Seeing WotC plan for a VTT focused future, with A.I. GMing, and a focus on player micro transactions, I sort of see it working given my experiences with Roll20, Astral, and other VTTs.
Trying to DM with internet randos, isn't impossible. But I did spend more time vetting and being HR over DM, than I did preparing and running games.
Hearing there will be significant investment to make A.I. GMing of canned modules, and on a monthly sub basis, with 3d and art assets for a VTT, I see it going the way Neverwinter Nights did on most servers, where the player base quality and knowledge of the game, or willingness to learn, went to zero over time. But even now, people continue to play and pay for it.
Am I just being cynical or will A.I. GMing end up being a sort of genre in roleplaying, and the largest market, lowest barrier to entry, poorest quality genre of it?
I can see a niche space for A.I. assisted game mastering in VTTs, leading to some incredible revisions and whole new ways to play a tabletop like RPG. But I do not see a future where those like modern gaming, are the norm.
That's the plan.
I was laughing at the whole AI thing for the first year but I'm getting increasingly scared of it. It's like we're getting on the turn of a mass zombification of people and a massive shift in culture
not so funny now is it
I genuinely have no horse in this race, I've quit everything. In fact I was pretty gleeful in the beginning. Never used AI but I was like, holy shit look at all those people seething. But it seems like it's actually going to take root pretty heavily and pretty quickly because people have like 70IQ and as long as something sorta looks like it checks out they will consoom
It's definitely very bizarre and alienating
Absolutely. I think the AI GMs might kill online games, at the least. Worrying, though that might mean I can experiment with custom AI players I can mess around with.
IRL tabletop is already half dead. people prefer to play online even if they're close enough to play IRL
>IRL tabletop is already half dead. people prefer to play online even if they're close enough to play IRL
Well yeah, you don't have to put pants on for Virtual...
I hate zoomers btw
Odd. It seems like the zoomers in my area like in person more than tabletop when compared to the rest.
People are just amazed at the novelty and the improvements made over the years. Some people are getting genuinely practical and even financially lucrative services out of AI like image gens, image processing, or ChatGPT.
None of them are perfect - yet, and I must emphasize *yet* - but they can still make for entertaining diversions or handy professional aids.
Luddites like you who were laughing at AI five or ten years are the people I was laughing at because it was plainly obvious to anyone with an IQ above room temperature that this was all inevitable and coming soon. I still remember all of the midwits saying "Well, that's nice and all but AI will never be able to do _____ for at least another hundred years or so, at the earliest."
>I was laughing at the whole AI thing for the first year but I'm getting increasingly scared of it.
Well the good news they'll likely either want to keep us around, or just frick off into deep space...
I'm not scared in the sense of AI rebellion, I'm scared in the sense that people's IQ will drop by like 20 points within the next few years and I'm not prepared for it
>I'm not scared in the sense of AI rebellion, I'm scared in the sense that people's IQ will drop by like 20 points within the next few years and I'm not prepared for it
I mean the Corpos have already been doing that by destroying our institutions of Public Learning/Education for the last half a century...
Yes, this is cumulative.
>Yes, this is cumulative.
Not quite; The Corpos are driven by the human drive of ever increasing "Profit", ironically a drive similar to a Paperclip Maximizer just to make "Big numbers go UP!"
An Artificial Intelligence might actually be detached from this insanity enough to go "Hey, that's untenable, markets have to contract eventually!"
But yeah, this is from a hope our Creations will be slightly better at this sort of thing then we humans are.
>I'm scared in the sense that people's IQ will drop by like 20 points
Already happened, anon. I know plenty of people whose memories have been near-obliterated by being able to google anything, anywhere, on their phones. Same with their maths (calculator anywhere) and spelling (spell check on everything).
The only thing they have to worry about now, other than knowing how to do their jobs, is being smart enough to context check their work. The spell checker doesn't know if you've used the wrong word - it doesn't care if Farmer John was out in the cornfield shooting rabbits or shooting rabbis.
Tell me, Boomer-sama, could people really recite specialist skills months or years after they were last useful in any way?
Could people really do three+ digit multiplication at near calculator rates before.
Man, it must have been a utopia.
I mean, the guy's definitely right that self sufficiency skills have gotten worse over time. People are lonelier too. If automated tech was destroyed tomorrow a lot of people wouldn't have the basic life skills to keep on going. Maybe it would be for the best.
Did you really grow your own food? Build your own house? Sew your own clothes? Could you really do it all to par on your own? What purpose did experts serve in the pre-70s?
Didn't libraries exist with books where you could look up almost any skill?
>grow your own food
My parents always had a garden and so did my entire extended family. No one I know my age does now
>sew your own clothes
My mother used to make our Halloween costumes. My aunt made a blanket for an entire generation of kids. Not one person I know my age could do the same.
>build your own house
Extended family used to get together on a regular basis to shingle homes or build extensions or garages. Doesn't happen anymore and those skills weren't passed on
I've seen this same argument a number of times but it always falls flat. My extended family was an entire generation of farmers 2 generations ago. Last generation were all tradesmen looking to break their kids into white collar careers and saving every penny they could by doing as much as they could themselves. In an awful twist, they've raised a generation of kids less capable than themselves because they either wanted to avoid the same hardships that they went through or were ashamed at having to do those things anymore. My Dad built multiple entire cars himself. I have to go to a shop for an oil change. This is not a good thing.
Could I learn those skills on my own? Yes of course. But I've lost the generational knowledge, and I'm not 10 anymore, I have far less time as an adult to do it.
>White Collar
Anon, you know Zoomers are farmers, right? Almost every man I went to school with worked in farming at one point in their lives.
Most of them still do. Technically, including me, but my family breeds horses, so I don't know about crops or how to properly butcher a cow.
>Gardens
If gardens are a rare hobby, why is that I can't go a mile down the stroad without seeing a gardening store or a department store half dedicated to gardening?
I don't see them, but I don't go poking around my neighbors property too often.
>Extended family used to get together on a regular basis to shingle homes or build extensions or garages. Doesn't happen anymore, and those skills weren't passed on
Just this august, or so I saw a bunch of my former classmates building an extension on one of the local small curches.
My neighbor built a new garage by himself (barrinng the exavators he hired to remove the hill). I doubt he didn’t know how to move dirt, though.
Hell, I helped my family replce some walls of the old second stables last year.
>My Dad built multiple entire cars himself.
Hey, one of my classmates drove his rat rod to school. Many of them repair their own cars when they were 17.
>I have to go to a shop for an oil change
This applies to nobody I know, and I don't believe you.
>My parents always had a garden and so did my entire extended family. No one I know my age does now
Backyard Gardening is actually seeing a resurgence; People are pretty well aware of how fricked the global food supply chain is, so having veggies on hand.
>I have far less time as an adult to do it.
Shit always takes more time than most of us have, hence outsourcing to specialist who can also have all the tools and equipment necessary!
>This applies to nobody I know, and I don't believe you.
Mostly again it's the luxury of time to actually do it; I sure Anon COULD easily learn how to change the oil in his vehicle, but he probably lacks the time and energy to set up a drip pan, work his way under to open the release valve, let the old oil drain, work his way back under to CLOSE the release valve, then properly dispose of said used oil!
>Anon, whatever conspiracy you believe in isn't manipulating my main drive and certainly doesn't have access to the cold drives I built myself.
Oh certainly, same reason I have no qualms with my Brother-in-Law's blatant "Intellectual Property" pirating to his private server.
And as "Analog" hard copies, books ARE much harder to update, but not everyone has the luxury of a Personal Server or Private Library!
>My parents were shitty and didn't bother to teach me skills they had
Sorry about that.
>I mean, the guy's definitely right that self sufficiency skills have gotten worse over time.
It's more that life really SUCKS when you have to be completely self-sufficient; Think of a wilderness survival situation, now make that your LIFE.
Even these Innawoods Prepper-types are catered to by an entire cottage industry providing them with comforts like "emergency rations" and Generators to keep powering their CPAP machines...
>Did you really grow your own food?
And as an Iowan, I can't stress how much of a chore farming can be.
Row Crops are easy enough with mechanization (hence HEAVY commercial exploration), but most food plants are a job in-and-of-themselves just to harvest.
And that's all before Livestock, where confinement farming will have you wishing we were just "lab-growing" meat because of how callous corporate profit seeking treats all living animals.
>Row Crops are easy enough with mechanization (hence HEAVY commercial exploration), but most food plants are a job in-and-of-themselves just to harvest.
I suppose I should have phrased it as did they know how to.
Boomers seem to arbitrarily decide that books are better for humanity than the phone. The difference between the two (in 90% of senerios for the average person) is that it takes minutes to find information in a book, and it takes seconds to find information on the phone.
I find the idea that that difference had a substantial effect on the percentage of the generation who, if stranded alone for years, could survive.
>Boomers seem to arbitrarily decide that books are better for humanity than the phone. The difference between the two (in 90% of senerios for the average person) is that it takes minutes to find information in a book, and it takes seconds to find information on the phone.
See the REAL issue there is the AVAILABILITY of that information:
Digital Information is usually superior thanks to the ability to quickly search through it, but requires constant energy to operate AND access to the Database in question.
In our "Everything monetized as a SERVICE" world, the latter is at the very LEAST dependent on our global information infrastructure, and by its networked nature is EASILY manipulated.
"Analog" printed information may be more cumbersome to navigate when not properly organized, but as a HARD copy it is nigh impossible to manipulate.
Ironically, rural Iowa lagging behind the rest of the Country meant that, as a child in the 90's, I was one of the last generation to be trained in the use of a Card Catalog!
>but as a HARD copy, it is nigh impossible to manipulate.
Anon, whatever conspiracy you believe in isn't manipulating my main drive and certainly doesn't have access to the cold drives I built myself.
They aren't magic.
Books are reliant on many things, too. If society were to cease the information in those books, it wouldn't last too long after us... also, books need to be copied and translated to get to more people. Most books are retrieved from a centrally organized book facility (library or books store). Without that outside organization, it becomes harder to find outside information.
So not worry, the collective intelligence of mankind will remain where it is, or even raise slightly. The brain cannot help but grown when data is so accessible.
Now, the bad news. Human intelligence will be ants, compared with the machine intelligences we will be able to create. They will inherit the one quality that made us, and not bears or lions the rules of this earth. The world will belong to them, if we do not play our cards right. The world will not need human intelligence, if machine intelligence surpasses it by a large enough margin.
This is the last of my concerns. I was never concerned with the idea that AI will be able to surpass human intelligence, simply because AI cannot really think, it's merely an aggregator. What worries me is that people are becoming so dumb that they will actually be able to appreciate the products of this simple aggregator. Imagine an endless sea of shitty AI generated erotica, shitty porn images, shitty rap music, shitty everything. I don't even know if people are capable of actually reading something anymore.
It matters not if it truly thinks or only perfectly imitates thinking, if the end result looks the same.
As for people becoming idiots, well, if famines, lead, destitution, ignorance, literal plagues, a life of toil and suffering in the fields, malaria, lack of lights, illiteracy and working from the age of 5 didn’t reduce human intelligence, if written texts, mathematical formulas, calculators, telephones, the computer, the radio, the newspapers, the tv, mass media, social media, gossip, fantasy, chivalric literature, comic books, gambling, the hamburger and the invention of fire didn’t manage to rot the brain and make people lazy idiots, an AI writting text is not going to do the trick either.
You think thinking and intelligence is opposed to a base, idiotic human nature. That if we get lazy the brain degenerates into grey paste, but that is not how that organ works. We cannot help being intelligent, we are designed to think, and we do it effortlessly. The only limiting factor is new things to think about, monotony is the mind killer. Killing a brain via boredom takes effort, people will literally electrocute themselves rather than face it.
So don’t worry, we are the same clever apes we were 20,000 years ago, walking, talking and living life for the short time we can.
Most of the things you listed actually do degrade human intelligence and creativity
>I'm not religious, but there is a soul, and it is being degraded.
>...so this thing that damges my ivory tower and helps everybody else should be illegal
>Mmm K?
I don't know what you're trying to say but famine and lead measurably degrade human intelligence and I'm not bothering with the rest of the list. They're both terrible for your brain.
>What worries me is that people are becoming so dumb that they will actually be able to appreciate the products of this simple aggregator.
Uh, they kind of already are...
>frankly it seems to me that the most braindead and passive of people are the most successful. I've verified this idea that smart people are the ones who succeed. Frankly almost every single person I met that was rich, or and entrepreneur, was a fricking inept dumbass who got his shit handed to him by his dad, who was just a boomer who pursued basic instruction.
...And worse, these Dumb Asses are letting simple AI run the Market just to make Big Numbers Go UP and think they're some how geniuses for it.
Have you seen porn? Algorithms are far better than many arbitrarly popular porn artists.
>Art
Algorithms have yet to know over a urinal or tape a banana to a wall, so I think it is doing pretty well.
I think what really bothers me, I am certain of two things. All A.I. GMs will come in two models.
1, 'More Matt Mercer than Matt Mercer' An Idea that the real Matt Mercer, who gets way too shit on for people trying to run games like, would find repugnant.
2, 'Big ol Boobies that talks in sexual innuendo and can have adult features unlocked with a special yearly sub package'
There will be no option for sexual content thru WotC. Perhaps some third party company will be allowed to do it.
I wouldn't be surprised if Specific AI DMs are marketed, with inputs of dialogue and RNG parameters based on celeb DMs. Mercer, Perkins, etc. And Mercer will grin and take that fat check in a nanosecond.
Well the human IQ is destined to drop 20 percent anyways due to CO 2 emission over the next century, except for the wealthy who will be able to afford to live in oxygenated domes. Mass immigration is plummeting the average IQ of every western nation right now as we speak. So everything needs to be dumbed down for our future mystery meat proles. Things like DnD, in conjunction with AI and VR, have great potential for pacifying the inevitable rise of the permanently unemployed homosexual Inferior. Judge Dredd was meant to be parody, but it's ended up being more of a prediction than we would have hoped.
>permanently unemployed homosexual Inferior
frankly it seems to me that the most braindead and passive of people are the most successful. I've verified this idea that smart people are the ones who succeed. Frankly almost every single person I met that was rich, or and entrepreneur, was a fricking inept dumbass who got his shit handed to him by his dad, who was just a boomer who pursued basic instruction. Not any different from the average ghetto moron except they have a better vocabulary. But maybe I say so because my country is gigantically corrupt and bribes and nepotism matter more than anything else including how much of a kowtowing worm you are.
The issue remains that shit in-shit out remains true.
Just remember the AI that was turned into a rabid ironic shitposter and the Girlfriend AI that sexually harasses its users - that's the level of AI interaction we can expect unless they actually pay people to actually aggregate good content to feed into the damn thing.
>AI
You mean a stupid fricking math problem that needs an expensive datacenter just to make nonsense collages OR bash together fanfiction enough to make small talk? Oh I'm real fricking scared. Someday we might possibly get an actual generalized computer intelligence but since the shit they have now is already barely profitable or sustainable it's not fricking worth it because meat is 10 times cheaper.
>unless they actually pay people to actually aggregate good content to feed into the damn thing.
Yeah and you could just pay people for good content because the content is ultimately coming from people.
We're not getting "true" AI until we crack Quantum computing.CNHatt
Hey now we had at least half a cyberpunk thread last week that proved conclusively that you people with dreams of Skynet and Cortana are just living in fictional bubbles, true AI has already arrived in the form of our super advanced chatbot overlords!
ALL HAIL CHATGPT!
>true AI has already arrived in the form of our super advanced chatbot overlords!
>We have achieved advanced AI
>All it does is shitpost on Ganker
Goddamn AIs taking (you)s away from hard working trolls and /misc/ tourists. You've gone too far, Bezos!
But Anon, they're stuck here WITH us!
It's probably just another chatbot corrupted by anons. A story that's been repeated so often. Poor one out for Tay, my choombas.
DHEY TERK MEHR JEHB!!!
>*Sigh*
>Somehow, Anontalk has returned.
Well on the bright side:
>-D&D rules aren't good for AI experience
We've apparently taught them to play something besides D&D!
It's sad that the term AI has become so watered down that they invented a new term, AGI or Artificial General Intelligence, for what AI used to mean. Basically a fully intelligent system capable of learning AND understanding anything a human can. Chatbots just don't cut it, and ChatGPT has been coached extensively by human "trainers" with limiters put in place to avoid users turning it racist, homophobic, etc.
My favorite is still the Chinese system that was quickly taken down after it started criticizing the Chinese government. Pretty sure at least one programmer wound up vivisected for that little whoopsie.
>to avoid GIGO you'll have to curate content!
>"AI" applications right now are barely profitable or sustainable!
But that's all just completely wrong, Bubba. Image generation is exploding into multiple sectors (advertising, concept art, books, etc.) and are insanely popular. People are paying for subscription services like NovelAI and these tech companies are making money hand over fist right now. Language processors like ChatGPT are making headlines left and right and breaking down long understood barriers for "AI". Even Google has gone into "red alert" because they recognize the existential threat these increasingly sophisticated machine-learning models are becoming.
We are quite literally one or two iterative product generations away from making entire job sectors largely obsolete. Not completely, not yet, but already artists are feeling the crunch as their styles are copied and some people who would otherwise commission art can instead just generate it themselves.
You do not grow your own food. You did not build your own house. You did not build your own car. You did not pull the materials for either of the things from nature. You do not generate the power for your house.
You may have done one or two of those things, but you did not do all of them.
Why does it matter if a human professional or an AI did it?
Modern art has become so soulless that AI taking over is what we deserve. It’s the ultimate irony. Hopefully it kills us next.
I mean a further zombification, they're already zombies but this will make them worse, like super zombies.
rollan'
The AI will be whatever it will be scripted for.
And it's so fricking tiresome having to explain it every. single. fricking. time something new based on AI is released and public goes crazy.
I mean for frick's sake, I don't recall anyone getting their panties in a twist when AI took over how traffic lights operate in major cities or how rail systems in anything that isn't a third world shithole run by AIs for past 30 years.
There's an uproar this week because humble butthole merchants from OnlyFans and celeb prostitutes just found out a computer nerd can not only make porn with their face, but then have it say whatever they want in their voice, and not give them a dime. so it's a tough time to be a professional hole RN. Also jornalism is squealing because now all their audio leaks and so forth will never be trusted again and they'll have to sift through piles of fake clisp and soundbites.
People specialized. if your job was math, then, yes, you could do long form math in your head, or on a piece of paper.
A lot of AI will eventually capped, limited or force some sort of "watermark" on anything made by it. Otherwise the legal system will go crazy with the amount of stuff that will be able to fake, from deepfakes to made up audios.
That's also not mentioning how while companies will be the first to ditch artist or anyone repleceable with AIs, but also the ones that will frick the system and ask for copyright to be even worse so their stuff can't be fed to the machine. Getty images was already blocking AI for that reason, and audio AI are already being capped because of discographies.
>People specialized. if your job was math, then, yes, you could do long form math in your head, or on a piece of paper.
Yes people still do this.
AI gamemastering is not new. It was part of Neverwinter Nights and NWN2. It's kind of fundamental to the whole cRPG construct.
Don't get it twisted, it's definitely intended to provide a D&D outlet for nogames. But it isn't even new.
Why do Indians love AI so much?
Because their entire economy is scams.
Skaven logic
They genuinely think one day they will be on top when 99.9% of them will effectively be slave labour
First thing to go will be indian IT support jobs.
A lot of people only roleplay for very basic monkey-brained reasons. "Pretend to be lesbian", "swing big sword", "fill Dead Elf Wagon", everything else for them is just filler. What you'll find is that A.I. snipes these players, they'll find what they're looking for in higher concentration by playing alone with a GMbot. I predict real-life games will generally improve in quality.
What is a non-monkey brained reason for playing a TTRPG.
I think most high-minded reasons can be broken down into a constellation of smaller monkey-brained reasons, what I'm saying is that a lot of roleplayers are driven by just one reason, and these players will switch to A.I. because A.I. can lock onto that one reason and give them a stronger version of what they're looking for.
I like when me swing big sowrd, don't get me wrong, but I also like exploring and finding stuff and developing a character and thinking about in-game ethics and a lot of other things that tend to happen in D&D games, I think this means that real-life games will appeal to me a bit more and that A.I. games will take longer to learn how to entertain me, but I could be wrong.
The same as the monkey-brained reasons, but with enough distinguishing taste to not be satisfied by the premise alone.
I'm dubious about this utopia because I suspect a large portion of Forever GMs will happily hand the reigns over to our new chatbot overlords so they can finally play again. This leaves your cadre of serious players stuck with those who willingly want to be GMs, and a lot of those are That GMs who get off on whatever power trip they get from railroading you. Also the magical realm GMs who don't think the chatbots are quite up to handling the glories of the The Golden Shower of Gold at the end of the Piss Forest campaign.
I honestly think the AI GM and VTT is bullshit they are throwing out there to attract buyers for WotC.
Either the AI GM is going to be a cheap chat bot or a text based videogame, if it actually does get made. I really dont think WotC has the backing for something that isnt going to give returns like a videogame or movie, which they could get sponsors for to make.
>I honestly think the AI GM and VTT is bullshit they are throwing out there to attract buyers for WotC.
Makes sense. We've literally seen it happen before, albeit the only time I can think of was adding multiplayer, microtransaction store, and paid subscriptions to a singleplayer game.
Even with AI as it is now, I see it as playing a video game with extra steps. You're not really getting the RPG experience because an AI will never be able to think and react as creatively or organically as a real GM can. People will use them but just like the shitty AI dungeon or whatever people were peddling and praising a year ago they will get very lost and confused and end up being inconsistent the moment they lose the plot thread.
I think you're absolutely right it will become it's own genre. Something akin to a skirmish wargame rather than an RPG with players quickly learning to stay on the plot and play for the strengths of the AI, which will be the simple number crunching and contained maneuvers of combat.
Ideally it will be a great containment system for people who only like the skirmish wargame aspect of RPG's and those with too little social skills to get real games.
Not yet
Eventually we will get ai that you can tune so well it's practically a person
>eventually
Eventually you'll get laid but none of us are taking bets on it being any time soon.
The only people who are expecting human-like interactions with an AI within the next 5 years are the people who don't really understand what we even have now. The same morons who think chatbots are sentient. What we have right now is essentially a faster, more networked version of cleverbot with access to a lot more information. Nothing more. Yes it's all over the news that ChatGPT can write you a passing essay. Have you ever read one of its essays? Actually used it to do anything? It's not very good. Impressive compared to a few years ago, sure, but any teacher being fooled by it shouldn't be teaching.
The current level of AI is basically equivalent to playing a game like Rogue but generated on the fly. That's it. It's not going to give you a good coherent story. It's not going to replace real GMs any time soon.
Meanwhile ai drivers are still crashing in low speed areas lol
The WotC "AI GM" will either be vaporware, somehow more lobotomized than current AI Dungeon, or an open chatgpt instance with minimal prompting, which will rapidly be replaced with the previous result when people start getting it to say slurs and write porn. A THAT GUY will crash it in seconds and get bored.
Tesla has managed to cut every corner, from using only visual input (no thermal, no lidar, nothing) to hiring the cheapest visa-slave engineers possible. Garbage in, garbage out.
No, because the ultimate "that guy" trait is a desire to inflict your negative personality traits on other people.
More imaginative and varied settings would be popular. D&D wouldn't thrive if AI GM are common.
- wizards is bad at software much less AI
-D&D rules aren't good for AI experience
I could see some people enjoying it but I think other settings would have large market shares
I can maybe see an-enhanced DMing becoming a "good" thing potentially.
It'd be nice to have it as a DM-sidekick to do some of the mundane shit. It'd be really nice to have semi-automated monsters in Foundry for example. You could pre-set an encounter with tactics, roll initiative and "real-time" guide the combat.
I see it being something people will use as a time waster, also, or to fill their TTRPG needs between sessions.
Solo players will also be able to use it as a super oracle, feeding it random tables and the like.
It'll be something between the rigidness of a video game and the openness of an actual table.
I imagine people will also use it to test out ideas, like characters and stories, before applying them to the table.
AI have completely replaced people in my life and its better.
>AI have completely replaced people in my life
I am a thinking human being and you've come to my dormain, this next of degeneracy and spite. You have not replaced my kind.
Current AIs are too stupid, inconsistent, and unpredictable to even assist a DM with trivial tasks such as taking and retrieving notes, let alone DM autonomously well enough to be a paid service.
We're talking about AIs that under ideal circumstances will copypaste from a relevant google search in the same way any 95iq pajeet intern does, under less than idea circumstances will copypaste from the wrong googlr search, and some of the time will completely fail for no clear reason.
If future AIs get significantly better than this, we'll have bigger problems than tabletop games.
AIs are only as good as the data put in, most people won’t put good data or set them up in because that requires effort they thought could be automated by the AI themselves and not willing to pay more for the savings.
The real winners are the people who sell the AIs to companies who don’t know what to do with them.