In a world overtaken by this fauxtopian vision of a world filled with “artificial intelligence,” spurred on by techno fascist billionaires, it’s become impossible to escape the slop machines everywhere.

Once-trusted news sites churn out slop, praising the tech-bros as the feature of “the industry,” actors sign away their likeness to AI versions of themselves, entire economies bet big on massive data centers the size of cities. Book covers–hell, book contents–music, video games; everything is not quite human-made anymore.

CEOs and developers of beloved games signal their approval of the technology. “It’s already here, and it’s not going anywhere,” they proclaim to their fans and audiences. Even though they all admit not having seen great improvements to efficiencies or cost reductions, “everyone’s using it, so we might as well use it, too.”

It’s frustrating. Maybe the reason it’s “not going anywhere,” is because you guys keep inviting it to stay. Even the most benign use of it shows the big tech companies that there’s desire for it. It enables them. And any and all pushback against it is seen as just another internet hysteria–some woke, left wing crusade to be angry for the sake of anger. After all, they made really good games, and maybe some minor use of this tech is justified, because we’re all having fun.

Everyone’s a critic until the thing being criticized is something they enjoy–want to enjoy, regardless of the implications. Fuck AI, until something I really love used it in some capacity. Then it’s okay, that one use case is fine. There is a line, after all. Fuck all AI beyond that line, of course, but this one thing, this one game, that I love, that is before that line. That’s fine. That’s cool. It’s reasonable. It’s allowed.

Plagiarism, labor reductions, environmental impacts, socio-economic devastation; the list goes on and on and on, and no one fucking cares the moment something they enjoy buys into it.

I’ve been creating for a very long time now. Writing, designing, some music. None of it is commercial, and I’m not at risk of being replaced by generative AI. LLM won’t come for me. But they make the process of creating more challenging, frustrating. Can’t use a damn em-dash anymore, because chatGPT uses them, so your writing looks “AI.” Never mind the fact that chatGPT only knows about them because it steals from real writers, who like to use them. It’s all so backwards now.

Generative AI does not create. It regurgitates. It doesn’t think, it just collects and makes guesses, one token at a time. People keep claiming use cases for it in writing, coding, concept design, placeholders, spreadsheets, what have you. They outsource human engagement and expertise to a sophisticated guessing machine, and if it messes up or creates something unremarkable, someone either needs to now go in and fix it, or they just leave it as is and move on. The end product is worse than it would have been if someone real was just doing it in the first place. Maybe it’s faster, maybe it’s cheaper, but it’s not better. At best, it’s just boring. At worst, it’s eroding the foundation of the product. And I’m just talking about art and words and code here. Personal, human expression and connections.

Yet, as a creator, game master, writer, there is a better way to engage with your inspiration than just vomiting an idea into a chatbot and slurping up the slop it shits back at you.

Procedural Stories

Some time ago, I got into the idea of solo roleplaying. It started with Ironsworn, and expanded from there into other products like the Mythic GM Emulator. In fact, I wrote a whole thing about Ironsworn: Starforged and procedural story telling here.

Many games these days come with tables to roll on to prompt stories and ideas. Even 5e Dungeons & Dragons uses random encounter tables to spice up the game between major set pieces.

To me, these oracles, spark tables, prompts, and random encounters, are a sort of anti-AI tool. You don’t prompt the chat bot and let it spit out a probabilistic aggregate of all of the data it has been trained on (read: it stole from). Instead, you use human-create prompt tables, some dice or cards or whatever random generator you prefer, to prompt you. It gets you thinking about what these ideas could mean within the context of whatever story or game you’re currently engaged with. Maybe it’s the first thing that comes to mind, maybe you sit with the prompts for a bit, maybe you just roll again if nothing strikes you with inspiration. But one way or another, sparks and oracles drive your fiction forward in ways you wouldn’t have thought of–or the ideas generated confirm your initial instincts even more. The game or story moves forward from there, until you reach another fork or seeming dead end. And you prompt yourself again within the new context based on all that came before.

Over and over again, and your imagination will create something, one building block at a time. Every new spark is informed by what came before. It’s contextual, it’s procedural. Nothing, no one else, generates what you are creating using these tools. It’s not a homogenized collections of all the data of the internet, reduced to the most common, most likely outcome. When random prompts hit, they hit hard. They spread like a wildfire into ideas and concepts and possibilities. It’s the opposite of outsourcing your thinking. It’s putting your inspiration into overdrive to create something truly unique.

Currently, I’m writing a story using the Fiasco RPG and a deck of cards, called “Writer Emergency Pack.” You can read all about it here. Each scene of this story is preceded by the draw of one of the cards, which is meant to get you thinking about your story in new and interesting ways. Each card is a complex, themed prompt. They’re meant to help writers push past writer’s block, but I like to use it in this extreme way for every single scene because it’s fun. It’s exciting to think about the current narrative–which itself was randomly tossed together using Fiasco–in new ways I had not previously considered.

A while ago, I ran a short game of Savage Worlds using the Mythic GM Emulator as a tool for the entire group to procedurally generate the development of the narrative as we played. It’s a great tool, not just for solo players. Every new scene, we rolled some dice and let the the chaos of it take us where it wants to go. Whenever anything was uncertain in the fiction, we asked the oracles. Whether it was a simple yes/no question, or something more complex, Mythic helped us explore and shape our own ideas into something actionable and exciting. No $500 billion dollars worth of GPUs needed.

Games like Mythic Bastionland (no relation the Mythic GM Emulator) uses spark tables to invoke details and imagination. Even a short table to generate a character’s appearance or demeanor can go a long way to add depth and detail to a game. These random tables aren’t so random anymore, once you use them within the context of your game or story. What they inspire is informed by what came before, and they will inspire what comes next. It’s why I refer to this process as procedural in the first place. As in, procedural generation as used in video game design. I think of the usage of prompts as a sort of algorithm, which, together with the context of the story so far, creates new avenues for your mind to explore. Both Mythic and Ironsworn like to use Verb/Noun combinations to spark ideas.

• “Create Safety”
• “Advance Blood”
• “Cleanse Vision”

If you ask questions like “Why does this NPC want from the characters?” or “What information can the party find on the computer?” and roll up a verb/noun combination like that, your mind will (most often) start to create new ideas and connection pretty much instantly. Sometimes you roll a few times, like pulling on a thread of ideas. It’s quite fascinating what such a simple tool can actually do for moving stories forward in unexpected and interesting ways. Even if the prompts don’t seem to fit at all, you probably end up thinking about how you would rather resolve the situation despite of them. Either way, it worked to get you ahead.

Trevor Devall’s youtube series “Me, Myself and Die!” shows of these ideas extremely well. Worth a watch, for sure.

Now What?

Is any of this enough to combat genAI in our media? No, of course not. But it got me thinking, and I felt the need to rant. I love games–table top and video alike–and it just grinds my gears how eager some people are to excuse the slop machine because something they like starts using it. Even within the TTRPG space, AI Dungeon Masters and similar tools keep creeping up all the time. People use the tech for art and writing, for placeholders, concept art, or just in general vibe with it for their projects to some degree or another. It just sucks.

I’ve been using prompts and random generation for years now to create and run games. Maybe I wanted to write this post as a means to take a stand against the constant push of LLM in our creative (and daily) lives.

Fuck AI.