Drunk on power this afternoon, I commanded my demonic robot slave Claude to make some hexmaps. And I was impressed with what it came out with. I told it to produce a single 24-mile per hex hexmap of Japan for use in an OSR sandbox, then a 6-mile per hex map of each of Japan's regions (Kyushu, Shikoku, Chugoku, Kansai, etc.), and then 1-mile per hex maps of every prefecture. And it duly spat out amazingly detailed, usable, and - one must conceded - aesthetically pleasing stuff.
Here is the 24-mile per hex map of Japan (it even apologised that since some of the sea channels in Japan are less than 24 miles wide it was not able to map them accurately, and at its own initiative placed special sea borders between hexes at such locations):
Here are examples of two of the regional 6-mile hex maps (for Shikoku and Tohoku):
And here are two examples of individual prefectures (Kochi and Ishikawa) at the 1-mile hex level:
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Now, you can tell these are AI-produced (note for example how the little insert map, showing where what is depicted fits into the bigger picture, just depicts a random, sliced-off corner of Asia and then sea all around - a human being would never do that). But still, you have to grant that, with about three simple prompts and 30 minutes it is a wonder that it was able to come up with all this. And it is incredibly useful; it would potentially completely revolutionise the way I prepare a campaign, and also scale-up my ambitions for what I could create in terms of campaign settings by several orders of magnitude. I would just love to get cracking keying in those hexes.
And yet, and yet, it is funny how something so marvellous can at the same time fail to satisfy. Last weekend, I happened to have created my own map of a campaign setting, the idea for which had popped into my mind almost fully formed. I won't talk about the substance here now, but here at any rate is the (unfinished and unlabelled) map I did on Worldographer:
It took me a good few hours across two evenings - let's say, at least 6 times as long as it took Claude to map out Japan in beautiful 1-mile hexes in painstaking detail. And it looks nothing like as nice as what Claude came out with. But I was much more pleased with it, because it was mine. OK, ok, so I used a software programme to do it - I didn't hand draw it. But it was my effort and labour that went into it. And doing the coastlines for those islands, not to mention the rivers (have you tried to draw rivers in Worldographer?) was fiddly and took some time to get right. I felt good about what I had done, and satisfied. It's not perfect, and it will take more work to fill everything in and get everything how I want it. But it - forgive me being pompous - feels good in my soul to have made it.
I have over the years made a number of posts riffing on the fundamentally Satanic nature of AI art and writing. But here I come back to the main observation I made several years ago. Like the Angrborn in Gene Wolfe's The Wizard Knight, the problem, the real problem, with what Claude and its ilk produce is that, while technically incredible, lacks the capacity to be loved. As I put it back then:
We examine [what AI creates] as we would a constellation of stars - a thing that, however beautiful, is impenetrable to emotion. We do not love it in the same way that we can love a real painting by a real person, or at least recognise such a painting to be loveable in some sense to somebody even if it's not to our personal taste. We humans can love all manner of things - think of how deeply a child loves a stuffed toy, a hardworking parent loves his or her comfortable bed, a football fan loves his team, or a young person loves an item of clothing. But we do not love AI art. It is inert to our affection.
I recall a professor in art school who informed the class, "art is not merely an embellishment to our lives, it is the purpose of life", or something like that. Thinking now on your comments regarding the relationship between art and our ability to love a created thing, it occurs to me that at least one purpose of our existence may be to create something that someone will be able to love.
ReplyDeleteWe do it all the time as children and it is part of what makes childhood so magical.
DeleteI think this is also a significant insight into how we interact with other people's work. We don't have the same emotional connection to what someone else has created as to what we've created ourselves, so the superficial attractiveness - and sheer scale - of the computer-generated version impresses us and we overlook its shortcomings. Meanwhile the person who created something ambitious but flawed is judged harshly for their human limitations.
ReplyDeleteThat’s an excellent point.
DeleteI always addressed ChatGPT (my previous AI servant) as "Oz." Unfortunately, it was far too apt a name as he kept giving me fraudulent info. I've since moved to a different (slightly smarter) AI for my occasional one-sided convos. No name for the new guy yet.
ReplyDelete; )
The modern way to do this would be to tell Claude to make the map directly in Worldographer for you. Then you would have a fully editable map. If you like Claude's style you could then have it make a tile set and apply it the map. I'm not making any kind of "should" statement or value judgement here, that's just the most effective way to work with it.
ReplyDeleteThanks. I did some experimenting with that this afternoon.
DeleteProducing a hex map of Ishikawa Prefecture at a 1 mile per hex level seems like exactly the kind of thing I'd gladly hand over to the devil machine with no questions asked, but it doesn't actually seem tremendously *useful*. I don't understand how it scales up your ambitions for campaign settings - creating a map has never been the bottleneck. More hexes to fill means more human-work.
ReplyDeleteIt allows the creation of beautiful, detailed maps that I personally would find it a joy to key and populate!
DeleteI find I feel the same way about art and creativity for my own work, and I have an immediate, negative reaction to works when I discover they are AI assisted, *even if I previously appreciated them.* That said, I spend at least an hour a week working with undergrads and a few grads in math, science, and graphic design trying to help them navigate a future in which their personal accomplishments are held in low esteem and they are judged only by the speed of their work product. I vicariously feel their pain when they are told that their value is lower than the tools. Consequently, I am careful not to shame those who do use them, as we do not know their personal skill or motivations, and I refuse to say those who use such tools cannot per se be making art. It is possible that I will change my opinion in the future if some sanity returns, but as of the moment, I encourage students to work with the tools they must and protect their own skills to the extent they can.
ReplyDeleteIn Hex/Worldographer I just use the straight line tool for rivers, giving them as many angular bends as I need. It's more stylized but much easier to execute.
ReplyDeleteI also see you've used a variety of water lines to make islands; I use those for coastlines as well, blending them into the shallow water hexfill.
I don't know. I am sympathetic, to say the least, to your feeling that AI is a Satan-machine; but I think the child's stuffed toy is the strongest possible counterargument to what you're saying here. The teddy bear, or whatever, is a mass-produced piece of tat made in a factory, often very cheaply, by some machine overseen but not as such controlled by an extremely poor Asian person; at no point has any human hand instilled it with any warmth or human feeling. But the child loves it desperately, boundlessly, as an adult struggles to love anything at all. This seems to imply that it's not at all the humanity imbued in the creation that matters, but the human soul that embraces the creation – a new refutation, let's say, of Marx's labor theory of value.
ReplyDeleteThere are those who love the stars the same way, cold lanterns forged by no human hand, distant beyond measure.