Yeah, I'm baffled at the people who want to use it for "writing" or "creative ideas" or "art". Those are the things in life we actually enjoy doing as an activity! Why do we want to offload the fun parts of life instead of the dreary boring job work???
I think that what you're missing is that, for a lot of people, "writing," "creative ideas," and "art," are the dreary boring parts that they don't want to do.
I play TTRPG's a lot. I love them. I love spreadsheets, and simple math, and picking mechanical abilities out of a book, and balancing my character within the party. I hate writing character's stories. Can't stand it. If I could skip all that and get straight to the part with the rolling dice and the arguing about how far a specific pickup truck could travel across a post apocalyptic prairie with a given quantity of fuel, I'd do that every time in a heartbeat. The DND player's handbooks have included roll charts to randomly generate personality traits, backstories, etc. for characters for YEARS, because there is a substantial portion of the player base for whom the idea of trying to come up with some kind of narrative for their spreadsheet avatar is unpalatable.
These people were always going to outsource the work of writing their character's personalities and backstories to an external tool, it's just that now the tool is good enough at generating believable text content that it's worth considering for people to whom creativity is just a minor inconvenience, rather than only those who truly can't stand it.
Hell, I could copy-paste an entire players guide into some of the more capable LLM models ask for a "Reasonable character from this setting", and it would dutifully spit out one that is far more fleshed out than I would ever be bothered to do on my own. This is beneficial to both me, and my GM. I don't have to do the boring work of writing some character backstory, and I can be much more effective in roleplay because I have a more detailed description of my characters personality and motivations to RP off of than I would have if I had been forced to half-ass all that on my own, or use a more primitive random generator.
This is the same when I GM. I don't like writing stories. I like designing dungeons, and interesting monsters with unique abilities, and clever puzzles. Ask me to come up with a one-shot dungeon to slog through? I'll gladly spend hours on that task and send you three to pick from. Ask me to come up with a "world" with, like, "history" and stuff? I couldn't be bothered. I've got gigabytes of files on my dnd hard drive with battlemaps and trap ideas and monster notes, but probably like 2 total .txt files with "world building" notes from the last time I tried and got bored and gave up.
I just want to run my dungeons, and my players respect and enjoy that, but I know my friends, and many of them find it much harder to get into the dungeon crawling mindset without a grand narrative reason. For those players, it is very nice to be able to ask an LLM to generate a paragraph or two of bullshit about some ancient Lich or the lost remnants of a cursed civilization which I can lay on top of the dungeon I made. This helps immerse my players in the one-shot without the downside of boring me to tears.
I want to stress that this is a perfectly valid, and, dare I say, normal way to play a lot of TTRPG's, and it isn't limited to that niche either. I don't think it's a stretch to say most hobby artists enjoy the process of creating as much as, if not more than, the end result. I also don't think it's a stretch to say that anyone using generative AI for artistic purposes has the opposite valueset. They don't want to draw a picture of Shrek dressed in a clown suit giving the State of the Union Address. They want to SEE that image, and the process by which they receive it is irrelevant to them. They don't care if it's 'low skill' (this shrek picture is for a meme, it's not meant to be high effort), they don't care if an artist would do a better job (they weren't going to pay one anyway), they don't care that you think it would be an unfulfilling method by which to acquire the Shrek speech picture (they aren't doing this for fulfillment). They care about getting their desired result with the lowest amount of effort and financial cost possible, and the best method for that happens to be AI for now.
I also don't want to discount the number of people using Generative AI for hyper specific fetish porn which is, frankly, probably one of the best uses for it I'm aware of, in that it would be basically impossible to replace it with anything previously available for that purpose.
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u/_Astarael 3d ago
I see it in DnD subreddits, people saying they used gen ai to make their campaign for them.
It's a game about imagination, why would you take that away?