fill Lake Mead. Just one data center uses as much water per day as 33,000 households. Our groundwater aquifers are already at record lows. So congrats, you're literally destroying the environment and the economy just because you can't be bothered to use your own brain. Your brain is a data center. Use it. D&D is a game of imagination. If you don't want to use your imagination, why even bother playing D&D? 

But that's just my opinion. 

You're getting bad reactions because generative "AI" is tremendously unpopular, for extremely valid reasons. 

It's also just not good at accurately doing things like generating encounters -- it's both uncreative and bad at math.

Quote from LucianMoonstream >>

I'll have to keep my eye on the data center locations that are popping up. xAI is planning to put them in space, so hopefully that at least solves the location and resource problems. 

 They won't do it, or it will go poorly if they do. Physics is not a fan of the idea. (In particular, these things need a lot of cooling, which is really hard in space. The expense and fuel expenditure are also working against them, as the hardware burns out and become obsolete quickly. It's also going to be hard to shield them against cosmic rays, which play havoc with computers.)

Not to mention any space-based data center will be competing with 40,000 currently-orbiting satellites, as well as tens of millions of pieces of orbiting debris, which are basically bullets moving at mach-20.

I'm not saying "Gravity" (2013) was a good movie, but the movie's premise was sound.

Quote from LucianMoonstream >>

if I want to generate a random encounter, I could say "Take a look at the active scene and generate a moderate difficulty encounter for the party with thematically appropriate monsters. Add the monsters to the combat tracker and place them near the cave entrance near the top left of the map. Roll NPC initiatives."

Or, you can just pick a monster you think would be cool for your party to fight

Or you can take a prefab monster and tweak its stat block to make it more interesting

Or you can listen to your party's chitchat and get ideas for the kinds of monsters they'd like to take on, and the kinds of challenges they find compelling

Personally, I think if you're going to outsource your opportunities for creativity, why are you even bothering to DM?

I mean, a tool to roll initiative for all your monsters, sure, no worries. That doesn't need AI, it's a super simple bit of code and there are tools that do this already. (You can also... roll initiative for them yourself before the game, and it would take just a couple of minutes.) But a tool to pick the monsters and decide where to put them? To me that's like the best part of DM'ing.

If I want to play a video game, I'll play a video game.

Using the AI tools which cost so much energy on simple problems, or on things that are the best part of being a human, is just so wasteful. The bad guys are trying to hook you on this so they can charge you 10x the cost in a couple of years. 

There are some kinds of complex problems for which LLMs and GenAI can be useful (like transcription and translation), doing valuable work that otherwise wouldn't be done. What you describe doesn't fit in that category IMHO.

The same as I felt when half a dozen other users made threads to ask: Boooooooooooooo.

A.) Any AI is too much AI.

2.) Critical reactions make sense. This is a game of collaborative storytelling. Players expect each other - including the DM - to be invested and put in effort.

You want  to use it for encounters, than have Fun with to easy challanges or accidental TotalPlayerKills. Thats a problem some DM already have wen they starting and only using data now the AI only has that data and dosent lern from players DM interaction. 

Nope

https://www.dndbeyond.com/forums/d-d-beyond-general/general-discussion/238562-do-you-use-ai-to-help-build-your-character-and-or

Imagine you're trying to play D&D so whenever you have a question or need to come up with something, you ask your friend who claims to be an expert in D&D (although they've never played). They say they've read every book and can answer any question. So you ask them so questions and every time they give you a confident answer. However very often—like 1 in every 5 questions—they're very confidently wrong. So instead you try running some ideas past them and they tell you every idea is amazing and groundbreaking, which feels really good to hear. Except you run those same ideas past someone else you know who's currently DM'ing a campaign and they actually point out a bunch of issues with your ideas. That doesn't feel good, but it is valid critique and actually helps you make your campaign better. So you go back to your "expert" friend and instead ask them to make you some art, or write some text. So they very quickly come up with some art and some boxed text, but it looks a bit off and it turns out they just plagiarized other people's work, smushing stuff together. They claim it's all original, but find the artbooks they stole from the bookstore.

Oh, and every time you ask this friend something, they fill your bathtub with water and empty it down the drain, flip your breakers off and on, crank up your heating to max, and play white noise at max volume.

This friend is AI (more accurately LLMs). It steals others content. It gives confidently wrong answers. It's sycophantic solely for the purpose of keeping you using the tool. It diminishes your cognitive abilities. It disproportionately* consumes fresh water and electricity. It disproportionately* damages the environment. AI is today what radium was at the start of the 20th century.