Wednesday, December 28, 2022

Pseudorandom vs. AI-Generated Dungeons?

SURELY A LAWFUL EVIL PROBLEM

So if you look back through the mass of my posts, you will notice many many many times that I advocate for mass pseudo-random generation of dungeons, or at least dungeon ideas, based on methods outlined by Moldvay and Gygax and others... I personally stole/appropriated a huge number of tables and charts and methods, and also made up a great deal of items in a huge list amounting to like 3000 lines of code. When I say "code", I mean a couple of decision-tree and number generation code but mostly adjectives and nouns and adverbs! So my most advanced, albeit rudimentary, method is orders of magnitude lamer than a slick AI adversarial network or million-iteration learning model. It's my brain and some tables I lifted from early-TSR books.

Why, a couple of months ago I even had a text-prompt generated artwork post. Yeesh. 

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around how this method - i.e. have the machine do the hard work and fill in the empty spots myself, and gussy it up some at the end - is any different, philosophically, from the GAN-network or GPT-Chatbot method that I am seeing go around. To be absolutely clear, my method doesn't cause me as much internal strife as letting an AI do the majority of the work, but I'm on the fence! Could I ever be expected to do ALL the work involved in generating a vast, demon-haunted underground death-complex?

The answer is probably a resounding NO. But like, maybe I wouldn't ever offer a thing an AI made for sale, it would be like cheating on my art final instead of submitting a shitty doodle, or having someone write me a good dissertation instead of a half-assed one like I would probably write.

Would I try, or play, a module that an AI generated? Yeah, sure, I guess. I have deep misgivings about it in a way that I do not have for purely-randomly generated ones, like donjon.sh and all those.

The machine gods exact a high price, I guess, and like Don't Raise Up What Ye Cannot Lay Back Down

Here are some links to other things you could find with a simple google search:

http://tenfootpole.org/forum/index.php?threads/making-a-module-using-chatgpt.386/

https://aidungeon.io/  - looks like a playable thing

https://medium.com/building-the-metaverse/creating-a-text-adventure-game-with-chatg-cffeff4d7cfd - this one seems to have also used the AI-generated art

https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/za8bmf/openais_gtpchat_knows_about_dd_and_can_even/ - alas, reddit

https://www.thegamer.com/dungeons-dragons-chatgpt-ai-dm/