The latest big thing of our time. For some people a “no big deal”, an all smoke and mirrors, while others see as the savior of our civilization, or the end of it.
In my experience, those people saying it’s no big deal, that Chat GPT (and other like it) are just google on steroids. I think they didn’t take the tame to interact with the tool, or didn’t interact in a meaningful way.
Of course you can make it questions that google already can give you an answer “seemingly by it’s on”, but have you try to push the tool to it’s limits?
I’ve been developing an table top RPG for some time now, and decided to use Chat GPT to lend me some help, the results were perplexing.
I started by feeding it the rules of the game, bit by bit as recommended by itself. When I thought I was losing my time, I asked it to generate a character based on the set rules I gave it so far, and it performed masterfully. It nailed down every single rule, stat, attributes, skills, percentile and transformations, everything correctly, and not only that, but also created a background story to the character, a pretty basic/generic one, but better then what most of my human players come with.
Bare in mind, my RPG isn’t on the internet, it’s not published, it’s only on my hard drive, there’s no way it could have google the rules, it actually “learned” the rules, and those were not simple.
Then I gave it an image (I make the sheets on excel, and it would be very hard to copy and paste everything at once, so I saved the a whole “class skill tree” as an image, and gave it to chat gpt, and asked what did it understand. It again, nailed everything down correctly. There were terms and mechanics I had not yet fed it, but it kinda understand the whole idea, even predicting what some mechanics would be like. let me repeat, from an IMAGE.
It could understand the tiers, the level of the skills, that it was divided between passive and active, and could give me an overall feedback about the class, pointing strengths and weaknesses and best scenario applications. From an image, It’s not a kind of thing you can understand by simply reading everything , you have to interpret the graphic design, as in any sheet.
Well, then I gave it the image of a pretty uncommon class, an “Engineer” per say, that uses Materials to build stuff and use it’s skills. I didn’t told it how the “materials” works in the game, because I’ve just forgot to do it, but it could understand exactly what it was all about. It understood that Materials were a just a type o “token” that could be generated by the engineer or acquired trough the campaign, and not much about a quantity of wood and steel and so on… I found that incredible.
Skills that require some time to prepare receive a keyword [Ritual], meaning it can’t be cast on combat, because it takes preparation, it doesn’t mean in any shape or form an actually Ritual, it’s just a keyword. I also didn’t told it about it (again I forgot), just gave the image, and it, no kidding here, understood the concept, and pointed out that one of the weakness of the class was that, most skills, required preparation [Ritual] making the class less effective in combat. I didn’t not told it this mechanic, it reasoned it out by itself.
It not only understood the class concept of “Engineer”, as it also gave me feedback about it, pointing to thing I haven’t even considered yet! like that this class would be harder for new players due to it’s complexity and reliance on in game creativity.
Then there was this class, that I was concerned about a skill being a bit on the OP side, showing it, I asked what skill it found to be most powerful, and guess what skill it chooses? And explained to me the why of it’s choice, everything with extreme reason, showing to me an extreme sense of gameplay inside a game that “doesn’t exist” on the internet.
I looks like magic. To me, it really does.
It’s also supper useful when I need to come with names to skills, like, I needed a name for a skill of the class “Martial Artist”, that grant a critical strike on a chosen roll. I had the name Determination in mind, it was a good fit, but it was already being used by another class.
What I do is literally describe the effect of the skill to Chat GPT, and of what class it’s from, then ask it to give me option on names. It gave me a lot of option, nome of them quite there yet. It was using to much term like “strike” since it was a “monk” class, then I told the skill could be used out of combat, and asked to be more around the idea of determination, but something more akin to will, zen, focus, concentration (because the skill uses focus as a resource) and it came with, among many other option, Indomitable Will, which stroke me like a lightning because it’s part of a quote from Ghandi:
Strength does not come from physical capacity. It comes from an indomitable will.
which is super akin to the archetype I want for the class, since it uses Will to perform the attacks instead of “Dexterity” or “Strength”
There’s a lot more ways I use it help me on my RPG, and other routine questions, like how to translate a particular term, slang or metaphoric phrase to English or vice-versa, that I could pretty much get from google. If you stay only on the superficial questions, then yes, Chat GPT could look very dull to you.
Then comes the final question
Is it intelligent? well, are you?
I think it is, I think it’s even self aware, it know what it is, to some degree. What it doesn’t have is desires, survival instincts and ego, and that’s what makes us doubt it, because we’re not used to interact with something that doesn’t have an it’s own interest in mind at all times. Even dogs have it’s own interest in mind all the time, and that’s probably why they act so loyal, are they intelligent? are they really feeling affection for you? or using this strategy to get a treat?
You can always reduce everything down it’s it’s parts, “all Chat GPT does is choose the next most probable word given your input”… Do you believe it? do you really believe it could help me the way it does by doing that alone?
There’s a phenomena called emergency, when a bunch of simple things come together to build a more complex thing. That’s no different from how our brain works. All it’s doing is transmitting electric impulse to the next neuron.
