I’m fine with it just in general. If they can make an AI that does a good job dungeon mastering it’s going to open up the hobby tremendously. New players can jump right in even if they don’t know an existing experienced player to hold their hands, the “forever DMs” can be free to play too, groups that just don’t have any DM can play.
If it’s bad at DMing then nobody will use it. Oh well. If human DMs want to DM, they can do that too. It’s just the same as with the art AIs, the existence of these things doesn’t stop people from still doing things “by hand” if they want to.
You realize that no one complained that ai art would discourage people from drawing, right? It’s because the ai scans other artists works and designs an imitation based on its prompt. It’s stops artists from being able to profit from their work because it introduces a free alternative that stole their designs to learn.
I think the bigger concern than whether or not it’s good will be what it learned from.
Don’t be so sure about that “no one”, I’ve seen plenty of hyperbolic arguments along those lines.
Stopping artists from being able to profit is a separate issue, and not particularly relevant to DMing since most DMs don’t charge for it.
I’m pretty sure about it. No one who suggested that deserves to be taken seriously. But intellectual property theft is a legitimate concern and comparing them as equal concerns is disingenuous.
Lots of people produce content and make a living off of 5e, and not just 3rd party producers, plenty of people use patreon as a means to distributetheir work. Will the ai be trained exclusively on WOTC playtesting or will it be able to scour the internet for plot hooks and npcs and loot and whatever else it needs? It’s inevitable, and well known that some of that content has been reposted and copied in various places across the internet. The damages they suffer from user piracy wouldn’t be comparable to an ai running multiple games on an online platform owned by the ‘world’s most popular rpg’ not to mention that they would be charging for at least a onednd or dnd beyond or whatever they’re calling it this week, subscription.
It’s not as simple as “oh cool, more people could play”. It’s just their next attempt at eliminating the third party market.
That’s my thought basically - theres really no way this can go really wrong.
I suppose it could go wrong if WOTC keeps throwing money down an AI money pit for a system that never works quite right, and then they end up losing market share to a system created by a scrappy startup that does but it’s built on a different fantasy TTRPG system.
Oh no.
