Serious thoughts on exciting news from our hobby

Last week I found a very interesting topic on board of an RPG community: a very skilled guy, Vladar, managed to create a full adventure module with AI text generation. This is absolutely outstanding to my eyes!

I will report nor the topic neither the tools used for such a great achievement. I left my congrats to the fellow in the topic where he wrote about his job. I find in any case fair and honest to link the final output so that everyone can assess the quality of the output: Castle of GPT.

This piece of news left me with opposing feelings: from one side there is regard towards Vladar for the success of his work; on the other side I feel uncomfortable with the development the AI is having.

Let’s first talk about the ‘sunny’ side of the story. The great achievement is a fact, beyond any reasonable doubt: this work confirms that in the future the industry will benefit of this very advanced technology and this is, needless to say, a high-potential option for the whole community of GMs and players. It is important to outline however that the current development is at its dawn: the essential tool for AI texts, ChatGTP, has seen the light last year only and the deployment is still in an embryonal phase. As a matter of fact, the fellow who compiled the adventure had an hard task (to my eyes): he had to use different applications and manage the inputs/outputs before reaching the final result. At this stage only a very skilled person could carry out this process. I am confident that in the next future, the process will be streamlined and there will likely be a solution which embeds all the different steps inside and provide a final product upon the submission of the initial outputs. It won’t be too far from what everybody has seen with AI graphic/art during last year (funny thing: the AI art has nearly one-year advantage compared to AI text… or at least at consumer level!), it would be interesting to understand the reasons for such a gap…

After the light, the shadows: I am seriously worried by the current development in the AI field. I am not against such a development, I am well aware that’s the future and apparently nobody can’t stop this run. What makes me really uncomfortable is the field of application of AI. Let me say that I am not an expert and for sure AI is growing in several fields which a common man doesn’t see, the point is in any case extremely sensitive: for both art and text (in the sense of the creative production like an adventure module) the pillar is creativity. In this sense, I have always thought that AI had been developed since the early days with a different goal: maybe I use a trivial example but I have in my mind the case of the defective screw. Let me explain better my view: in an assembly line which produces screws, there is a man who is in charge to check that every item fits the production standards (i.e. it is not defective). In this scenario, the man is going to be replaced by an AI program which can perform this task more efficiently: no creative spark is required to the man to run his job and therefore a machine can easily take over his position. In our case, exactly like for the AI art, the creative process of a human being is replaced… this is completely different. Am I wrong to feel worried since we are looking to replace something peculiar of a human being with a machine job?

My apologies if this last consideration erases any positive feeling which I wrote in advance. That is, as a matter of fact, such a serious concern that it completely offsets any exciting success, like in the case of the first AI adventure module I’ve ever seen.

Let me send my personal congrats to Vladar and thank him again for his efforts and the opportunity that led me discuss about an important concern we will likely face in the next future. Should, in the mid-range future, all the GMs turn their creativity off and follow outputs generated by a machine?

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