Honestly i’m fine with AI in a virtual tabletop environment, and am curious to see where it ends up.
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.
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.
owner of Hasbro afaik doesn’t even like D&D and has never played it
It’s a publicly traded company. It’s owned by shareholders. You may be thinking of the CEO.
I’m sure he is quite right that the CEO has never played D&D though. Or any other game. He was produced in a lab and spends every waking moment (which are all of them since they engineer CEOs not to need sleep) devising ways to be an even more terrible facsimile of a human.
Yeah, Monopoly is more his kind of game…
Fun fact: Monopoly was originally called The Landlord’s Game and was made by a Georgist to illustrate the inherent unfairness and ruthlessness of capitalism and especially the exploitative nature of land ownership.
Then ruthless capitalists made a couple tweaks and made vast riches selling a derived but legally destinct version celebrating the very things the original vilified before being bought out by Hasbro who now control D&D.
I have no issue with AI in tabletop roleplaying. Being able to create an NPC and just define its position and what it’s motivations are could lead to some really organic interesting gameplay.
I totally disagree with how that articles author lumps in AI with NFTs too. AI is supplemental. It’s just a tool to further expand on existing technology like search engine optimization. NFTs don’t provide anything like that. They are just gimmicks.
AI discourse has way too much “Throwing the baby out with the bathwater,” especially from a lot of people who have no idea what they’re talking about. AI, as a thing, is not a perfect system. It’s not a magic panacea that will cure all. There are legitimate concerns about how much it infringes on creative spaces and how it may put people out of work. There are also legitimate concerns about the AI training data scraping web-hosted content indiscriminately without permission. However, these are not the same as AI just being “bad”.
Do I think a D&D campaign led by a ChatGPT-like DM would be “good”? Probably not as it stands. I’ve played a lot with ChatGPT and its limitations are pretty obvious. Could it get better in the future? Probably. Is it an interesting possible way to get to play D&D if you can’t get a group together? I mean, it’s gotta be better than nothing, right? But the real interesting prospect to me is machine-learning powered tools for the DM. A System that’s trained on WotC-owned resources that lets you just choose a paintbrush that’s labeled “cave” and draw out a series of tunnels and have it automatically populate with crystals and mushrooms and visual points of interest, which lets you sketch out a good-looking map in minutes. Then, as your party is in the cave, the system knows what type of “biome” you used so it has a button to let you generate a random encounter, which it takes from your character levels and where your players are. There’s a lot of ways that “smart” tools could take a lot of work off the DM’s shoulders that would be great. I don’t know if they’re in the pipeline, but the point is that AI isn’t a boogeyman that’s just out to steal jobs and IP.
I really like that you mentioned machine learning. ML is a great practical application of a subset of AI. You don’t necessarily need an advanced AI DM. Sometimes you just need a tool to simplify DMing. I remember writing cellular automata that would build maps and dungeons. That’s not using ML or neural networks or anything like that, but it was code that simplified my task. People tend to think about the hype behind buzzwords and not how they are practically applied.
My only fear would be that this turns dnd more into a walled garden.
Looks like there are no plans for AI in their VTT:
Update 2/08: Hasbro’s representation has sent us a statement about the usage of AI in future games: “We’re very excited about the partnership with Xplored, but want to clarify that this partnership is centered around future applications within board games and not the Dungeons & Dragons tabletop roleplaying game or its upcoming virtual tabletop.”
Their VTT seems primed for microtranactional garbage though, and Foundry is amazing, so I don’t think I’ll touch it.
