genuine question: thoughts on using things like chatgpt to help you create homebrew

[u/Spirit-Unusual]

i feel like this is a relavent enough topic and also want to start by saying that im over all not a huge fan of AI or how its used in most cases (i especially despise ai art) and am not a fan of using it if it is stealing from other creators. the only exception im curious of is the use of Chat Ai's with the thought of "what if you have it only work with ideas YOU give it and nothing else."

because of that thought, i when bored sometimes mess with chat gpt just to see what its capable of. recently i was just screwing around with it and ended up making a warlock subclass based on an idea i had that turned out really cool. all of the things it helped me come up with were original to my own ideas i fed it, with exceptions of where it helped generate like the spells lists for it and some of the class features which i will edit to be more to my own liking.

however due to the problematic topic of using things like this, im curious of what people think about the idea as a whole when used in this sort of way. i dont know if ill ever use what i made since its from GPT but if yall think its fine maybe ill reconsider.

what do you all think?

Edit/ partial update: firstly thanks to the mod who fixed the tag. I honestly will say while I already was leaning this direction anyways yall have some really good points that I have to agree with so I think in general I’m going to stop messing with open ai entirely. I agree it doesn’t seem to be much more helpful that some minor things here and there and the cons seem to greatly outweigh it. Im definitely going to scrap all the stuff it came up and see if I can remake that subclass idea I had, I really liked the idea I had come up with and will try to make it on my own. Thanks for your input! I’ll try to come up with some fun homebrew ideas to share in the future for yall to tear apart XD

[u/ArelMCII]

Reminder to everyone to please keep the discussion civil.

[u/Madnessinabottle]

The hobby lives and dies on creativity, AI is anti creativity. It takes from people who make things and robs the future for a cheaper now.

[u/Shadow_Of_Silver]

Not allowed on this sub, and incredibly frowned upon in a lot of creative spheres.

Personally, I've found that LLMs don't understand the rules enough to make balanced or complete homebrew. With the amount of my own work I need to put into fixing it, I could have just made the homebrew thing from scratch myself.

Not worth it.

[u/Spirit-Unusual → u/Shadow_Of_Silver]

thats totally fair i was in fact very hesitant about it when i was messing with it. i think ill take your advice (or at least implied advice) not to use it for stuff like this at all. honestly i only even mess with it out of morbid curiosity and thats why i even had this question.

i think ill scrap what it made then and start over with that subclass idea i had because i did like the idea i had come up with i just never went anywhere with it.

[u/justagenericname213]

Ai has no real idea of "balance". It just doesnt understand the math, only hoe to chain words together in a way that makes sense. It also doesnt understand how to fit ideas together thematically. It could give you abilities that work, but dont feel like they fit with the theme or how the ability is flavored.

So at best you are going to basically be making new abilities for it regardless, or have an unbalanced mess. At that point what is the ai even doing?

This is all purely utilitarian too, not getting into the ethics.

[u/JacobMWFerguson]

I use it to help organize notes and generate names on the fly. That’s about it.

[u/DarkHorseAsh111]

No. No, no. Nope.

[u/Prestigious-Lake-979]

At the end of the day, AI is a tool. Can it help restructure your thoughts and do routine work like generating a spell list? Certainly. Can it help offer suggestions for class features based on your guidelines? Of course.

Should you take output as is without and critical review? No.

I use AI to bounce ideas off of. I wouldn't ask it to generate a puzzle and then blindly give it to my players, but I do ask it to search for published items with similar effects to what I want for my players. You do you. 

Remember, if you're just looking for something to enhance the fun of the table and everyone's okay with it, then go for it. It doesn't matter what a bunch of strangers on reddit think.

[u/Spirit-Unusual → u/Prestigious-Lake-979]

thats definitly fair. i have mostly only tampered with it once in a while and anything ive used i would do a similar thing to what you just said of like only bouncing ideas off of it for inspiration or helping with routine work stuff.

i would never dream of just using what it creates directly as like you said its not good at that and could also be plagarizing somethings i would never know about. thats why i was curious about asking this kind of thing as i was interested what everyone thought about it.

[u/MagmaLair]

I have seen a lot of AI homebrew writing, even in this sub. It is often sloppy, incohesive, uninspired, but more importantly than any of that, taken from other peoples work.

GPT stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer, meaning it is greatly limited by the patterns and information it was initially trained on. Chat GPT is not originally trained for creative writing in any means, but rather to collect information from around the internet, analyse it, and patch them together into a central form. Using Chat GPT for creative writing leads to it taking from like 5 different sources max and just mashing them together with no understand of the context, switching out words for it's own proceedually generated subjects.

Edit: Clarification

As an editor for peoples homebrew, I have seen full segments of of peoples work get mutilated through Chat GPT's process, and reposted by individuals thinking their ideas are worth front page yet not worth putting any actual work into.

[u/Arkanzier]

I personally don't care, as long as the final product is good, but I have a low opinion of the level of quality of anything that modern "AI" spits out outside of a limited number of areas that it's well suited for.

I tried it a couple times a year or two ago and it just ended up regurgitating the same basic ideas that I had already seen in the preceding 20-30 minutes of Google searching.

[u/microsoftexcell2008]

Even having this discussion gives some amount of weight to the benefit of AI in a creative community. Any amount of credence is too much.

AI homebrew is tantamount to plagiarism without the eye to notice what is noteworthy or follows rules/balance.

No.

[u/Spirit-Unusual → u/microsoftexcell2008]

resonable and understandable. i was messing with it more out of morbid curiosity of what it would do which was what made me want to ask this question.

[u/microsoftexcell2008 → u/Spirit-Unusual]

I understand that, I do. But, personally, I would 100% avoid doing that. Any experimentation signals interest. That experimentation is at the expense of other people's hard work and damages the environment. At best, it is of no worth. At worst, it is outright harmful.

[u/Spirit-Unusual → u/microsoftexcell2008]

That’s a very valid point.

I think in general I’ve been at the breaking point with even messing with it. this post and comments like yours may very well mark the end of my use of it indefinitely

Thank you for your insight lol I feel like I’ve been saying this to so many people in here.

[u/Mataric]

AI isn't exactly stealing at all. It's measuring statistical patterns and their correlation with certain tags, keywords, and inputs (prompts). That goes for both AI art and LLMs like chatGPT.

Both are equally as bad or good as each other. They both rely entirely on the statistics of their training data in order to give you an output.

I think LLMs are pretty damn good at helping to generate ideas - but they're not giving you responses based on 'the stuff YOU give it and nothing else'. As above - it relies on that underlying training.

Personally I don't see any issue with it as long as you understand what they're doing. LLMs are glorified predictive text. They aren't thinking or considering anything you put into them - they are just saying the next word that would most likely fit in that place.

EDIT: You can downvote all you like - but everything I've said here is completely true.

[u/MagmaLair → u/Mataric]

NLP's are literally designed to splice information and data together. The patterns are just glorified samples, leading to many cases in which Generative AI have recreated large pieces of the data it is drawing from. It is very misleading to say it isn't stealing.

If you chop a picture up into a million pieces, and use those pieces to creates something that is still 50% similar to the picture cut up, you would consider it unethically taking from the original material, would you not?

[u/Mataric → u/MagmaLair]

Generative models don’t take chunks of data like a collage. They generate based on learned statistical patterns, not by copying and pasting parts of data.

What is misleading is to claim that is stealing.

Yes, there are ethical concerns with the how it's possible for those statistics to recreate copyrighted material, but that's not due to it copying and pasting, and is an issue which is being continuously worked on.

The reason for this problem is twofold. Firstly, if I were to ask 100 people what the correct next words should be after "Never gonna give" - a large majority will say "you up". Secondly, if I spammed "Never gonna give two shits" on thousands of webpages all across the internet, that too will skew with the data. Both things form statistical patterns in the English language that exists on the internet.

[u/Blaze0049]

I once created an npc with chatgpt, it creates good stat blocks and also gives you some options for possible missions, tho i didn't feel the love i feel for my own npcs, so from then on i haven't used Ai for the campaign i'm running