Do you lack the time, creativity or intelligence to think about a good background story for your favorite toon? Are you an altoholic and don’t know how to come up with 50 stories and another 49 for your second account? Do you shamelessly copy stories written by someone else?
Than the time has come! Newest goblin technology makes it possible to get your very own background story with little time and efford! Just use ChatAI and see what it can do for you!
Here is one example: I asked the AI to do this:
Dear AI, please write me a story within the lore of Wold of Warcraft about a goblin alchemist named Spruggl. She was born poor and her father was a bad alchemist. She tries to be better than him and often uses shortcuts to reach her goal.
And I got this:
Once upon a time, there was a goblin alchemist named Spruggl. She was born into poverty, and her father was a terrible alchemist who could never quite get the mixtures right. But Spruggl was determined to be better than him, and she was willing to take shortcuts to reach her goal.
She stole recipes from other alchemists, experimented with unconventional ingredients, and even cut corners to save time. Her unorthodox methods often led to unpredictable results, but she never gave up.
One day, Spruggl stumbled upon an ancient text that contained the recipe for a powerful elixir that promised to grant its drinker great strength and agility. Determined to create the elixir and prove herself as a great alchemist, she threw herself into her work.
Despite her shortcuts, Spruggl’s skills as an alchemist were undeniable, and the elixir she created was a tremendous success. It sold for a high price, and soon, Spruggl had more gold than she ever imagined.
But as she reveled in her newfound wealth and success, she began to notice something strange happening to those who drank her elixir. They were becoming more aggressive, more prone to violence and anger. It seemed that her shortcut had come with a heavy price.
Desperate to find a solution, Spruggl sought out the help of other alchemists, but none could find a way to reverse the effects of the elixir. It seemed that she had doomed those who drank it to a life of anger and aggression.
Ashamed of what she had done, Spruggl gave up her life as an alchemist and devoted herself to finding a cure for those who had been affected by her elixir. It took years of research and experimentation, but eventually, she was able to create an antidote that would reverse the effects of the elixir and restore those who had been affected to their former selves.
Though she had never become the great alchemist she had dreamed of being, Spruggl found peace in knowing that she had made amends for her past mistakes and helped those in need. She continued to work as an alchemist, but this time, she did so with the utmost care and diligence, always putting the well-being of others before her own desires.
Obviously, this is not a serious suggestion to get your background story written by AI, but I think it would be a lot of fun to do this. Join me if you like! Let’s read some background stories written from mechagonian ghosts in the machine.
Though I’m sure the OP means no harm and this is meant just for fun (no hate aimed at Spruggl), on the topic of AI I’m not too fond of observing how the use of machine learning softwares is spilling into writing and visual arts in online roleplay communities too. I get it if someone would like to generate something for private games or create something as a base for inspiration, but I’m not particularly looking forward to the day when you can’t appreciate someone’s literature or visual art skills in creative online communities anymore because you’re left uncertain whether it’s AI or not. Or if it starts discouraging people from cultivating their own personal voices.
Edit: Machine learning has advanced a lot in terms of quality at least on the visuals side in just a year, and the text based generation will likely follow suit. Even if it looked somewhat clumsy right now, isn’t what it’s likely to be in a year or two and the more people train it, the better it gets.
Yeah, this was obviously meant for fun and exploring new technologies on an area that is quite irrelevant for humanity. Took it from another realm where I read quite a lot of funny and strange AI generated stories and thought it could be fun here as well.
In reallife I work with children and they will use this technology, whether you like it or not. So I need to keep up with it. It will affect their future, like homework assignments in school and you better think about it now than later. I think you can use it and have fun, even if you might be worried about Skynet. But it is shocking how good it is on more serious topic. Except Lyrics.
I believe this isn’t necessarily bad: a lot of character profiles are a bit formulaic. If you’re going to write something bland, at least have the AI polish it for you a little.
I view this as a challange, other than a somewhat good piece of story. How do I make my background feel more human?
If I wanted to write with myself, I would open Google Documents up and start writing something, not feed an AI prompts and pretend that it is some twisted form of roleplay.
In real life I work as an artist and art outsource manager, and I also need to keep up with how the AI software develop. They will affect the line of work for many creative industries, such as writers, visual artists, photoshoot models, voice actors, music etc. I’m not against new tech, or worried about Skynet - I’m worried about how companies are let free to use anyone’s photos, art or texts to train commercial products without the content owners’ consent in a way that shouldn’t fall under the fair use category. And I’m concerned about the impact of these software if left unchecked, as it will have an influence on our culture, and how it’ll shift our appreciation for human arts (which I consider very relevant for humanity).
The most glaring issues with softwares like Midjourney and ChatGPT is that they have been trained through data laundering of immense scale through legal loopholes (such as using the LAION image database, which was allowed to datascrape the Internet on such an immense scale for non-commercial research purposes, but LAION is funded by Stability AI that is using the database for commercial gains with Stable Diffusion). Laws are dragging behind on this subject, and the tech companies everywhere right now are rushing to try normalise the use of AI tech for their own benefit. The more people are using them for fun, the bigger the outcry when this new exciting tool is threatened to be taken away from people. Ultimately though, we shouldn’t allow tech companies to do everything they like with our content online without our consent.
My apologies about leading the conversation to more serious discussion, I just think it’s important for roleplayers to be aware of the current circumstances with the technology, and consider whether it would take our creative community toward the better or worse in the long run if left unchecked.
Edit: I don’t think this genie of a tech will ever be put back in its bottle. But hopefully regulations will be put in place that force tech companies to respect people’s copyright to their own content, so that both creatives and new tech can prosper hand-in-hand, and that the current models will be replaced by more ethically trained AI softwares.
Edit 2: Meant Stability AI (the company) instead of Stable Diffusion (the product).
I don’t think any apology is needed, it’s a relevant point and, honestly, it’s a little diquieting how ‘ok’ with it some people are, particularly creative peeps I’ve seen.
Seeing people (rightfully) being vocal and negative towards art thieves, then so much less so towards particularly the visual side of Software Generated stuff is… bleugh.
Writing is much the same, however. It says a lot less to me about ‘democratasing’ creativity (which is a damn weasel political phrase if I ever heard one) and a lot more about peo
… I was going to elaborate after my initial comment but forgot.
So anyway,
My hatred comes from the fact that roleplay to me is a cooperative writing and storytelling exercise. It’s meant to practice one’s creative writing and tell stories with other people, as opposed to what was already brought up, with single player RPGs.
If you take away the other real person behind the character I’m interacting with, which is what AI generated backstories are a step towards, then such a core element of the hobby is taken away that in my opinion it ruins the very thing many specifically enjoy about it, taking away the reason and purpose we became invested in RP for. It would severely jeopardise my enjoyment of it if this was put into practice in game, at least.
These are… actually very good points. I am not much of an expert of any AI, so hearing people’s criticism on these things is quite important and definitely your words can open up some eyes. Thanks!
There’s bucketfuls of criticism towards these AI softwares, and I’m actively following where the lawsuits thrown at them are headed.
Here’s some examples how AI/machine learning softwares are already causing harm in some creative fields (writers, visual artists, photography, human models):
ChatGPT:
AI-generated fiction has flooded several literary magazines. This is a shame because one of them has had a good reputation getting stories reviewed quickly, and they had to put hold on new submissions entirely. I really wouldn’t want to be a reviewer right now having to go through submissions. I also don’t envy teachers who have to figure out what to do with various student assignments going forward.
Writers Guild of America is seeking to protect writers from machine generated stories:
ChatGPT is facing criticism from major news outlets for allegedly using their articles to train the artificial intelligence tool without compensating them:
We’ll see where that goes.
As for visual arts, here’s some issues I’ve seen happen over the past half a year or so with image generation softwares such as Midjourney. I said some? Okay, it’s a lot:
When searching for a famous artist’s work, you’re likely to come across AI works that used the artist’s name in the prompts, but that the artist had nothing to do with. Their style and name are getting mixed up with AI generated content that sought to mimic the artist’s works.
AI generated images used for harassment campaigns, such as against artists who expressed being against their name/works used in generation prompts. Prompters made a competition out of who’d be able to create an AI model that best mimics the artist voicing their disapproval.
Art spaces where you’d usually go to admire people’s skill in imagery, such as ArtStation, DeviantArt, Facebook art communities, and other social media, getting flooded with AI images. They thrive especially on social media sites where cool thumbnails are everything, and viewers generally spend but few seconds looking at the images and either leave a react to it or not, and move on. The longer you look at AI generated images though, the more you notice things that look off.
When it comes to roleplaying communities, the Argent Archives for example has been a place where I’ve for a long time enjoyed browsing human expression in the form of stories and art, and it’s been a shame seeing AI generated content starting to appear there as well. Double so when a users slaps made by ArtistNameHere in the credits while it’s obvious to anyone with any experience with Midjourney that the image was generated. We see you.
Prompters using an artist’s work-in-progress image to generate a “finished result” and post it up before the artist has finished their piece, and then accuse the artist of stealing. Seen this happen to a big name artist on social media, the accuser had to double down fortunately.
After some big AI models started removing specific artist names from the dataset (such as Greg Rutkowski), there’s been KickStarter fundraiser to train a new AI model with claims to make it possible to generate you-know-what-graphy, and to plagiarize specific artists. They were rather upfront about this, and after public attention edited their post to make it sound more innocent. Kickstarter thankfully removed the campaign from their website after it caught a lot of online attention. That Kickstarter then moved to Patreon, etc.
Prompters have been selling AI works (such commissions claiming them to be original art, art books, texture and illustration packs) though the ability to copyright these works is very muddy right now.
There’s been claims of sensitive material to have been found in the LAION dataset that Midjourney used/uses, such as medical images that a patient who came upon, and hadn’t approved to be posted online. Somehow it had leaked from the hospital and been scraped.
Human models have found their likeness stolen for AI imagery. In some cases for very uncomfortable context too. Related to this, the other day I saw a new AI initiative where the creator is trying to make money by offering AI models for hire to sell products such as clothing.
It’ll become easier to create fake news/events/situations of anything and anyone (with enough pictures to be trained on) when the effort barrier becomes super low, while the image quality keeps getting more believable. Just wait until someone gets mad at you over some Argent Dawn drama and embarks on an AI crusade.
I’ve taken a look at a website where you can browse images used in the enormous AI dataset. By putting in the search words “night elf art” for example, there were tons of artworks created not by Blizzard Entertainment, but by independent digital artists, including artists I know from Argent Dawn and social media art circles. You can bet that a lot of art people on AD have commissioned is in there.
On that note, isn’t it curious that professional-looking digital art probably makes a very small percentage of a 5 billion image dataset, but that small percentage must’ve played a huge role in Midjourney being able to deliver the results that it now does. You don’t get the same results training on stick figure crayon doodles. Midjourney has already made a lot of profit from selling their services (subscriptions).
I tried out Midjourney last summer to see how it works after seeing it featured in ImagineFX magazine for digital artists, and I understand where the excitement to use it comes from, but with everything that has come up around the software since then, I cannot justify using it at all. Even if you’re not paying for the product, you’re the product in helping train the AI.
Some tech companies are pushing an “opt out” rather than “opt in” stance towards datasets now that they’ve been put under pressure about the ethics. Sorry but people shouldn’t be chasing to opt out every single bit of text, images or audio that they post online. As if we even have control over wherever the content ends up posted around the Internet.
When it comes to audio side of things, I’ve for example seen the partner of a voice actor who passed away, claiming to be busy now trying to remove the VA’s content online after people started grabbing them for VA AI models. That must’ve been fun.
Summa summarum, in its current form, this isn’t the kind of tech you should release into the wilds without any consideration of its long term impacts or people’s rights to their online content. Machine learning softwares will have a role in the creative industries, but in its current form it’s causing a lot of headache and concern, understandably so. Hope the above list offers people unaware of all this going on at least some understanding towards creatives who are upset feeling exploited. Machine learning is far from how we humans learn, adopt and express art, so the whole “humans learn from looking at pictures too, what’s the difference” argument shouldn’t even be used.
I saw someone say that a lot of AI prompters don’t actually even want fast art, they want fast love, identity or money while this is still fresh and that got me wondering. Is it for some about that feeling of being a rockstar… before everyone else is a rockstar too?
I believe this tech may hurt the creativity of people, especially young folk, who adopt a nihilist attitude towards various forms of human expression; why bother learning skill X when everyone else is just using this magic box to generate in seconds what would take me 5-10 years to learn to do all by myself?
Lastly, as a society we’re already consuming all kinds of entertainment at an ever increasing speed, and people’s attention span keeps getting shorter and shorter. How many of us sit down to read books anymore? Look at a picture for longer than a few seconds? What happens if we become numb in the face of constant overload of content?
Now let me rest my fingers before I go back to edit this long post for XX times to fix all the grammar issues the human way, or maybe I’ll just replace it with ChatGPT’s explanation of all these problems
Regarding the use of AI to create stories, one thought in particular does come to mind — I (probably won’t) apologise if it comes off like a series of platitudes, but it continues the shift of literature becoming a product rather than a passion.
Acrona made a very good point earlier in the thread, about the human aspect of art and its importance. The product of someone’s imagination, practice, and applied effort is far more valuable than inputting some criteria into an engine and leading your computer do the rest.
More than just being blatant theft of intellectual property, AI generated content is soulless. It doesn’t contain any meaning beyond those prompts. It doesn’t tell us anything, doesn’t convey anything, any beauty is totally artificial.
I’ve seen this really start to pick up in pace these last few months. It’s still very much in the minority, but that it’s started eating into the space of art on AA at all should never have happened.
I do have a bit of a laugh when their credit is themselves though.
When searching for a famous artist’s work, you’re likely to come across AI works that used the artist’s name in the prompts, but that the artist had nothing to do with. Their style and name are getting mixed up with AI generated content that sought to mimic the artist’s works.