In the comments on my previous post (about creating a 1-mile hex map of Japan with the help of Claude) somebody popped up to say:
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.
I found this interesting. Don't get me wrong - I understand the point being made. Laboriously filled in a 1-mile hex map of Japan does not on the face of it reflect a more ambitious campaign setting, which would require, if anything, the opposite (namely, big, sweeping, large-scale ideas and inventiveness).
But I would like to stick up for this type of project, on the grounds that 'more human-work' is by no means necessarily a bad thing. I happen to think that keying a 1-mile per hex map of Japan would be a very pleasurable activity in its own right. It would be a life's work - if it took 5 minutes to key every single hex it would still take you decades, working at evenings and weekends. But would that be any more of a waste of time than doing jigsaw puzzles, playing video games, or watching TV?
Activitiy like this has its own pleasure. This is often misleadingly and ignorantly labelled 'mindfulness', although it's really the opposite of that. It is really more to be understood as the pleasure of being in a creative fugue-state, where the external world ceases to matter for a while and the conscious mind becomes absorbed in the completion of a focused task. This is the brain-state which we enter when drawing a picture, writing, practicing a musical instrument, and so on, and although it is not filled with intense pleasure it does produce a mild and continuous sense of tranquility, relaxation, and enjoyment.
A month or two ago I made a post advocating world building as a hobby in its own right, and this type of task - keying huge and detailed maps - is clearly a very concentrated and distilled version of that activity. Just now I asked Claude to make me a set of hex maps of Kyrgyzstan, at country, region, and district level. Tell me that the urge to get keying doesn't come over you when looking at this stuff:
I guess. My question is haven't we had Hex maps of actual places before Large Language Models or AI as we are calling it?
ReplyDeleteSuch as these: https://idraluna-archives.itch.io/
Perhaps I am being too prejudiced against Large Language Models.
I am not totally against creative people using it as a tool or jumping off point, which is what you are saying I think. My large hostility towards it are many things, yet one of them is I have never had something so aggressively and forcefully marketed to me in my life, and the only way to be more aggressive is to actually force me to buy it. It feels like if the tech sector was a merchant in a bazaar, that merchant would be thrusting his wares into my hands with one hand and then grabbing into my wallet to get the money with another saying "thank you."
I have never been an adopter of the latest technology or upgrade, if I was in the era of when cars were coming out, I would have likely been still on a horse.
I get you and hear you. It’s the speed and accuracy with which it can do it. You can get it to spit out the maps and that leaves you to do the really creative stuff. Although I agree that it is nothing a human couldn’t or shouldn’t do (see previous post).
DeleteMuch as I dislike using an LLM to build anything creative for me, I have to say I am completely enchanted by the idea of building procedural worlds (like in Dwarf Fortress). I would happily commit years of work to programming this myself, but it does not rise up high enough in priority to overtake the other creative work I want to do.
ReplyDeleteThe way I see it is that using AI is delegating the creative process to a machine. The fugue-like joy that you describe is something I find in the creative process. Rather than being flatly against AI, I ask myself "Is this task something I would like something else to do for me, or is it a task I would enjoy doing myself?" Sometimes if the task is onerous or getting the finished product as soon as possible is a priority then AI becomes an option to consider. But if it is something I like doing and there are few other pressures, then of course I won't ask AI for help. This is especially true of my creative writing and to a certain extent software writing and sketching where I can really focus on the process and get absorbed by it.
ReplyDeleteThe maps are beautiful and enticing, but I think I'd rather dig into Idraluna's tools & tutorials to learn how to do it myself here? Then I'd have something deterministic, repeatable, reliable, understood, procedurally tweakable.
ReplyDeleteAnd I'm a professional programmer so *do* feel like the tooling is something I can work with, whilst I see some severe tradeoffs in LLM use during the day job... But there are definitely hobby projects where I would consider, say, using the LLM to write some code that's massive and boilerplatey and outside my competence...
Like John L said, this all ties into deadlines, affordances, how I *want* to spend my time.