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And this, unfortunately, is why I now skim past your posts without reading them.
I am aware. I find it most unfortunate, since I do genuinely believe that LLMs help make my writing even stronger.
That's not the point. LLMs would make many people's writing stronger (for some value of "strong"). I'd rather read your writing, weaker or not. Now when I read you, every point you make, every turn of phrase, every word choice, I don't know if it was you or the LLM. Sure, maybe 80% to 90% of it was you. I can't know, and that makes me not care. I can prompt ChatGPT for its sparkling shiny opinions all day long.
I genuinely do not understand the intuition at play here. Let's imagine someone who has an instinctual aversion to the use of AI image gen: is using Adobe Firefly to change a single pixel with it sufficient to taint a larger painting? Two pixels? Ten? To finish the blocked-in background that the artist would have been too lazy to finish had he not had the tools at hand?
What if the artist deletes the AI pixel and reinserts one himself, with the exact same hexcode?
(It is worth noting that at one point, in the not so distant past, that even Photoshop itself was treated with similar suspicion)
Where is your threshold for "too much"? When you recognize an AI fingerprint? The problem is that once you begin suspecting it in a particular user, it is easy to imagine that there is more of it than in reality. Of course, if you have an all-or-nothing attitude, then I suppose that sounds less horrible to you than it does to me. I skew closer to a linear-no-threshold model, or perhaps one where, for the average writer, there exists an x% of AI usage that will increase overall quality as measured by multiple observers. Preferably blinded ones.
This x% can be very high for the truly average. I'm talking average Redditor. It can be very low, vanishingly so for others. Scott has mentioned that he has tried using LLMs to imitate his own style and has been consistently disappointed in the outcome.
I think, for me, the optimal amount is 1-10%. 20% is pushing it. This essay is closer to 20%. But even that 20% is closely vetted for factuality. Alas, it has not been vetted for style as hard, or else this topic wouldn't have arisen. In fact, I didn't particularly try. Performing edits to launder AI commentary as my own strikes me as dishonest.
I envision myself as the artist using the tool to finish painting that unfinished background. Sometimes, it makes something so good it's worth bringing to prominence in the foreground. The day where I can see no conceivable value-add from my own contribution is when I pack my bags as a writer. I suppose it is fortunate that I've been at it so long that there is a sizeable corpus of time stamped, archived evidence showing that I am damn good without it. That I don't need it. I still think I benefit from it, though I'm not sure I can change your mind on the topic.
After all, there are a lot of people making pure slop. I try not to ever become one of them.
There's a minor scandal in the tumblr video game sphere, because Studio Larian discussed the use of AI tools in the development pipeline. It's not clear exactly what they were using the tools for, but most critiques have interpreted it as only using AI-gen for concept art that won't even get a pixel in the final game, and they're still very unhappy with it.
((I've been trying to come together with a top-level post on the topic, but I dunno if it'll be interesting enough or if it'll be me going full Gelman Amnesia given that we have actual video game artist experts around.))
That's a shame they're being shamed. One of my takeaways from GPT-4 was that it was good enough to beat a lot of video game text and dialogue. Filler content, conversation with NPC #987, and side quests? AI can jazz up things budget doesn't allow for. It should no longer be cost prohibitive to develop the 120 filler fetch quests into something slightly more meaningful and engaging. Extra flair, storytelling, or character development where there was barebones effort. Someone needs to weather the criticism, raise the bar, and get paid for it.
Disagree on all accounts. When AI does content, it’s ultra generic, has no sense of tone or effect, and lacks any of the idiosyncratic spontaneity of even sloppily put together human content. There’s also a lack of broader complexity, meaning that any ‘character development’ it’s adding to a given story isn’t corresponding to a grander vision of what that story aspires to be or is about, but is essentially just the cut and pasted clichés, tropes, and emblems of other works that only incidentally contains some of their meaning. I’d prefer content to be cut rather than given over to AI.
That's what I think about many video games! Given that RPGs were never my forte, but I have played enough games. I've even played enough of recent-ish titles.
Take any Bethesda game or probably most other open-world titles. They all have mountains of generic filler called content that doesn't get cut despite being generic filler. The content doesn't get cut, because it needs to be there. Players like wandering into an interaction and they like doing the thing. That's the appeal. Developers can reward players with do-the-thing-get-thing reward and writers reward players to do the thing because they've become invested in some story or consequence behind it. A great game rewards a player with a dopamine did-thing-got-thing and it rewards the player with an engaging story. There are not very many great games and there's only so many opportunities for great writing in a given game.
In Starfield, there's a common loop. Player meets character NPC. Player may have up to 4 distinct interactions with the character. Possibly one or two of those interactions have 2 different variations. The player is provided with a few sentences of backstory in some way, then the player is expected to recognize the shape of a familiar story and fill in the blanks. These storytelling opportunities come a few phases translated to video game format:
There's nothing in there that can't be improved upon by a writer working with an LLM. If nothing else, this results in the player being provided the opportunity to add depth to a bland and boring A-B experience. The generic shape of the story, where the player is expected to recognize it to fill in the blanks, gets more filling.
Starfield is a bad game, but Starfield had so many of these generic fetch quests, generic storylines, generic dialogues that I don't think I got close to finish it. And hey, I know this developer, I expect some level of generic human slop, but boy did it seem bad. On the other side I've also played most of Baldur's Gate 3. BG3 is a much higher quality game. As I understand it's considered a generational class of game. My generation of this genre would be The Witcher 3 which, as I recall, had relatively rich stories and writing in part. There's still plenty of bland, formulaic, or marginal content that wouldn't be harmed by curated robot slop.
Now I could not be aware of the new fangled indie RPGs true gamers play these days, but I have played enough games to know the writers phone it in no more than a good prompt. That may be due to a workload as is typical for the industry or it might be that video game writers write games for a reason other than greatness. In either case I bet there's a use case for this now. Today! Someone could go find banal interaction in a game, feed a few prompts, and get something that enriches that experience. No question in my mind. AI will not single-handedly create a cohesive BG3 story board and 100 hours of dialogue in one go, but even a free model can help a mediocre writer enrich their 15 minute mini-story side quest #121.
There's nothing in there that can't be improved as prose, but are you entirely sure that the changes will be improvements as game writing?
I like Table Top RPGs, despite them being worse than some Computer RPGs in every way but one, and the one way they're better is the way that matters here: in a TTRPG, your players don't have to be railroaded nearly so strictly. When the players try to dig deep into the interactions with some character, there can always be something rewarding they can dig deep into. Once the Game Master runs out of official quest writeup material, he can start to improvise, and those improvisations can actually affect all subsequent gameplay. It's quite common for players to develop an attachment to someone like that elderly forgotten veteran NPC, who the GM can then slot into other parts of the story, on the fly, as a recurring side character, making the story much more fun and interesting. In the longest-running game I run, my players have one originally-mid-level mook who's managed to escape enough fights to become a recurring villain (with some hilarious banter), and even have another three mooks who (via vast interleaved efforts of diplomacy and subterfuge) they've managed to semi-reform and (despite some lingering head-butting with PCs and each other) recruit as underlings. The written adventures for this campaign included some designed-as-recurring-character NPC friends and villains, too, of course, but these four were all characters who were written with at most a short backstory but who were expected to be eliminated in the first encounter if the players had been aggressive enough and their dice rolls lucky enough. We're all glad they weren't.
In a CRPG ... do you want to let the AI rewrite your game on the fly, like a GM does, not just write things you can review in advance? Writing on the fly is probably an AGI-complete problem. If you've got an LLM that you trust not to make its part of your game worse than your part then you might as well let it write your part too. But if all your writing is done in advance, that won't let you have long-term effects on the story. The possibilities you'd have to write for grow exponentially with elapsed gameplay, as more story elements arise and more combinations in which they might affect Ascended Extras' actions accumulate. If you instead do a lot of writing in advance without letting the now-fleshed-out side characters have long-term effects on the story, that just tricks the player with false affordances: instead of interacting with a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and obviously are critical to the story and another hundred characters quickly get to a loop with nothing new to say and are obviously scenery after that, you'd be giving them a world where ten characters have deep dialogue trees and are critical to the story while another hundred characters have deep dialogue trees but are still going to be plot dead-ends after those trees are finally exhausted.
Roger Ebert infamously took the stance that "video games can never be art", which was nonsense, but the interactivity of games is a bit of a two-edged sword: on the one hand it's an additional capacity that can make video games much better art than non-interactive media, but on the other hand it puts the artist even more at the mercy of the audience than is the case in other media. Someone may fail to understand what you intended them to understand from your painting, but at least once they're part of your painting's audience they'll see what you intended them to see. If you want to make art in the form of a game, however, everyone in your audience is also your collaborator, and your job isn't just to make them understand a finished product, it's to guide them into helping properly finish that product with you, and part of that guidance is making it easier to see which parts of the work they should focus on the most and which are just intended to be out-of-focus background. Making the background more beautiful would be an improvement, all other things being equal, but making it more beautiful without accidentally bringing it to a spot in the foreground where it shouldn't be is much trickier. The reason why new fiction writers always have to be told to be unafraid to "kill your darlings" is that it's true but non-obvious that most authors' writing can be best improved not by expanding it but by cutting it, removing the digressions and infodumps and red herrings and detached side plots and on and on until you're left only with the things that most contribute to the story. Game writers (and level designers, and so on) have a much harder problem, because even if you avoid handing the player a pointless distraction the player might seek it out anyway, and they'll enjoy the game less as a result even if they don't understand why. I recommend playing the Half Life 2 Episode 1+2 with Director's Commentary - some of the most interesting tidbits there are tricks with which they coax players into actions as simple as looking in the right direction at the right time to see a scripted event, while not actually taking any control away from the player or even letting most players realize they'd been maneuvered into making the decisions they did.
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