I said metaphorically telling a story. Chess is literally a battlefield, but even physical sports focus on certain categories of human movement and form. They encourage certain body types. They require certain movements. Body language is a form of communication. The shape of your body tells stories of your ancestors and the story of what you’ve done and how you’ve treated it. There is poetry in body langue. It can tell a story. There are many kinds of stories. Not all of them are narrative. Some are metaphor. Every sport has its own vibe to it. Every game has its own feel. A video game is the creation of a human being(s). Another human being wants you to share an experience, whether game mechanic or literal plot narrative. Even a game with no plot at all still has heart, still has a soul. It represents another human being’s expression of what they believe to be fun, enjoyable, and wondrous.

That is a deeply human form of communication. Even if it is entirely nonverbal. Every game played and loved represents the opening of one human heart unto another. And I find it morally reprehensible to be tricked into having that kind of experience with a machine.

I feel the same for most all creative arts.

If NPCs can be dynamically fleshed out using LLMs, why not.

Sorry for the essay, but your “why not” got me thinking. I would argue it shouldn’t be done, both for gameplay and safety reasons.

The application I see of this is something like city population in RPGs. Looks at Skyrim. Canonically, the cities of Skyrim were supposed to have populations in the thousands. But that wasn’t possible to develop with realistic resources, and instead, they hand crafted a large, but still reasonable, number of NPCs to populate each town. It was enough to make the place feel like a functional city, but the cities themselves were physically small enough to make it all work. And, of course, like any RPG, after awhile you max out the dialogue tree of any NPC. This does cause you to lose the immersion.

So you might be tempted, “let’s use generative AI to populate a truly vast metropolis. Let’s build cities with thousands of NPCs.”

You could try it, but it’s already been tried. It’s called Starfield. I have a weird relationship to that game. I find the plot vapid and empty. And there is no joy in exploration. There are innumerable planets, but each of them is filled with procedurally generated assets. Every planet is vast, fully and utterly empty at the same time. There’s tons of bases, landmarks, flora and fauna to explore, but they’re all repeats of the same thing, nothing like the vast yet still handcrafted worlds of Skyrim and Oblivion. There’s some variety, but after playing for awhile, you see beyond the veil and the patterns become obvious. At that point, exploration loses all joy. I have a complicated relationship to Starfield mostly because despite hating much of it, I still have around 200 hours in it. Though that was mostly because I’m a sucker for factory games and got really into the base builder. The base builder, notably, doesn’t rely on those procedurally assets for its core functioning. The parts I like best about Starfield were the handmade parts.

It’s tempting to use LLMS to populate a vast RPG world. But soon enough, you will see behind the veil. Sure, they won’t repeat the same catch phrases, but after awhile all the NPCs will start sounding the same. Instead of getting disillusioned because all the NPCs repeat the same 5 lines, you’ll instead become disillusioned because they all sound like Claude or ChatGPT.

And worse, even if this doesn’t happen, even if it never gets old, that’s in some cases worse. Imagine you took this to the ultimate conclusion. Not only do you generate a mountain of dialog options for all your NPCs, you also embed an active LLM prompt window into the game. And let’s magically assume that LLMs get good enough to never hallucinate and to always give unique and relevant answers.

Such a game might be legitimately dangerous to the mental health of anyone using it. People already get addicting to immersive games. Take a game as addictive as WoW at its prime. Now fill it with NPCs, each the most engaging conversation partner you’ve ever had in your life, each with infinite patience and willing to talk with you for as long as you want, at whatever you want, who will never question your ideas or find you at fault for anything. Each as unique as people in the real world are from each other.

That right there is a dangerous machine. That is not something anyone should build. Immersive games are already addictive to many. People are already falling in love with chatbots. Combine them together, and you’re going to ruin a lot of innocent lives.

Games are ultimately about telling a story, through literal plot narrative or metaphor. I like it when people tell stories. I don’t want to be told a story by a damned machine.

Bunny doesn’t identify as a rabbit. Bun is non-binary and the pronouns are bun/bunny. Not a name. We use it like they/them and ze/zem. And not a child, a teenager

This is nonsense. And, as I said, a child.

Y’all got issues beyond being trans. And whatever it is, it has nothing to do with trans people or our struggles. I leave you to your demons.

That’s not a pronoun though, that’s a name. No one can know what social role this person is aiming for or how they want to be treated, as rabbits do not exist as free people in human society.

“I identify as a rabbit, treat me like a rabbit.”

“What, do you want me to lock you in a cage and raise you as a pet or source of meat and fur?”

If a child wants to play make believe, and the adults around them want to humor them, that’s fine. But we’re talking about adults in the real world here.

Again, the only way anyone knows how to treat this person is by learning their very specific “pronoun.” And if a word cannot form as a useful shorthand, it by definition isn’t a pronoun. This person doesn’t have “bun” as their pronoun. That’s just their nickname.

And what’s really odd in these conversations is that this has fuck all to do with trans people. Going by a quirky nickname you just made up doesn’t make you trans or anything other than a person with a quirky nickname.

If you have to explain it, it’s not a pronoun. If it has nothing to do with gender, it’s certainly not a pronoun. And gender isn’t just vibes. It has to have some actual relation to human sexuality and gender roles. Do you think your gender is a cat? I’m sorry, but you’re real gender is apparently clown. The purpose of pronouns is traditionally to indicate male and female. And pronouns should stick to that axis, though nonbinary folks fit neatly into that.

To me, a pronoun is something that:

1. Is a useful and practical shorthand. (A pronoun is not a nickname.)
2. Maps to a real gender that has some relationship to male, female, man, woman. (Could be various forms of nonbinary that say you identify between male and female, as neither male nor female, etc. But it has to actually have some connection to male/female.)

I just fundamentally reject the idea that the definitions of “gender” and “pronouns” are so meaningless that you’re basically using the word “gender” interchangeably with the word “vibe.” We have so many words to describe “bunself” without muddying the word pronoun. You could just say some has a rabbit-like personality or character. There’s no need for cis people to appropriate trans terminology for things that have nothing to do with trans issues or the gender spectrum.

They do. There’s a power-tripping mod for most of the big trans communities that loves to ban people for silly ideological reasons.

Look at this ridiculous shit. What did I do to deserve this? Did I go onto a trans community and start throwing around slurs? No! I would never do that. I’m trans myself. I’m active and help run actual trans support groups in the real world. No, I got mass banned for “gatekeeping” for completely innocuous posts like this:

Or another one here:

The person that moderates these communities is completely out of touch. If any discussion organically arises about the nature of pronouns or the bounds of who counts as trans arise, this out of control mod mass bans anyone that disagrees with her ideology.

Note, I didn’t go around harassing people who were using neo-pronouns. (Pronouns other than she/he/they.) It was simply an open discussion that organically developed. I personally find some neo-pronouns pretty ridiculous. Often they don’t even meet the definition of a pronoun. But I wasn’t forcing that belief on anyone or shoe-horning it in random discussions. I wasn’t even addressing anyone who use them. But I went against the party line, so it was time for a purge. These comments had very high upvote/downvote ratios, with greater than 90% of people upvoting rather than downvoting. So her views are clearly extreme even within the Lemmy trans community.

And worst, this power-tripping woman banned me from a bunch of other communities, all justified by the same childish “gatekeeping” bullshit. What’s worse is that it’s so sudden. Like, it’s not like they have a list of topics that are banned from discussion. The mods will allow discussions of these topics and then ban people who give answers they don’t like. If your answer to “what does it mean to be trans” is anything short of “it’s completely meaningless and has literally no real definition anymore,” then you’ll be banned for “gatekeeping.”

Nah, that’s bogus. It’s a private company, they can do what they want. They could have absolutely given OP the 5/5 rating, and just had them sign something saying that they were content with the bonus appropriate to a 4/5 rating. No one would have had to receive a penny less.

I’m surprised they haven’t just started building 5g chips right into the tvs. That’s the end goal here. Just make it so the devices don’t even need your cooperation to phone home.

It’s called MAGA.

Obviously duhumanizing someone due to their race, religion, sexual characteristics, or other immutable properties is wrong. But we’re talking about someone who Damned themselves entirely through their own actions. No one took Thompson’s humanity from him; he threw it away willingly.

Make no mistake. When Thompson hit the pavement that cold morning, he did not stop falling. His soul tried to rise up to the clouds, but he could not. Looking down, his ghost found a shackle tied to his ankle. Bound in fetters to a pile of gold, an otherworldly representation of his own wealth and greed. As his spirit tried desperately to soar upwards, instead he sunk down, down, and down, the ground rising up above him like a diver beneath the surface of the ocean. And he did not stop falling until his soul reached the Pit of Hell itself.

Such is the fate of all men who take the lives of others for their greed. In the end, they all Burn.

And yet, every single civil right you enjoy now was only achieved through lethal violence. The powerful never give up their unearned privileges without at least a little blood spilling first.

Murder? Such strong language. Is CEO killing really murder? If someone has so thoroughly surrendered their humanity as Brian Robert Thompson did, are they really human anymore? You can only commit murder against humans. I think of Thompson more akin to a cloth sack filled with bloody dollar bills than an actual human being. Ethically, what Luigi did is like collapsing a cardboard box or treating mold on a bathroom tile. Technically a destructive act, but hardly murder. There’s no need to use such inflammatory language to describe the disassembly of an inanimate object.

Same. I used reddit since 2008. I’ve had accounts with multiple posts to /bestof, with over 100k karma get banned. The things I’ve been banned for have always been trivial “zero tolerance policy” violations that remind me of the zero tolerance, zero thought policies you used to (still do?) see in American high schools. At least when I was in school, my school had a zero-tolerance policy for violence. A bully could attack a victim and both of them would be suspended for fighting. The administrators didn’t want to bother figuring out who was at fault, so they just punished victim and perpetrator equally.

On different accounts, I was banned from some of the largest subreddits that I had years of history of posting very high quality and well-regarded comments in. The biggest account I ever had was under the username “isleepinahammock.” You can still find links to now-deleted bestof posts through google. The things I’ve been banned from the big subreddits for include:

1. On January 6th, as the capital was actively being breached, wondering aloud why this invasion wasn’t being responded to with soldiers and automatic weapons. (Historically how such mobs trying to overthrow governments are always dealt with. Later we learned that the reason those soldiers weren’t present was because Trump deliberately left the place unguarded.)

2. As SCOTUS was considering its ruling on presidential immunity, stating that if SCOTUS rules the president has complete immunity and effectively be a dictator, Biden should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices until the ruling is reversed. (Later news articles and opinion pieces proposing this exact kind of thing were openly promoted to the top of r/politics.)

3. Flippantly telling an overt bigot, commenting in one of the LGBT subreddits, to “go die in a fire.”

4. Making pro-Palestinian comments in r/worldnews.

Never did I ever threaten anyone. Never did I propose vigilante justice on anyone. Any mentions of violence were either obviously flippant remarks or suggestions of lawful and just use of government authority. But these comments violated the zero tolerance, zero thought policies of the major subreddits. I received bogus site site suspensions for these, which I ignored with alt accounts. Eventually I received a total IP ban for ban evasion.

I realize that reddit likes to claim to have a neutral hand. They say that moderators should be able to operate their subs as they please. But these major community subs aren’t some niche community. If you want to create r/rightwingworldnews, go ahead, but the main worldnews section for the biggest discussion site on the net should not be run by a bunch of radical Israeli supremacists. r/politics, the main political discussion forum, should not apply a harsher standard to their commenters than they do the standards they apply to the very stories they feature. And there should be a meaningful appeals process to actually get access restored to individual subreddits and the site as a whole.

If they actually cared about quality content, they would do this. But this takes care and thought. And if all you’re trying to do is juice ad revenue, your number one priority is to make the site as clean and sanitary as possible. If all you care about is maxing ad revenue, then having a zero-tolerance, zero-thought policy of “any mention of an act of violence in any context = ban,” makes sense. Even though in some cases, such a nation’s capital literally being stormed by an invading rebel army, violence IS the correct response.

I don’t know if you saw images of what the capital looked like a few weeks after January 6th on Biden’s actual inauguration day, but the capital was a damn fortress. If those fuckers had tried to storm the capital again on that day, it would have been a blood bath. And you know what? I would absolutely support the military opening up machine guns on any violent mob trying to overthrow our democracy. The moment you choose violence, you deserve to be responded to in turn with violence. You do that? Well you’ve made your choice. I have no sympathy for you. And zero-tolerance, zero-thought moderation policies prevent us from talking about these harsh realities. Sometimes violence IS the answer. Sometimes democracy DOES need to be defended with force. But we cannot discuss these harsh realities on the main political page of the biggest discussion site on the net, just to keep the place clean for advertisers.

Oh, and one more reason I was once banned from r/politics? Someone posted a doomer comment saying something to the effect of, “how can we possibly deal with MAGA terrorists? What if they lose the next election and just start an open rebellion? It’s hopeless! We might as well give up now.” I responded with the obvious and correct statement. Something to the effect of, “what do we do if armed revolutionaries enter open rebellion against the government? We shoot them. We send in the military and we shoot them. That is what you are SUPPOSED to do to people who take up arms against a just and legitimately elected government. It’s that whole ‘enemies foreign and domestic’ thing that soldiers swear to enforce.” I was literally banned for suggesting the very thing every US soldier swears an oath to do if necessary.

Yup. I walked the whole path. Slashdot->digg->reddit->now lemmy I guess.

Also, I think the unaccountable moderators really are a problem. You end up with major subs like r/politics or /worldnews getting camped by people who just happened to get there first, and then being forever unaccountable for bias or stupidity. And then you get sitewide bans if you subvert the bans from the tinpot dictators camping on what should be community-led spaces.

You should look up the absurd pay structure of Musk at Tesla or how at Facebook, despite it being a publicly traded company, Zuckerberg literally cannot be fired.

The reason tech tends to chase stupid trends like AI is that there really aren’t that many people in charge of the whole place. They all know each other; they’re all buddies. And they all chase the same stupid fads together.