In October 2022, OpenAI's Generative Pretrained Transformer-3, called ChatGPT, created a huge societal splash and started a firestorm of controversy around the future of creativity and content.
Other Large Language Models and other tools mis-labeled “AI” quickly piled on, along with image creation, and many other uses.
As a writer and like many others, I have spent much of 2023 wrestling with the questions and dilemmas these new technologies pose.
In order to make a more informed consideration, I signed up for an account and began my own experiments with these new tools.
As a result, I learned that, if I want to feel any sense of authorship, I must create the text myself.
I have set myself a hard line that text generated by ChatGPT will not be copied-and-pasted or included into Chronology or Salvage Space.
Therefore, the Chronology RPG and Salvage Space setting published here contain no content created by one of these “AI” or GPT / LLM tools.
The only ChatGPT content on this site is on the front page where I've posted its rather amusing explanation of the purpose of my website as imagined by these tools.
As part of exploring this new technology over the past year, I developed a workflow, pattern, or habit of drafting my thoughts out first on the site.
Then, for comparison, I may prompt ChatGPT to assemble its version of the same section of the game which I have already drafted.
This workflow provides me deep insight into the strengths and limitations of the tools in a practical context.
In a few instances, ChatGPT's output prompted more thought about a given section of the game, causing me to go back and expand or revise that section in my own words.
And this, I feel is the best use of ChatGPT and its ilk, as a rather sophisticated dice table random generator of inspiration.
I think of ChatGPT as the “mirror of the Internet” it was trained on.
Asking ChatGPT a question or requesting a prompted response lets me look into the internet mirror and get a reflection of the general thought that might be out there up to late 2021.
ChatGPT's distorted reflection of humanity provides its own fascinating perspectives and surprises worth exploring.
But I also see the value of being able to cast a thought into the ChatGPT reflecting pool and get an immediate feedback.
For generating personal use content, rather than publication material, I see no reason to avoid tools like ChatGPT.
Being able to rapidly generate and iterate “filler content” for my own solo or tabletop game sessions is the realization of a dream I, and many others, had back in the early 1980s when programming early microcomputers to automatically roll up characters for games like Dungeons and Dragons.
Science fiction for many decades promised “human-form” robots we could converse with, and these now exist.
So, while society convulses in its modern day re-enactment of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, I find it much more interesting to explore and adapt rather than blindly fear and reject.
The sense of authorship remains key for me.
If I intend to publish something under my name, then I will write it.
If I ever include verbatim generated content, I will clearly mark it as such because attribution is a key requirement for authorship as well.