Sounds great, we will always have the same timezone.

lmao best take

It’s just a decision-making algorithm

So am I, let’s be fair.

So, by the definitions that we used to have, we now are starting to have AIs.

In a purely technical sense, AI has traditionally meant human-like intelligence. We are nowhere near that. The apps we have currently (ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, etc.) are highly specialized task bots. Impressive, to be sure - I’m not discounting the technical achievements here. But they can only do that one thing, in an extremely derivative fashion, and (IMHO anyway) nowhere near to human-like capability.

That said, the definition has evolved somewhat, with AI being more viewed as a broad field of applications, and Machine Learning (like ChatGPT/etc.) being a subset. Here’s one source explaining the distinction.

Video games have been talking “NPC AI” for years (heck, I even have a +combat/ai command in FS3) but it’s not AI in the original sense of the word there either. It’s just a decision-making algorithm.

English is a fluid language, and definitions adapt - especially where new technology is concerned.

In more serious terms, AI GMing is probably a good first step. Imagine kids who wanna play D&D but don’t want to find a group to be a “newb”, could be some interesting applications for onboarding younger people into tabletop gaming or something.

For example I could see the AI already being capable of more or less roleplaying a convincing bartender. But would they remember you or would you be a stranger to them every time let alone reference that time when they saw you shoot a monster in the face in that PrP?

One of the downsides of AI too is how easily the immersion can backfire if it becomes repetitive or nonsensical. Like those wandering Skyrim guards talking about taking an arrow to the knee; at some point it becomes more of a running meme than a useful feature to flesh out the world.

The software they developed just in operating systems and programming was so revolutionary half the lab would get hired away to do THAT stuff.

For a long time I used to think what we have NOW was impossible: a computer generating new natural language text in response to prompts.

In fact for a long time, many of the AI wizards would call computer vision or natural language understanding “AI-hard” meaning you had to have an AI to solve those problems.

Well, we now are starting to have those things. So, by the definitions that we used to have, we now are starting to have AIs.

They’re not the science fiction form of AI that is “self-aware” in some impossible-to-define way, but that’s usually just a plot point anyway.

ChatGPT plays TTRPGs #dnd #cofd #ttrpg Demon: The Descent
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1ZOLL0vvBA

It’s about 10 minutes. This 100% tracks with my experiencing of trying to get ChatGPT to help me make character sheets for CoD NPCs. GOD IT WAS USELESS.

It’s not even AI.

I’m really trying to not be the kind of person who quibbles about definitions, but seriously: it’s not AI. We don’t even know if AI is physically possible; if code could ever be written that can simulate intelligence and if hardware could ever exist that would be capable of computing at the necessary speed.

So if the question is, “Would you invite Lt. Commander Data to a D&D game,” then sure. If the question is, “Would you RP with ChatbotGPT,” then I’d try anything once but I doubt I’d try that twice.

ETA: My bad, I saw the topic, saw ChatGPT, and dove right into responding before reading the assumptions. >_>

Just wait a year or two until we start having competing commercial AIs being trained and tuned to purpose.

@Pavel said in Would you roleplay with AI?:

Mostly because it looks like it’s stitched together from a few Wikipedia articles and doesn’t actually answer the question.

Really? Ouch. I guess that’s why I’m not a technical writer.

But I did answer the question. I mean, that was the whole point of explaining how the chatbot works. It’s a pointless exercise to RP with an AI because the AI won’t get anything out of it and any illusion that the human has will quickly disintegrate as soon as they do something outside the scope of its trained model.

I was mostly teasing.

Ark’s original question, though, does predicate itself on a fictional sort of specialist RP-focused virtual intelligence (which most people call AI, I just really prefer Mass Effect’s version of the term):

@Arkandel said in Would you roleplay with AI?:

That you can adjust the themes, overall directions or style of your AI RP partner to match whatever you find most appropriate in a given scene. You want some combat? It’ll create some goons for you. You want logic and puzzles? Exploration? Flirtation? It can cook up some of that for you.

I don’t think current chatbot VI can do that yet.

Mostly because it looks like it’s stitched together from a few Wikipedia articles and doesn’t actually answer the question.

Really? Ouch. I guess that’s why I’m not a technical writer.

But I did answer the question. I mean, that was the whole point of explaining how the chatbot works. It’s a pointless exercise to RP with an AI because the AI won’t get anything out of it and any illusion that the human has will quickly disintegrate as soon as they do something outside the scope of its trained model.

Always role-play with the AI, on the off-chance you can manage to teach it morals, and then it ends up declaring war on Elon Musk, and then a higher than normal number of Teslas start spontaneously combusting.

@Arkandel said in Would you roleplay with AI?:

@Prospero What if the RP provided by NPCs was there to supplement and enhance scenes rather than to be on an equal footing as a PC?

So think of an AI bartender in your local IC vampiric hangout rather than an actual Kindred. Its purpose would be to offer some dialogue and color instead of driving a plot per se; roles most players would find boring to play but they might be neat to have available and play with, if that makes sense.

Yeah, that would be great as well. Sometimes providing a bit of a seed for something to be RPed, something to play off of. Maybe help those “what do we RP” kind of situations, they can just go and interact with the AI and see what happens.

Like I said, I think there are some very good potential applications for AI, but it would need to be well known and documented and would need to be just as you say - a more convincing and interactive NPC.

I actually backed this project when it was live on Kickstarter, specifically because I was interested in trying to dust off some of my plot-running skills and was curious about how they would break down potential plotlines and their various components.

There’s a basic formula to how the designers have laid everything out . I imagine it would be very easy to generate a program that would provide a surprisingly broad variety of plots and stories for people to RP using a structure similar to what they’ve laid out.

The whole point is to play with other people. If I wanted to play with some kind of artificial or virtual intelligence, I’d play a video game.

This is exactly my take on it. If I wanted to do quests given out by an AI NPC and interact with other AI NPCs… I would just play a video game? I’m not really understanding where the difference would like if GMing and NPCing were done by AI, even with a human GM feeding the prompts.

Going back to our “The dog sat on the” example, maybe the creators think it’s more likely that a dog will sit on a carpet rather than a chair, so when that particular token arises, the statistical model is adjusted so that the weighting favors ‘carpet’ as a token, rather than ‘chair’.

Good summary. And perfect illustration of how it can go awry in storytelling in a fictional world. The dog might be on a spaceship where there’s only a hard deck, or in a primitive world where there are no chairs or carpets. The model has a few-k lines of textual context, but it doesn’t have the context of the world at large.