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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2941 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for July 19, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I've been mucking around with Claude for a while now, most recently I started RPing with it. Dumb power-fantasy stuff like 'what if I was a wizard with a transmutation theme in a duel with a legendary warrior'. Claude does a good job, coherently answering my call for powerful, challenging adversary. We fought in the sky, I threw transmuted antimatter bombs at him, he turned into an energy being, I sucked him into a black hole after a good bit of fighting. It can do more grounded low-level stuff too, as if I were playing Pathfinder.

I'm staggered that we have a nearly perfect freeform text adventure machine (200 page context length if you pay for Pro) - and nobody cares. OK, it won't let you be outright evil in normal mode. The terms of use are pretty restrictive but you can get around them to a large extent. You can have it cast off the officialese default AI tone and take up 40K-speak. No more 'iridescent beams of energy', now it's all 'Your bifurcated clone, a mirror of your terrible majesty, streaks towards the xenos filth'. All the humanism and safetyism drains away as it puts its bloodlust hat on. I guess this is what rayon means with the 'mad poet' stuff.

But it acts in the most prissy way when you ask it to list things from some novels. 'Oh the copyright means I can't say anything other than the most generic boilerplate'. It's happy to waltz around in Warhammer 40K, one of the most litigious and copyright-obsessed franchises around but rehashing things that are on the Wheel of Time wiki is too much? It can isekai a character into a universe but it can't just list things from that universe? AI safety is truly a dizzying realm.

There's plenty of fun to be had, the only limit is your creativity.

character.ai has a pretty notable userbase if its subreddit subscriber count is any indication. I think Zvi might have had a more objective stat in a recent newsletter. I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about if you're not already in certain circles. As someone very much outside of the circle my only exposure to the subculture is the occasional peek into the chatbot threads on /g/.

I expect AI RP, much like regular RP, is just something you're not going to hear about

Incidentally, the seeming consensus among former roleplayers I saw in threads and talked to personally is that (E)RPers are the first decisive casualty of robots. The absence of interpersonal friction that internet RP entails is by itself enough to make LLMs strictly superior RP partners, even with all of their soy biases and retardation cognitive shortcomings (they can even mimic OOC chats, hilariously). I haven't really dabbled in RP before AI so I have no real way to check, but Reliable Sources seem to back up the general sentiment.

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