I'm starting this thread to get the community thinking and talking about what role they believe ChatGPT or any other AI text generators can or should occupy within roleplay, how they have seen it used in-game, and how they may have used it themselves. AI's rapid assimilation as a tool of creative expression means this kind of conversation was going to be inevitable - in fact, it's already a subject of heated debate in various discord channels, which never goes anywhere because discord is an inferior venue for really any kind of meaningful conversation. If anything, this thread is surprisingly late to the party.
Although I understand how it works and seen examples of its use, I've never used ChatGPT myself. Not necessarily out of some technophobic resentment, but because I don't experience much difficulty in expressing my thoughts and ideas, so it simply has no appeal to me. I find the writing process to be cathartic and engaging, but I understand that for a lot of people it can instead feel stressful and frustrating. These people I sympathize with, and wouldn't look down on for requesting help from a well-spoken robot. But an argument I've seen for legitimate ChatGPT usage that I consider genuinely concerning is that of the non-native English speakers who use the program to generate their speeches or IC texts top-to-bottom, with the excuse being that they don't know English well enough to perform the task themselves. I find that perspective concerning because I'm a non-native English speaker - and the way I got to be so confident and comfortable with my writing in the first place is by attempting to read and write at a higher level than I was actually capable of pulling off skillfully. ChatGPT doesn't help you write better if it's doing all the writing for you. I would much rather read through a passage of text riddled with grammatical errors but still fundamentally your ideas than to read through a robot's empty attempts at pretending to be a person.
And that's something that less-skilled writers may not realize about ChatGPT: Anyone who's actually paying attention to your writing will recognize an AI's voice within it. I've already seen ChatGPT used on the server on multiple occasions. Some instances were subtle applications which I only learned about after the fact, while in a few other instances I recognized the AI immediately. I'll be vague with my example as I don't want to call anyone out, but in one circumstance, there was a speech being delivered about a subject that my character felt very passionately about. The speaker very obviously copied and pasted somewhere around five paragraphs of text ostensibly related to that subject - the subject was named and referenced and the words chosen within the speech all fit the general "vibe" of the subject - but for all the words being spat out at me, at no point was anything actually said. No meaningful statements or claims were ever staked. I read five paragraphs of something I intended for my character to be passionate about, and found it absent of any actual message. This incident was extremely upsetting to me, to the point where I've since shelved that character. I wondered to myself what the point would be of pursuing a narrative that everyone around me was content to treat as little more than an aesthetic filter for an AI word salad. What meaningful roleplay can come out of interacting with people who treat their character as a stand-in to parrot the fabricated ideas of a robot? And what made that incident all the more upsetting is that the speaker in question spoke English as a second language. I know how alienating it feels to think you're just incapable of measuring up to the people around you, and I can imagine they only got the courage to put themselves on that stage because ChatGPT gave them all the correct capitalization and pretty punctuation to make them think they could pass as "one of us." But in the process they forgot that the point of roleplay isn't to impress your peers with how you good word the thing stuff. It's about being yourself. Or, y'know. Being yourself being someone else.
Roleplay is fun because it's a character exploration. It's an opportunity to live another life, see the world through someone else's eyes, and engage with others within the boundaries of that premise. How well can you really claim to be roleplaying if you outsource the opportunity to express your character and hand it instead to some AI program? Would it be any different from handing your keyboard to some random person sitting next to you at the computer? What do you really get out of the experience? And furthermore, what do I?
That said, there are some examples of ChatGPT usage on the server that I find much more interesting and worthwhile: Translation & Refinement. I expect it can be dangerously easy to slip up and become a walking, talking thesaurus with this method, but using ChatGPT to make slight tweaks and edits to a body of text you've already put together can help smooth out the edges of your work, trimming the fat and highlighting the message within. I've seen amateur poets go back and forth with the AI, inputting a rough draft to be translated into more poetic language, taking what they've been given and adjusting what comes out of it to better suit their own vision. In that sense, ChatGPT isn't creating your message, but serving as an editor to help you better express what was always fundamentally what you wanted to say.
I can also see its merit as an "idea generator" to help you find the direction you'd like to channel your creative energy towards. Maybe your wizard wants to write an essay about something within their realm of expertise, but you can't quite decide what to focus on. ChatGPT can be helpful in breaking through the writer's block by listing out some interesting topics for you to then elaborate upon. Again, it's an example of using it as a tool to help you find the right way to express yourself.
I feel like the difference between "good" and "bad" usage is in the intentionality of one's use: It's one thing to have something to say and use AI to help you refine the presentation of your message, and another matter entirely to simply let an algorithm decide what your message is. But you still have to understand that there's more to this art than good spelling and accurate syntax. ChatGPT might improve the presentation of your writing, but it isn't going to make you a better roleplayer, and it's probably not much help in making you a better storyteller. If you're using it because you think it can accomplish either of those goals, then you're simply in it for the wrong reasons.
This topic is interesting to me because it's essentially a new frontier, a new realm of possibilities in how it may affect the way we experience storytelling. I care very much about fostering an environment that encourages better roleplay, and I think examining the role that this new tool can play in our craft is a worthwhile discussion. I'm not interested in discussing the implications of AI's presence in artistic fields for broader society - at least, I'm not interested in discussing it here - so if you engage in this topic, please try to keep it focused on how you think AI interacts with Arelith and with roleplay in general, whether good or bad.
