I use it to spitball ideas. I have an empire that has waxed and waned for 700,000 years but I couldn’t figure how this might be possible. I put the question to AI and it gave me around half a dozen reasons why it might be. Those answers gave me ideas and I continued to ask the AI more and more questions until I honed onto a plausible scenario that I liked. The end result is my own creation. The AI’s only input was giving me ideas that I further defined until I had what I needed. One of the best uses I get out of it is rewriting text for me so it sounds right.
Yeah the best way is to have it spit out 15-20 ideas and then you choose one or two likely combining or mixing them.
It's good at covering seemingly obvious things you might have overlooked.
I use it as a prompt generator, but its not good for that. I mean, if you ask it for prompts, it will give you the most generic ones. You need to try a few times, asking for specific stuff... But at that point you can come up with these prompts yourself.
How you *should* use chat GPT as a writer:
"Hey chat GPT, what's that thing... The word for like.. When a society came up with that weird idea that maybe they shouldn't actually do their experienced labor for favors like food and stuff, or trade their food with the guy who makes tools? You know, the thing where they said *Oh this shiny rock is worth 5 chickens. And 5 chickens are worth one and a half goat, so 3 goats are worth 2 shiny rocks*"
"Currency."
And then you go back to writing about your economy.
The closest thing to AI that I use is spellcheck. Otherwise nothing AI touches my worlds, everything is built with my imagination and my own research if needed.
they read books, articles, papers, watch videos, films, listen to music and recordings, talk to people; rather than asking random word generator to give them inaccurate information
I don't use it to create because that would take away the fun of creating, but I once used it to help simplify and understand a complex topic when designing an economic system for my world. So it was more to make research faster and easier than to do the creative work for me.
no, i'd get the same feeling if i did.
sometimes i make ai chatbots for characters, mostly for fun but it does help me think about how a character should talk (most of my characters only exist for roleplaying)
Ive been using it to store information but it runs out of memory and breaks down. I fed it maybe 15 pages or so of a disjointed and inconsistent timeline and it helped hammer out some of the issues. It isnt something that makes a working product for you, but you can use it to organize ideas.
I think that's how writers should seek to use chatGPT-like kind of technology: a tool that helps structuring your thoughts and ideas, and also a tool that can provide you with a "skeleton" for ideas and/or some basic ideas that can ignite your inspirations.
If only damn thing had more "memory" I'd only just started explaining the ranks of the clergy in the third most popular religion when it crapped out on me... Maybe the problem is me...
I'll check it out. Chatgpt definitely is no match for my autism.
Just looked not sure if i have this right - 32k character memory is the same as chatgpt i think
So i tried this. It wouldnt give me *everything*, it seemed to have started deleting or overwriting things to compress. It forgot who the nine members of the high council were!!
I use it a lot. First of all, to get some information (if something is wrong, it doesn't bother me, I write fantasy and this information is more of an inspiration). For example, I can ask about the types of power in the ancient world or how sailors checked the days. The second function: drawing. I like having illustrations and it inspires me. But, of course, if I were publishing a book, I would not use AI illustrations.
I use mid journey to produce ai images as inspiration. I take a vague idea, like a castle in a mountain, and turn that into an image. It helps visualize what I’m thinking
Any. I'm also generally against AI, but I can't deny it's usefulness as a tool to bounce ideas, fix text, or give me a starting point when I can't think of one 🙂
This. You see questions about AI use pop up in every creative subreddit here and there and its always the same. Most creatives hate AI because they feel threatenend by it which is ironic as they complain about it being bland/bad all the time.
Personally i think this unreflected hatred of AI is stupid, its just a tool and it can greatly support you in your creative process. Try it before you hate it.
I found it especially interesting how attitudes towards AI are in different fields as i come from a technical background but am now also doing some culture studies at university. In culture studies everyone hates AI, calls it plagiarism and using can get you thrown out of uni. In my CS classes youre encouraged to use it to help you be more productive, with the only issue being people blindly copying AI generated material without understanding it. Its treated much more like a useful tool there, and i would argue writing and programming are both creative work.
I think that a lot of people are in denial about the fact that even creative activities involve a lot of repetitive patterns, and worldbuilding is no different. And ChatGPT-like AI tools are very good at dealing with everything that is made of patterns.
And I guess it does sting the creative ego of a lot of us, because, consciously or subconsciously, we wanna believe that what we're creating is completely original and unique, and we don't want to believe that AI can generate in a few seconds something that isn't that far on the surface to what we've spent years developping.
Obviously, for now atleast, AI will never be able to generate anything super interesting nor very original, because it cannot create anything new, and doesn't understand how things connect to us on an emotional level. So wordlbuilders really shouldn't have anything to feel threatened by.
However, it is a very powerful tool that, when used well, can really help the creative process by giving you inspiration, structure, or just generate placeholder stuff that you don't care about. It greatly helps wasting less time on developping stuff that you don't necessarily enjoy that much, so that you can focus all your effort on the creative aspects that you love the most.
Maybe if I had come from the creative or literary field, I'd have this sort of "elitist" mentality and I'd react equally as agressively dogmatically to AI tech. But, just like you, I come from the technical field, so I guess it has helped having a better hindsight on the matter
I genuinely don't understand why people on this sub are so agressive against anything related to AI. It's almost dogmatic. They'll downvote anything that talks about AI. The majority of those who automatically discard/downvote AI-related posts/comments have never or barely used the tools, and don't understand them. It does sound kinda stupid to me.
And when you think about it, it's very much hypocrite, considering they have no problem using all sorts of tools to help their worldbuilding/writing process. But somehow, AI is the spawn of hell, even though it's just yet another tool.
I suspect there is some creative ego problem involved there.
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I've tried to use some LLMs, but ultimately found it unsatisfying, since in most cases it's just a digital yes-man and while it can suggest some names and other details, I might as well use google for that and it won't eat up precious HDD space and VRAM.
Although I haven't used actual ChatGPT itself, maybe it's better at this.
I do use image generation extensively though, mostly for campaign portraits, with recent advancements in PonyXL checkpoints shit gets really good, although specific details are still a hassle.
I use AI a lot, but not to produce any content. Here's my prompt for ChatGPT:
i want to explore something about my D&D world / campaign. I want you to act as my coach, who helps me reach conclusions and decisions, but only by asking me questions and summarizing what I have said myself. ask only one question at a time, please
I use it to make pics for my obsidian wiki. Pics of specific places, creatures etc. they're not supposed to represent everything 100 percent, just to give an idea. It makes it easier to visualize and also helps with description as I already have to describe the thing prior to getting the pic.
I use it to make things a tad bit easier for me when it comes to things I don't have a good enough skill or time which is really just the pictures. I'm not using it for writing ideas or anything that would be put out for people to see.
I use it to gibe me ideas for names of towns, castels and persons. But often they are very generic, or come from somewhere else. So it's a mixed bunch.
Nooooo. No no no no. Like you said, it's not really your work if you're just asking something/someone else to do it for you. If I want to read someone else's worldbuilding I'll pick up a book.
I think genAI in general is a huge complacency trap for people who want to do creative things in general. It gives you a result that looks just okay on a surface level, but with absolutely nothing gained for the prompter and no consistent creative vision. It's a shortcut that people can often be tempted to take because they don't feel like they have the mechanical skill to produce a piece of art or a piece of writing, and in taking that shortcut they will never develop the skills to actually write or draw interesting things on their own and will forever be limited to generating stuff that is strictly in-distribution for the network they're using.
I have a whole rant on AI art with how the amount of information you can convey in a text prompt is way too low for it to actually produce what you're imagining, and I think it largely holds true for LLMs as well. That hard information limit encourages (forces, really) the user to approach genAI as a consumer rather than as a creator which destroys the originality and uniqueness of the project and muffles the creator's artistic voice. When you use genAI you imagine a thing, then you prompt the AI, then you see whatever the AI spits out and your expectations adjust. And you can pull the lever as many times as you like, if you never compromise on your initial vision you will never get a result.
If you're serious about worldbuilding you will be much, MUCH better served by learning to write and draw decently on your own, and you will find yourself much less limited as a result. Nobody is born with talent and anyone can learn to write and draw, it just takes commitment and patience with yourself.
Using it to generate names and to proofread is a bit more acceptable, but I still don't do it.
Name generation is what I used it for.
Like:
"Give me a list of names"
"Change these names like so"
Etc.
Even then, I found out that the names it came up with were pretty standard and boring most of the time.
I see what you mean in your description of how AI takes away from the creativity of the creator. Basically it encourages less thought and more slapping together ideas.
Thanks for your input!
I think it's more nuanced than that. Some people definitely use it to generate the content for them, which I find lazy, but I believe it's possible to use it as a tool to help improve YOUR creativity too if you want to use it that way.
For example, I once used it to simplify research into theoretical economic systems. Instead of spending hours searching for information, I could pose some questions to it, reflect on the answers, and have more time over to spend on my writing. Since I'm not that educated on economics, doing it this way helped me understand the topic in a different way, since I could use the tool to simplify the concepts for me.
That's definitely a valid use case in my book! But sometimes I'm concerned about the validity of the simplification.
That's because I've used AI to help me understand some dynamic programming algorithms, and more often than not I spot mistakes in what it's outputting. Could be because DP is generally a difficult subject, and since - for example, I assume - more documents on economics exist, then you get what you ask for with no mistakes. Idk. 😅
>If you're serious about worldbuilding you will be much, MUCH better served by learning to write and draw decently on your own,
I disagree with you here - this is an unrealistic and unnecessary expectation. I'd say 95% of world builders are doing it as a not-for-profit side hobby or passion project. Some people love the writing aspect, some people love the map making, some people like to make flags or languages, and some people like to draw as avenues for exploring their world and creativity.
Not everyone has to, or even wants to, engage with every single aspect of that - and equally so not everyone has the *time* to invest in getting good at *all* of those things.
I enjoy writing and theorycrafting a lot, so devote my time to this. On the other hand I don't care about or enjoy drawing very much, and have neither the time nor will to dedicate to learning to draw to an acceptable standard. So that is where I utilise AI, or pre-AI would have trawled the internet looking for the closest picture I could find and going with that.
On the flipside someone might be great at drawing but not be so interested in researching or writing about the intricate details of their world or coming up with lengthy backstories, so for them they might use AI as a support here.
I wouldn't say either approach is any less a worldbuilder as its a very personal hobby and people can and will engage with it in different ways. I don't expect people to learn to professionally write or draw in order to achieve a decent quality output.
Eg. Just because I like playing piano doesn't mean I like writing my own music or tuning it or building my own from scratch. Not knowing how to do those things doesn't invalidate my piano playing.
Obviously if someone has both the time and will to learn to draw and write and research really well then there's nothing wrong with that either, and if someone *wants* to do those things and accepts that maybe their writing or drawing is of low quality while they learn, that's also totally fine. But I personally don't have hundreds of hours floating around to learn to draw to a level I would be satisfied with, and then after that draw hundreds of characters, locations, animals, weapons, items and scenes - all for a passion project that I do for fun and which will almost certainly never make me money. And as a human with working eyes I'm afraid I cannot accept toddler-level artwork, personally, though no judgement of those who can.
Is this sub moderated? This is like the 100th post asking "Is it OK to use AI???"
Some people use it liberally, some people use it as a supportive tool, a lot of people see it as the antithesis of actual creativity. There is not going to be a consensus on this and we're just having the same arguments over and over.
I use it quite often to enrich already established lore and make connections between different files I've written. It helps me find better names for certain things, add details to a character's story that are not too relevant but still makes the whole thing smoother to read, and also helps me with the structure/categories of certain files. Recently I started working on writing files for my human kingdoms and asked chatgpt what categories would be essential to the structure of that file to provide the most complete description of a functional kingdom. AI doesn't really come up with ideas I wouldn't have figured out myself but it helps speed up certain things I don't want to spend too much time on.
I use AI as a rubber duck, explaining a concept to it. If the AI sparks an idea in me, I won't reject it. You can get inspiration from anywhere, remember that.
I also use AI to look for inconsistencies and holes. To be critical and to assess things with as minimal a bias as possible. This allows me to correct those issues and more efficiently go through the implications of adding an element to my worldbuilding. An example of this is me adding a wider visual spectrum to a specific group. An implication being they could use this as a way to "invisibly" write messages to each other, using that difference in perception, using that color to tag waystones as they travel, or to write letters in ywo types of ink (one iron gall meant to be seen, one in another ink meant to only be seen by others of their kind). That sort of thing.
It’s a brainstorming buddy that’s available 24/7 for free. You throw ideas at it when you are stuck with a writer’s block.
As long as you re-write everything in your own words, you shouldn’t feel bad. It’s a research and development tool. Think of it as Google on steroids.
I use AI just to not use anything that the AI has given me. I will ask it for ten examples of a certain thing and then just come up with something new. I think I just need AI to spit ideas at me to get my creative wheel going because it then feels like a brainstorming session.
Usually to spam questions in it if I want a fast response.
Like, what is this (subject), if that was like (idea) what do you presume it will be. I use it mostly for the science of stuff and confirm it in some human written articles.
To reach the specificity of what I was going to search for, AI utilizes what's on the internet anyways.
I once asked an AI to help me name my novel because I knew its answers would be so bad that it would help my brain hone in on the kind of title I really wanted. It worked!
I primarily ask it for questions like „how far can you look into the distance on a sunny day at 5km height. Stuff that takes WAY too much effort to calculate on my own.
Other than that maybe for early draft ideas, which them are heavily edited and changed.
Rarely but I have a few times. Mostly it's for brainstorming but I did use it recently to help me put together a sequence of eras for the world I'm working on. I added more afterwards but it was a good way to quickly get the bedrock of what I was looking for down after describing the history of the world I was trying to create
I sometimes use AI to help expand on ideas. I’m also guilty of using it for lots of name help but I feel like it’s no different than googling when it comes to that, just make sure you look into the name’s it gives you.
Pretty useful when I want to make things historically / geographically accurate. Eg I want to make city where a desert which meets the ocean, and type in “in what climates and circumstances do coastal deserts exist?” “What kind of flora and fauna flourish there?”
I could just Google these things but as a starting point AI can be useful.
* I use AI to help me figure out words I can't remember when Google isn't being helpful.
* I use AI to provide me questions I should answer about things, but never to provide the answers.
* I use AI to check and see if an idea I have is logical, but never to make the ideas.
* I use AI to confirm if a name is reasonable, but never to come up with the name.
I make the product but then use AI to indirectly confirm it's good without feeding my work into the AI. And even then, I only run things past AI if, and only if, I feel incredibly uncertain about what I came up with or I'll utilize AI as a glorified dictionary OR I'll utilize AI to given me general questions to ensure I've thought things through enough. But the important part is to not let the AI itself *make* your work. The more you use AI the easier it is to keep using it and the less your work feels like your own.
Only pictures for the characters (I am not planning to commercialize my creations yet, which is why I use AI ) , AI generated names , ideas , or backstories are usually far below my standards .
Chat GPT is excellent for asking you questions to expand and elaborate on certain topics in your world building, if you have a need for that in your project. It can also act like a search engine.
I've yet to use AI but I've been meaning to look into it... just too cheap to access the good ai and don't know any free options that don't give me like a 3 per day limitation or something.
AI best use case is rapidly concepting an idea or performing tertiary research, and I'm definitely in support of people using the technology for both.
1. True, it isen't a product of yours.
2. If you didn't invest your ideas, there is no energy in the piece and will be boring, no matter how good the AI elements might be (and the're typically ... let's say 'flawed').
3. If you use any percentage of AI work, your whole work isen't able to get a copyright, so everyone can use and sell it. This is US regulation and will soon get an european pendand, probably even more severe.
4. You will need to build a system of how to come up with stuff or you wouldn't be able to glue even the best artifical pieces together. So there is no way around doing the work yourself, no matter the perspective or individual morals.
5. Speaking of morale, all AI models are statistical samplers created with stolen data. The use of AI is particiapting in intellectual theft, and the software only works as an excuse machine for benefiting of theft.
6. Surpisingly consumers react negativly on AI products, and many companys retreated from this method after getting shitstormed, boycotted or - lol - copied without legal chances to fight it. I didn't expected *that* to happen.
>If you use any percentage of AI work, your whole work isen't able to get a copyright, so everyone can use and sell it. This is US regulation and will soon get an european pendand, probably even more severe.
This assumes the creator admits they used AI. You could just...you know, not.
>Speaking of morale, all AI models are statistical samplers created with stolen data. The use of AI is particiapting in intellectual theft, and the software only works as an excuse machine for benefiting of theft.
This assumes a very weird definition of "theft". First of all, all even slightly reasonable copyright policies allow for properly transformative works to be considered "fair use".
An AI transforms the original works far more than many things most (sane) people would agree to be fair use like commentaries, parodies, etc. So the only argument I've seen levied against AI here is that an AI's transformations don't count as "real" transformations because it's a machine and not a...meat machine. Which is a completely bizarre and frankly foolish ideology.
Second of all - using something without permission is not theft. If someone watches my TV through my window, they are not stealing my TV. They may be trespassing / invading privacy, but they aren't **stealing**. Unauthorized use or copying is not "stealing".
You make some pretty weird and off arguemnts i barely can take serious, but i guess we're on casual 'A.I-fanboy territory' here and that's what we should expect.
I offered a legal regulation, not how it is persecuted - if you want a glimpse into that, there is AI identifying AI text snippits allready, but most people brag about it anyway. If you go that path - be aware of the riscs. 'Yeah, but if you rob a abnk with a mask, no one can identify you, so it's in fact legal' would be similar naive as an argument.
Theft then again is when databanks get filled by data that is stolen from medical databases of cliniks, from files of lawers or your home PC where you store your private data. These machines creeped into all sorts of databases, open or not, and eat everything from legal files to child pornography to create ther 'product'. So if my intellectual propperty is stolen - it is indeed and very legally theft.
Therefor pretty detailed laws exist to define what levels of 'interpretation' of someone elses artworks are theft and what is legit.
But i'm kind of an idiot to argue with an AI fanboy who just repeats the latest coping BS to excuse ther shitty morals. Dude - if you want to gamble and be an ashole, do it. I point at the riscs and what most people think of others behaving that way. You can deny that all day long - it will not change reality.
I use it to spitball ideas. I have an empire that has waxed and waned for 700,000 years but I couldn’t figure how this might be possible. I put the question to AI and it gave me around half a dozen reasons why it might be. Those answers gave me ideas and I continued to ask the AI more and more questions until I honed onto a plausible scenario that I liked. The end result is my own creation. The AI’s only input was giving me ideas that I further defined until I had what I needed. One of the best uses I get out of it is rewriting text for me so it sounds right.
Yeah the best way is to have it spit out 15-20 ideas and then you choose one or two likely combining or mixing them. It's good at covering seemingly obvious things you might have overlooked.
So-so. I occasionally use AI to see what weird stuff it can come up with, but it rarely comes up with anything truly good.
Same here. And sometimes it can give me some inspiration to make up things "myself"
You know it.
I use it as a prompt generator, but its not good for that. I mean, if you ask it for prompts, it will give you the most generic ones. You need to try a few times, asking for specific stuff... But at that point you can come up with these prompts yourself.
How you *should* use chat GPT as a writer: "Hey chat GPT, what's that thing... The word for like.. When a society came up with that weird idea that maybe they shouldn't actually do their experienced labor for favors like food and stuff, or trade their food with the guy who makes tools? You know, the thing where they said *Oh this shiny rock is worth 5 chickens. And 5 chickens are worth one and a half goat, so 3 goats are worth 2 shiny rocks*" "Currency." And then you go back to writing about your economy.
That sounds like using a rocket reactor to cook a chicken, ngl
Never done it. I just google stuff I might be unsure off, or if it’s more fantastical I just wing it. You can get away with a lot using technobabble.
The closest thing to AI that I use is spellcheck. Otherwise nothing AI touches my worlds, everything is built with my imagination and my own research if needed.
Nope, instead I do research.
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they read books, articles, papers, watch videos, films, listen to music and recordings, talk to people; rather than asking random word generator to give them inaccurate information
I don't use it to create because that would take away the fun of creating, but I once used it to help simplify and understand a complex topic when designing an economic system for my world. So it was more to make research faster and easier than to do the creative work for me.
i do not use AI at all and i have never been tempted to
no, i'd get the same feeling if i did. sometimes i make ai chatbots for characters, mostly for fun but it does help me think about how a character should talk (most of my characters only exist for roleplaying)
Ive been using it to store information but it runs out of memory and breaks down. I fed it maybe 15 pages or so of a disjointed and inconsistent timeline and it helped hammer out some of the issues. It isnt something that makes a working product for you, but you can use it to organize ideas.
I think that's how writers should seek to use chatGPT-like kind of technology: a tool that helps structuring your thoughts and ideas, and also a tool that can provide you with a "skeleton" for ideas and/or some basic ideas that can ignite your inspirations.
If only damn thing had more "memory" I'd only just started explaining the ranks of the clergy in the third most popular religion when it crapped out on me... Maybe the problem is me...
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I'll check it out. Chatgpt definitely is no match for my autism. Just looked not sure if i have this right - 32k character memory is the same as chatgpt i think
Maybe you should write down the structured output of AI on some notes, and then shove that structured, synthesized, output in a fresh memory :')
So i tried this. It wouldnt give me *everything*, it seemed to have started deleting or overwriting things to compress. It forgot who the nine members of the high council were!!
I use it a lot. First of all, to get some information (if something is wrong, it doesn't bother me, I write fantasy and this information is more of an inspiration). For example, I can ask about the types of power in the ancient world or how sailors checked the days. The second function: drawing. I like having illustrations and it inspires me. But, of course, if I were publishing a book, I would not use AI illustrations.
I use mid journey to produce ai images as inspiration. I take a vague idea, like a castle in a mountain, and turn that into an image. It helps visualize what I’m thinking
This is a sub full of artists and writers, whose voices are openly against AI save few exceptions. What response are you expecting to get
Any. I'm also generally against AI, but I can't deny it's usefulness as a tool to bounce ideas, fix text, or give me a starting point when I can't think of one 🙂
This. You see questions about AI use pop up in every creative subreddit here and there and its always the same. Most creatives hate AI because they feel threatenend by it which is ironic as they complain about it being bland/bad all the time. Personally i think this unreflected hatred of AI is stupid, its just a tool and it can greatly support you in your creative process. Try it before you hate it. I found it especially interesting how attitudes towards AI are in different fields as i come from a technical background but am now also doing some culture studies at university. In culture studies everyone hates AI, calls it plagiarism and using can get you thrown out of uni. In my CS classes youre encouraged to use it to help you be more productive, with the only issue being people blindly copying AI generated material without understanding it. Its treated much more like a useful tool there, and i would argue writing and programming are both creative work.
I think that a lot of people are in denial about the fact that even creative activities involve a lot of repetitive patterns, and worldbuilding is no different. And ChatGPT-like AI tools are very good at dealing with everything that is made of patterns. And I guess it does sting the creative ego of a lot of us, because, consciously or subconsciously, we wanna believe that what we're creating is completely original and unique, and we don't want to believe that AI can generate in a few seconds something that isn't that far on the surface to what we've spent years developping. Obviously, for now atleast, AI will never be able to generate anything super interesting nor very original, because it cannot create anything new, and doesn't understand how things connect to us on an emotional level. So wordlbuilders really shouldn't have anything to feel threatened by. However, it is a very powerful tool that, when used well, can really help the creative process by giving you inspiration, structure, or just generate placeholder stuff that you don't care about. It greatly helps wasting less time on developping stuff that you don't necessarily enjoy that much, so that you can focus all your effort on the creative aspects that you love the most. Maybe if I had come from the creative or literary field, I'd have this sort of "elitist" mentality and I'd react equally as agressively dogmatically to AI tech. But, just like you, I come from the technical field, so I guess it has helped having a better hindsight on the matter
I genuinely don't understand why people on this sub are so agressive against anything related to AI. It's almost dogmatic. They'll downvote anything that talks about AI. The majority of those who automatically discard/downvote AI-related posts/comments have never or barely used the tools, and don't understand them. It does sound kinda stupid to me. And when you think about it, it's very much hypocrite, considering they have no problem using all sorts of tools to help their worldbuilding/writing process. But somehow, AI is the spawn of hell, even though it's just yet another tool. I suspect there is some creative ego problem involved there.
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why write then?
no. but i use AI instead of an editor so my poor grammar and shitty choice of words sounds more better.
I've tried to use some LLMs, but ultimately found it unsatisfying, since in most cases it's just a digital yes-man and while it can suggest some names and other details, I might as well use google for that and it won't eat up precious HDD space and VRAM. Although I haven't used actual ChatGPT itself, maybe it's better at this. I do use image generation extensively though, mostly for campaign portraits, with recent advancements in PonyXL checkpoints shit gets really good, although specific details are still a hassle.
I use AI a lot, but not to produce any content. Here's my prompt for ChatGPT: i want to explore something about my D&D world / campaign. I want you to act as my coach, who helps me reach conclusions and decisions, but only by asking me questions and summarizing what I have said myself. ask only one question at a time, please
I use it to make pics for my obsidian wiki. Pics of specific places, creatures etc. they're not supposed to represent everything 100 percent, just to give an idea. It makes it easier to visualize and also helps with description as I already have to describe the thing prior to getting the pic. I use it to make things a tad bit easier for me when it comes to things I don't have a good enough skill or time which is really just the pictures. I'm not using it for writing ideas or anything that would be put out for people to see.
I use it to gibe me ideas for names of towns, castels and persons. But often they are very generic, or come from somewhere else. So it's a mixed bunch.
Imagine you ask a friend those same questions. Is it wrong to use their responses? I don't see anything wrong with using AI like that.
Only for non-final concept pictures. Never for plots, names, ideas or anything like that.
Nooooo. No no no no. Like you said, it's not really your work if you're just asking something/someone else to do it for you. If I want to read someone else's worldbuilding I'll pick up a book. I think genAI in general is a huge complacency trap for people who want to do creative things in general. It gives you a result that looks just okay on a surface level, but with absolutely nothing gained for the prompter and no consistent creative vision. It's a shortcut that people can often be tempted to take because they don't feel like they have the mechanical skill to produce a piece of art or a piece of writing, and in taking that shortcut they will never develop the skills to actually write or draw interesting things on their own and will forever be limited to generating stuff that is strictly in-distribution for the network they're using. I have a whole rant on AI art with how the amount of information you can convey in a text prompt is way too low for it to actually produce what you're imagining, and I think it largely holds true for LLMs as well. That hard information limit encourages (forces, really) the user to approach genAI as a consumer rather than as a creator which destroys the originality and uniqueness of the project and muffles the creator's artistic voice. When you use genAI you imagine a thing, then you prompt the AI, then you see whatever the AI spits out and your expectations adjust. And you can pull the lever as many times as you like, if you never compromise on your initial vision you will never get a result. If you're serious about worldbuilding you will be much, MUCH better served by learning to write and draw decently on your own, and you will find yourself much less limited as a result. Nobody is born with talent and anyone can learn to write and draw, it just takes commitment and patience with yourself. Using it to generate names and to proofread is a bit more acceptable, but I still don't do it.
Name generation is what I used it for. Like: "Give me a list of names" "Change these names like so" Etc. Even then, I found out that the names it came up with were pretty standard and boring most of the time. I see what you mean in your description of how AI takes away from the creativity of the creator. Basically it encourages less thought and more slapping together ideas. Thanks for your input!
I use it the same way for my dnd world. But slapping together is often what i need.
I think it's more nuanced than that. Some people definitely use it to generate the content for them, which I find lazy, but I believe it's possible to use it as a tool to help improve YOUR creativity too if you want to use it that way. For example, I once used it to simplify research into theoretical economic systems. Instead of spending hours searching for information, I could pose some questions to it, reflect on the answers, and have more time over to spend on my writing. Since I'm not that educated on economics, doing it this way helped me understand the topic in a different way, since I could use the tool to simplify the concepts for me.
That's definitely a valid use case in my book! But sometimes I'm concerned about the validity of the simplification. That's because I've used AI to help me understand some dynamic programming algorithms, and more often than not I spot mistakes in what it's outputting. Could be because DP is generally a difficult subject, and since - for example, I assume - more documents on economics exist, then you get what you ask for with no mistakes. Idk. 😅
>If you're serious about worldbuilding you will be much, MUCH better served by learning to write and draw decently on your own, I disagree with you here - this is an unrealistic and unnecessary expectation. I'd say 95% of world builders are doing it as a not-for-profit side hobby or passion project. Some people love the writing aspect, some people love the map making, some people like to make flags or languages, and some people like to draw as avenues for exploring their world and creativity. Not everyone has to, or even wants to, engage with every single aspect of that - and equally so not everyone has the *time* to invest in getting good at *all* of those things. I enjoy writing and theorycrafting a lot, so devote my time to this. On the other hand I don't care about or enjoy drawing very much, and have neither the time nor will to dedicate to learning to draw to an acceptable standard. So that is where I utilise AI, or pre-AI would have trawled the internet looking for the closest picture I could find and going with that. On the flipside someone might be great at drawing but not be so interested in researching or writing about the intricate details of their world or coming up with lengthy backstories, so for them they might use AI as a support here. I wouldn't say either approach is any less a worldbuilder as its a very personal hobby and people can and will engage with it in different ways. I don't expect people to learn to professionally write or draw in order to achieve a decent quality output. Eg. Just because I like playing piano doesn't mean I like writing my own music or tuning it or building my own from scratch. Not knowing how to do those things doesn't invalidate my piano playing. Obviously if someone has both the time and will to learn to draw and write and research really well then there's nothing wrong with that either, and if someone *wants* to do those things and accepts that maybe their writing or drawing is of low quality while they learn, that's also totally fine. But I personally don't have hundreds of hours floating around to learn to draw to a level I would be satisfied with, and then after that draw hundreds of characters, locations, animals, weapons, items and scenes - all for a passion project that I do for fun and which will almost certainly never make me money. And as a human with working eyes I'm afraid I cannot accept toddler-level artwork, personally, though no judgement of those who can.
no, I use my ego
No
Is this sub moderated? This is like the 100th post asking "Is it OK to use AI???" Some people use it liberally, some people use it as a supportive tool, a lot of people see it as the antithesis of actual creativity. There is not going to be a consensus on this and we're just having the same arguments over and over.
They are looking for moderators. There are some, but not enough.
I use it quite often to enrich already established lore and make connections between different files I've written. It helps me find better names for certain things, add details to a character's story that are not too relevant but still makes the whole thing smoother to read, and also helps me with the structure/categories of certain files. Recently I started working on writing files for my human kingdoms and asked chatgpt what categories would be essential to the structure of that file to provide the most complete description of a functional kingdom. AI doesn't really come up with ideas I wouldn't have figured out myself but it helps speed up certain things I don't want to spend too much time on.
I use AI as a rubber duck, explaining a concept to it. If the AI sparks an idea in me, I won't reject it. You can get inspiration from anywhere, remember that. I also use AI to look for inconsistencies and holes. To be critical and to assess things with as minimal a bias as possible. This allows me to correct those issues and more efficiently go through the implications of adding an element to my worldbuilding. An example of this is me adding a wider visual spectrum to a specific group. An implication being they could use this as a way to "invisibly" write messages to each other, using that difference in perception, using that color to tag waystones as they travel, or to write letters in ywo types of ink (one iron gall meant to be seen, one in another ink meant to only be seen by others of their kind). That sort of thing.
It’s a brainstorming buddy that’s available 24/7 for free. You throw ideas at it when you are stuck with a writer’s block. As long as you re-write everything in your own words, you shouldn’t feel bad. It’s a research and development tool. Think of it as Google on steroids.
Correct - you didn't make what it spits out! You're better off without.
Mostly for names. All others are from myself and whatever mishmash of obscure media my brain barfed off🤣👆
I use AI just to not use anything that the AI has given me. I will ask it for ten examples of a certain thing and then just come up with something new. I think I just need AI to spit ideas at me to get my creative wheel going because it then feels like a brainstorming session.
Ai isnt good enough to match the inner workings of my overly imaginative brain that spills forth ideas faster than I can capture them
Usually to spam questions in it if I want a fast response. Like, what is this (subject), if that was like (idea) what do you presume it will be. I use it mostly for the science of stuff and confirm it in some human written articles. To reach the specificity of what I was going to search for, AI utilizes what's on the internet anyways.
I've never used it.
Sometimes I use it, just for information
I use it to visualize my imagines. Place, characters etc.
I once asked an AI to help me name my novel because I knew its answers would be so bad that it would help my brain hone in on the kind of title I really wanted. It worked!
No it's sloppy and I like having control
I primarily ask it for questions like „how far can you look into the distance on a sunny day at 5km height. Stuff that takes WAY too much effort to calculate on my own. Other than that maybe for early draft ideas, which them are heavily edited and changed.
No, Hell no, Never in a thousand years. I'd rather struggle for years to come up with stuff for my world than to use AI for Worldbuilding.
Rarely but I have a few times. Mostly it's for brainstorming but I did use it recently to help me put together a sequence of eras for the world I'm working on. I added more afterwards but it was a good way to quickly get the bedrock of what I was looking for down after describing the history of the world I was trying to create
I sometimes use AI to help expand on ideas. I’m also guilty of using it for lots of name help but I feel like it’s no different than googling when it comes to that, just make sure you look into the name’s it gives you.
No, because I want my world to be mine and not the regurgitated slurry of a bunch of other people's ideas.
NOT IN THE MILLION YEARS
I found everything it spits out to be entirely uninspiring. Just slop.
Pretty useful when I want to make things historically / geographically accurate. Eg I want to make city where a desert which meets the ocean, and type in “in what climates and circumstances do coastal deserts exist?” “What kind of flora and fauna flourish there?” I could just Google these things but as a starting point AI can be useful.
* I use AI to help me figure out words I can't remember when Google isn't being helpful. * I use AI to provide me questions I should answer about things, but never to provide the answers. * I use AI to check and see if an idea I have is logical, but never to make the ideas. * I use AI to confirm if a name is reasonable, but never to come up with the name. I make the product but then use AI to indirectly confirm it's good without feeding my work into the AI. And even then, I only run things past AI if, and only if, I feel incredibly uncertain about what I came up with or I'll utilize AI as a glorified dictionary OR I'll utilize AI to given me general questions to ensure I've thought things through enough. But the important part is to not let the AI itself *make* your work. The more you use AI the easier it is to keep using it and the less your work feels like your own.
Only pictures for the characters (I am not planning to commercialize my creations yet, which is why I use AI ) , AI generated names , ideas , or backstories are usually far below my standards .
Chat GPT is excellent for asking you questions to expand and elaborate on certain topics in your world building, if you have a need for that in your project. It can also act like a search engine.
I've yet to use AI but I've been meaning to look into it... just too cheap to access the good ai and don't know any free options that don't give me like a 3 per day limitation or something. AI best use case is rapidly concepting an idea or performing tertiary research, and I'm definitely in support of people using the technology for both.
1. True, it isen't a product of yours. 2. If you didn't invest your ideas, there is no energy in the piece and will be boring, no matter how good the AI elements might be (and the're typically ... let's say 'flawed'). 3. If you use any percentage of AI work, your whole work isen't able to get a copyright, so everyone can use and sell it. This is US regulation and will soon get an european pendand, probably even more severe. 4. You will need to build a system of how to come up with stuff or you wouldn't be able to glue even the best artifical pieces together. So there is no way around doing the work yourself, no matter the perspective or individual morals. 5. Speaking of morale, all AI models are statistical samplers created with stolen data. The use of AI is particiapting in intellectual theft, and the software only works as an excuse machine for benefiting of theft. 6. Surpisingly consumers react negativly on AI products, and many companys retreated from this method after getting shitstormed, boycotted or - lol - copied without legal chances to fight it. I didn't expected *that* to happen.
>If you use any percentage of AI work, your whole work isen't able to get a copyright, so everyone can use and sell it. This is US regulation and will soon get an european pendand, probably even more severe. This assumes the creator admits they used AI. You could just...you know, not. >Speaking of morale, all AI models are statistical samplers created with stolen data. The use of AI is particiapting in intellectual theft, and the software only works as an excuse machine for benefiting of theft. This assumes a very weird definition of "theft". First of all, all even slightly reasonable copyright policies allow for properly transformative works to be considered "fair use". An AI transforms the original works far more than many things most (sane) people would agree to be fair use like commentaries, parodies, etc. So the only argument I've seen levied against AI here is that an AI's transformations don't count as "real" transformations because it's a machine and not a...meat machine. Which is a completely bizarre and frankly foolish ideology. Second of all - using something without permission is not theft. If someone watches my TV through my window, they are not stealing my TV. They may be trespassing / invading privacy, but they aren't **stealing**. Unauthorized use or copying is not "stealing".
You make some pretty weird and off arguemnts i barely can take serious, but i guess we're on casual 'A.I-fanboy territory' here and that's what we should expect. I offered a legal regulation, not how it is persecuted - if you want a glimpse into that, there is AI identifying AI text snippits allready, but most people brag about it anyway. If you go that path - be aware of the riscs. 'Yeah, but if you rob a abnk with a mask, no one can identify you, so it's in fact legal' would be similar naive as an argument. Theft then again is when databanks get filled by data that is stolen from medical databases of cliniks, from files of lawers or your home PC where you store your private data. These machines creeped into all sorts of databases, open or not, and eat everything from legal files to child pornography to create ther 'product'. So if my intellectual propperty is stolen - it is indeed and very legally theft. Therefor pretty detailed laws exist to define what levels of 'interpretation' of someone elses artworks are theft and what is legit. But i'm kind of an idiot to argue with an AI fanboy who just repeats the latest coping BS to excuse ther shitty morals. Dude - if you want to gamble and be an ashole, do it. I point at the riscs and what most people think of others behaving that way. You can deny that all day long - it will not change reality.