Hi everyone!
I think if you’re going to have a position on AI, you need to have tried it, used it and understood what the limitations are.
I am broadly against AI in creativity. I’ve had all the horror stories you can imagine: writing submitted by people claiming it was theirs, artwork…
I wanted to talk today about something that I did to try out using AI, just a little in something I would argue doesn’t matter creatively: session prep! This just results in bullet points that I then use to guide me through the events of the session.
I had an idea of what I wanted to happen: the mood, the events.
And what I did was I asked the AI (in this case Chat GPT) to assist me with coming up with how it smells and looks, what sounds you can hear, describing murals what civilians say as you walk past and so on.
Now, I think what I got was far too over-specific compared to what I really needed, and I scaled it back significantly, but it meant that it took me half an hour to prepare a session, rather than perhaps an hour. I think I threw out about 3/4 of what it wanted to do.
It also relieved me of intense thinking so I could do it alongside other stuff that I had to do.
As this was an emergency session where I was stepping in for a GM who couldn’t make it, I would say it’s been a broadly successful experiment.
This comes with the normal caveats that I would give to AI: don’t let it do the thinking for you! Let it offer you ideas, yes, but don’t let it decide for you what you’re going to do. Use this tool to prompt the ideas in your own head
As a games master, your job is portraying a world. Some people like to know what they can smell, what it looks like that there are trailing wires you might trip over, whatever. And some people (like me) don’t think about that when they describe an environment. I prefer to let people imagine.
It’s all about your choice of what you want to include. Make sure you keep it that way!
– Ed
