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Slipspace wrote:

 kabaakaba wrote:
It's obvious that no current LLMs could make proper rules, but designer for this task AI make them better. Also it's can play test own rules if designed so. But it's required insane amount of work

Ai might actually be useful for playtesting. In theory you could give AI the rules and tell it to playtest and balance points values according to its testing. IT's the kind of thing AI should be very good at as it's basically how chess engines teach themselves to play. Wargames are obviously much more complex, but the principle is the same, I suspect the problem would be with creating useable outputs but if you gave the AI the structure you wanted the points to be in (integer values only, no conditional costs based on previous selections, etc) it could work.

As far as generating the rules from scratch? Absolutely not. Aside from the problems of Ai created anything, good rules are as much about creativity as they are mechanics.

Heresy does read as though it was passed through an AI filter as the final edit, as others have pointed out here. I've rarely seen such an impenetrable ruleset in my life. I'm sure it all makes perfect sense, but it does an awful job of communicating that.

ChatGPT and Copilot cannot do this.

I have tried.

When my human playtesters were unavailable, I thought I would feed my rules into these two LLMs and see how different effects would affect combat.

They could not remember more than a single paragraphs worth of rules and would insert their own made up rules, come up with numbers that are impossible (ie. Roll 3d6 and give me the total. OK, the total is 2. )

It was an infuriating waste of time. I spent way too long arguing with a system that... Argh. It pisses me off thinking about it.

The only cool thing Chatbots do successfully is splice in really cool backgrounds to your warhammer miniatures.

They are a waste of time and energy to do anything else.

 Easy E wrote:
Obviously, AI writing has come a long way in the past few years. Still, mostly a fancy auto-complete task with a bigger database to scrape, but that database allows it to put more and more things together in a more complete way than ever.

With that said, we have seen a rise in AI written books and scripts on various platforms. Wargame Vault and similar places have very strict rules about declaring when AI has been used for writing, editing and artwork purposes. That way, you can screen AI generated content out of your searches.

However, as a rules writer; I am curious how many of you are ready to spend $$$ on AI written rules for games?

Short answer? Feth no.

While we all heavily criticize GW's rules writing, I think we can all at least agree that they both give a crap and try (even if they miss the mark). Much like AI-generated slop in other art forms, rules would just be beyond an AI's ability to create in any meaningful way.

Also, if it's worth doing, it's worth paying a person to do it right. [insert joke about GW rules here]

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

They could not remember more than a single paragraphs worth of rules and would insert their own made up rules, come up with numbers that are impossible (ie. Roll 3d6 and give me the total. OK, the total is 2. )

There was a 40K player like that in a gaming club I used to go to...

1) I feel like this thread could age pretty fast with the development of AI.

2) Right now AI is useless for writing coherent rules.

3) I could see AI in the future being useful for basic scenario and story creation in campaigns. OPR Starquest has a basic system of creating missions, where you just tell the app which models you have available. I could see AI being helpful for stuff like that.

 kronk wrote:

I'm not entirely sure the 3rd edition Horus Heresy ruleset wasn't passed through an AI generator. It reads like unnecessarily complicated stereo instructions.

I have a new theory about this.

Since release, we've learned that the game is much improved and flows smoother than 2.0

I think that the team made a slick new book, that cut down on page flipping by culling USRs, nested rules, wargear referencing, etc... then some "bean counter" (the archetypal enemy in GW office culture stories) came in and said "oh, no no no, the book can't be shorter than the last one, do it over" and the devs were fed up and just fed it to a LLM and asked to double the page count without altering meaning.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
1) I feel like this thread could age pretty fast with the development of AI.

AI getting better won't change the fact that there's no point paying someone else to use it for you. If anything, as AI improves and provides better output with less need for revising prompts and filtering through failed outputs, there will be even less reason to pay someone else to do it for you than there is now...

 insaniak wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
1) I feel like this thread could age pretty fast with the development of AI.

AI getting better won't change the fact that there's no point paying someone else to use it for you. If anything, as AI improves and provides better output with less need for revising prompts and filtering through failed outputs, there will be even less reason to pay someone else to do it for you than there is now...

Well... there might be some disagreement with that.

I looked up AI created RPGs and there are a bunch of them. Most are rules-less text responses.

But this means that lonely people are in the market for AI driven drivel.

 insaniak wrote:

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
1) I feel like this thread could age pretty fast with the development of AI.

AI getting better won't change the fact that there's no point paying someone else to use it for you. If anything, as AI improves and provides better output with less need for revising prompts and filtering through failed outputs, there will be even less reason to pay someone else to do it for you than there is now...

You are probably right about the original question of directly paying AI to write rules. I was rather thinking about posts dismissing anything AI outright or describing it as too dumb to write rules. Give it a couple of years.
Also, chances are many rules we pay for in a couple of years will be written with the help of AI.

The more I find out about how AI is being used, the more I understand where the Butlerian folks were coming from. "In some cases it's actually the best tool for-" Don't care. On the pyre, burn it all. The only winning move is not to play.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:
Well... there might be some disagreement with that.

I looked up AI created RPGs and there are a bunch of them. Most are rules-less text responses.

But this means that lonely people are in the market for AI driven drivel.

Or it just means that people are making it. Doesn't mean anyone is actually buying it.

When you make it easier to create something, more people will create that thing. See the proliferation of DIY T-shirt sites filled with product that people made because they could, and because they were sold the idea that it would make them money... and that never actually sell, because the market is oversaturated due to the ease with which the product can be made.

As AI becomes more accessible, more people will use it to create content that they think other people will want... but that very accessibility means that there becomes increasingly less reason to not do it yourself. Returning to the T-shirt comparison, if there's a site that lets you buy custom T-shirts that also contains an AI image tool that lets you create whatever T-shirt you want, there is no reason to ever pay other people for their designs... if you see a design you like, you just ask the AI to create it for you.

Of course, in time, that means fewer people creating new content, which gives the AI less material to plagiarise, which makes everything worse for everyone. It all only works in the long term if AI becomes properly regulated and creatives are properly reimbursed for their work being used to train AI.

AI should be kept out of the creative sphere..

I don’t want AI “art”. I don’t want AI movies. I don’t want AI music. I don’t want AI telly. I don’t want AI stories of any length.

Art and creativity are such a huge part of what it is to be human. When I read a book, I’m invited into the mind of the author. They’re communicating thoughts and views to me. When I see human made art, it can provoke strong emotional reactions, and not always what the artist intended.

These things take skill and care. Someone has put thought, care and passion into them, even if I end up not liking or appreciating the end product.

AI cannot create, only regurgitate. It cannot offer a novel view or perspective. It can’t speculate. It will never create or reinvent a genre.

Finally? Humans are perfectly capable of churning out absolute crap. We don’t need a fancy programme to do that. I mean, Tracey Emin managed to convince art world goons that a manky bed was art.

AI generated rules? No.

AI playtesting? That sounds theoretically helpful to a small operation like us, but also sounds like it's not there yet.

Buut...

AI art? Neither Jim or I can draw for gak. Neither Jim or I can Photoshop for gak without putting the year aside. We can't afford to pay an actual human artist. So we either don't do Apocalypse: Earth with art at all, or we do it with some AI art, and hope that it sells enough that we can one day do a 3rd edition that allows us to hire human illustrators.

This is tech that hasn't really shown its hand yet, and will probably take at least a decade to bed in. Meanwhile, it is what it is, and what it is has its place as long as we all recognise its not the cause of or solution to all of humanity's problems

Do Apocalypse Earth with no art at all, then. I’m not the only person posting here who will refuse to buy a product loaded with AI art.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
If you can’t draw and can’t afford art, can you take pictures of miniatures or something?

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Do Apocalypse Earth with no art at all, then. I’m not the only person posting here who will refuse to buy a product loaded with AI art.

Same feeling here.

Skinflint Games wrote:AI art? Neither Jim or I can draw for gak. Neither Jim or I can Photoshop for gak without putting the year aside. We can't afford to pay an actual human artist. So we either don't do Apocalypse: Earth with art at all, or we do it with some AI art, and hope that it sells enough that we can one day do a 3rd edition that allows us to hire human illustrators.

Then you use no art until you can actually afford to recompense someone who can, or learn it yourselves. I would refuse to buy a product that has used any generative AI.

How do you copyright your work with AI art in it?

I was contemplating using an AI altered map of 1987 Berlin, but I was concerned by the ownership issues of using AI art in my work.

I ended up playing cut and paste with scissors and a scanner.

I am also making a game but I can't afford a rules writer, so I'm just going to publish Apocalypse:Earth under my own name with the words moved around a bit

Lathe Biosas wrote:

Slipspace wrote:

 kabaakaba wrote:
It's obvious that no current LLMs could make proper rules, but designer for this task AI make them better. Also it's can play test own rules if designed so. But it's required insane amount of work

Ai might actually be useful for playtesting. In theory you could give AI the rules and tell it to playtest and balance points values according to its testing. IT's the kind of thing AI should be very good at as it's basically how chess engines teach themselves to play. Wargames are obviously much more complex, but the principle is the same, I suspect the problem would be with creating useable outputs but if you gave the AI the structure you wanted the points to be in (integer values only, no conditional costs based on previous selections, etc) it could work.

As far as generating the rules from scratch? Absolutely not. Aside from the problems of Ai created anything, good rules are as much about creativity as they are mechanics.

Heresy does read as though it was passed through an AI filter as the final edit, as others have pointed out here. I've rarely seen such an impenetrable ruleset in my life. I'm sure it all makes perfect sense, but it does an awful job of communicating that.

ChatGPT and Copilot cannot do this.

I have tried.

When my human playtesters were unavailable, I thought I would feed my rules into these two LLMs and see how different effects would affect combat.

They could not remember more than a single paragraphs worth of rules and would insert their own made up rules, come up with numbers that are impossible (ie. Roll 3d6 and give me the total. OK, the total is 2. )

It was an infuriating waste of time. I spent way too long arguing with a system that... Argh. It pisses me off thinking about it.

The only cool thing Chatbots do successfully is splice in really cool backgrounds to your warhammer miniatures.

They are a waste of time and energy to do anything else.

I think part of the problem with playtesting is likely that the actual rules for most games contain enough errors and require just enough human interpretation that an AI can't actually play the game properly because it can't parse the rules. That's why AI has been so successful at games like Chess, Go and Poker. The rules can be accurately described with no ambiguity so the AI can just get on with optimising the best routes to victory. In theory, if you could actually teach an AI how to play 40k I'm pretty sure it would solve a lot of the balance issues in a day. It would probably take longer to go through that process than just getting humans to do it, though.

Skinflint Games wrote:AI generated rules? No.

AI playtesting? That sounds theoretically helpful to a small operation like us, but also sounds like it's not there yet.

Buut...

AI art? Neither Jim or I can draw for gak. Neither Jim or I can Photoshop for gak without putting the year aside. We can't afford to pay an actual human artist. So we either don't do Apocalypse: Earth with art at all, or we do it with some AI art, and hope that it sells enough that we can one day do a 3rd edition that allows us to hire human illustrators.

Do it without art. AI art in a commercial product is currently on very questionable ethical grounds, for a start. Aside from that, if I see a game with AI art everywhere I'm also going to question how much of the written content is human generated and how much is AI slop.

original question: No, I would not pay money for machine generative game rules.
machines can't grasp human experiences, like what make games desirable or bad.
Even people who can do that struggle with making consistent/meaningful rule systems.
We ask a program questions, it spits out a return regardless of whether it actually solves our problem, or has meaningful outcomes to our lives. ai don't care, it can't.

 Lathe Biosas wrote:

How do you copyright your work with AI art in it?

I was contemplating using an AI altered map of 1987 Berlin, but I was concerned by the ownership issues of using AI art in my work.

I ended up playing cut and paste with scissors and a scanner.

The same way you do with non-ai art. Depends on how much additional transformative work you put into the finished product. Standalone generative images or text cannot be Copyrighted by itself, but if it's featured on a page or within a larger work (like a pamphlet, pdf or book), where you've done human-directed editing: meaningful composition placement of assets, scaling, edited written text with chosen fonts or word emphasis, etc. That arrangement, that combination as a fixed work can be Copyrighted, because it's more than just the image as an image or text as text. that image/text is now a part of larger thing.
So not just throwing an ai map in a word document and calling it a day, that won't do.
And you might still run afoul if the original source map is under a copyright and not public domain.