Andy Pressman

@andypressman

low stakes, high jinx

he/him
andypressman.com/

Books, interfaces, games

Andy Pressman @andypressman7/4/2023, 4:58 PM

TTRPG contests and AI

I've been working on a submission to the One Page Dungeon contest, which updated their guidelines over the weekend. The guidelines have changed since last year, and now specify that

You are permitted to use an AI program such as ChatGPT to help develop or inspire your submission, but we strongly recommend writing the text yourself. If you choose to use an AI art generator such as Midjourney or Stable Diffusion, you must disclose the tool(s) you used in your submission. For the 2023 contest, all artwork will be judged on its own merits.

I don't think I'm comfortable participating. This is not intended as a knock on the contest, which seems really cool and is clearly a labor of love. But it's not a standard I want to see established, even for amateur work.

Partly this is to support the people who do the work professionally, of course. But it's also a matter of aesthetics! TTRPGs have a legacy of art done by untrained illustrators, work that's a best-attempt-I-can-muster translation of idea (vision!) to page. Amateur art brings an undeniable energy to homemade games. Using AI art generators to create images that look professional sacrifices that energy in exchange for a veneer of market logic.

(And I'm not even touching on the decision not to outright ban using ChatGPT to write the game text. Such low-hanging fruit!)

#TTRPG #ttrpg design

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in reply to @andypressman's post:

Twinkee @Twinkee7/4/2023, 5:12 PM

That's a bummer :/

@BigSadDad7/4/2023, 9:50 PM

But like, What's the problem?
Not trying to play devils advocate or anything. But requiring a clear disclosure on used tools I think is a step in the right direction.

That and content written by a human being is always going to read and feel better than anything AI could generate.

I'm not a contestant, but if I had to come up with a full dungeon and have interesting tidbits, I definitely could! But also asking me to make artwork or drawings for it? That's not my forte. I think it would be cool to ask a program to generate a (low quality) image to help demonstrate and articulate something I simply couldn't do on my own.

I think the dislike is coming from a place of fear. The fear that AI will simply do all the writing forever and we won't need writers anymore. On some counts I agree. But only for extremely low quality churn bait. Think your average daytime trash TV. But for something like this? No way.

Twinkee @Twinkee7/5/2023, 7:07 PM

Art and writing AI are trained on stolen work. AI is already being to replace the creators of said work. By using AI to generate content, you are helping the creators of that AI fine tune the process that is stealing the work and livelihood of those creators.

In a perfect world AI would be a fine thing to play around with, but as it exists now, it's unethical to engage with it.