I’ll try to be quick, but you know me.
In late 2024, I used ChatGPT as a brainstorming aid to help come up with numerous basic concepts for side-quests, opportunities, and random events for my upcoming Griftlands mod, Three For All.
The intent and result of using the software was purely as a tool to help me brainstorm a large amount of random, broad, surface-level ideas and concepts that would eventually create a spark of inspiration that would lead me to writing an idea I actually liked down in my planning spreadsheet. I found the software helpful in this one specific instance because, while writing a single deep narrative is very fun and engaging for me, brainstorming a huge number of smaller ideas is something I find extremely challenging. No text was directly copied to the concept planning spreadsheet. No line of code nor dialogue was created using generative software.
Since I performed this task, my opinion on generative AI software has strictly nosedived, and I am currently vehemently against using GenAI at all in its current form. They are an ethical disaster, an education disaster, an environmental disaster, a labor disaster, a security disaster, an incoming financial disaster, deeply inaccurate, built on a temple of lies and empty promises, and a blight on all creative and professional fields. If they weren’t un-auditable black boxes that everyone just despairingly accepts are filled with plagiarized material, if they were scaled down and ethically sourced, they would still be abused as a lazy shortcut that undermines the creative disciplines.
This has led to me becoming conflicted about this brainstorming spreadsheet I now have.
On the one hand, I want to believe that, in my relative ignorance a couple years ago (I was still skeptical at the time, but part of me was looking for some way that the software could be genuinely useful), I used this generative software as ethically as I possibly could under the circumstances. I only used it as a rapid inspiration tool to stimulate my own mind and thinking. I would prompt it to generate 10 quest ideas at a time, often in different genres that weren’t the space western I was working in, and if one or two of those listed concepts sparked an idea in my own head, I would write down the adapted Griftlands version of that idea onto the spreadsheet. I tried to use it as an augmentation of the creative process, to cover a genuine limitation I have with breadth-first brainstorming dozens upon dozens of ideas on my own. The alternative would have been slower and similar, raiding all of my favorite media, scouring the internet for various prebuilt TTRPG quest generators and the like, harvesting sidequest ideas to synthesize and remix into my own project. The generative software, in its role as lossy compression of large volumes of text, was helpful in speeding up that process. Or, less charitably, I used the random text generator as a random text generator just to simulate my brain and get ideas flowing, which is I hope the least presumptive way to go about using it at all.
On the other hand, even with all that filtering from slop-output to work product, all that effort to keep it to brainstorming only, it’s still the product of running a tainted source through multiple layers of sieves. The purity of the content will never be 100%. Not that any list of 100 sidequests I painstakingly thought up in a vacuum over the course of six months would be entirely original either, but I still ran some amount of my process through the dreaded un-auditable black box. How do I know for sure that one of the ideas I wrote down isn’t essentially ripped off from a plagiarized text scraped from what was supposed to be a private corner of the internet, a time-bomb waiting for when the five people who recognize that synthesized idea stumble across the finished work? Maybe a tad on the paranoid side, but this is the kind of existential dilemma that running your process through an un-auditable black box gets you.
Understanding all of those factors in play, I had a decision to make: Err on the side of caution and toss away the spreadsheet in order to start from scratch all over again, or err on the side of reckless expedience and keep the spreadsheet so I can get straight to work on filling out content for the mod.
The mere existence of this blog post has already spoiled the ending: I’ve kept the spreadsheet and I’m continuing to work on the mod using those brainstormed ideas, hoping that my efforts to keep it as ethical and slop-free as possible pay off in the long run.
However, I don’t want anyone to take this as an endorsement of ChatGPT in its current form or any future form anytime soon. Doing my brainstorming this way was a mistake, one I was ill-equipped to evaluate at the time and one whose baggage I’ve reluctantly decided to carry forward.
If faced with the same situation again, I would avoid using any generative software entirely, unless things have magically progressed to a point where we have reasonably sized language models whose training data can be adequately audited for ethical use. But boy howdy do I not expect that to be the case anytime soon. I would rather get some friends together to help me brainstorm or, as stated before, scour all my favorite media and other people’s handmade generators so I can do the flawed all-but-plagiarism myself rather than offloading it to a black-box program to launder ideas for me.
I debated somewhat about doing this “AI Disclosure” at all, because it’s such a borderline case and I really did put in the effort to separate the slop from the content, so that not a single line of code or dialogue ever even got close to the finished product. But seeing a bunch of high-profile game developers wheeling out excuses about how the way they used generative AI was for “concept art only,” I realized I had no excuse myself.
And I hope there’s something to be learned here from my mistake. Even if a random word generator might be helpful for that grueling brainstorming process, the current random word generators we have right now are so deeply unethical they taint everything they touch. Steer clear for the foreseeable future.