Ive been a DM for 30+ years and do practically zero prep. If the Rules Cyclopedia doesnt have what I need I just make it the fuck up, which is, yknow, half the DM's job - improvising answers that make sense.

You dont need AI. Period.

There are decades of campaigns and adventures waiting to be played. I have five campaigns on my shelf, all of them good quality and fit to my tastes. And yet, I still write new campaign material because I actually like making campaigns.

Why would I give the fun part to a machine?

If you're DMing and your idea flops, try again. If you cant be arsed to try, find a new hobby.

I'm going to argue that how you use the lying machine determines if it's slop, not if you use it.

"Generate a character profile for Alexander the blacksmith." Slop.

"Ask me questions about Alexander the blacksmith so I can further develop his character." Not slop.

"Summarize everything I explained about Alexander the blacksmith in the format of a wiki article." Could be slop, might not be, depends on how diligent you were about not letting the lying machine have creative control. Needs to be reviewed for accuracy of course.

And for the record, I was a DM for years before generative ai was a thing. Running a campaign is ton of work, even with shortcuts. Don't insult your DM like this.

Hopefully people will slowly become more conscientious of the reasons we find things valuable. A beautiful sad song is touching in large part because we empathize with the sad person who wrote it. They put words to something our soul was feeling too. The exact same intonations feel kind of empty if we know it was a computer that generated them.

I've tried using AI three times as a GM. Two were complete failures. The third worked well enough for my purposes in the end, but I certainly wouldn't say it was good.

The first was trying to generate a picture of a very specific scene I had in mind. I wanted to show the players the landscape they were seeing. The AI was unable to generate a picture to my satisfaction, so I gave up. This was 3 years ago now so maybe image generation has gotten better, but it certainly wasn't good enough at the time, and I haven't bothered trying again.

The second was an attempt to generate some box text–style description of something. More out of curiosity than anything. It made some very basic factual errors. The description was of a statue of an archer, and it described her doing something with both her hands (hands on hips I think? I forget) as well as having her bow drawn. Humans don't have 3 hands... I tried and tried repeatedly to get ChatGPT to fix its errors, but by the time I ran out of free credits it still couldn't produce something that was even cogent, let alone artistically good.

The third is one that I think has the greatest potential. I had a great map that I wanted to use. I can't remember if this particular one is one I paid for or if it was purely hobbyist put up for free. But it wasn't printer friendly. I asked the AI to take the map and convert it into a printer-friendly format. So mostly blank white with black outlines of things, and a black grid. It really, really struggled with this task. After several back-and-forths I eventually got something that was...usable. But I was far from happy with it, and the AI regularly completely ignored the specific things I was asking of it to address the failure in the previous attempt. This was maybe 1 year ago or so. I think it has potential to get better because it's not replacing a creative process, but a mechanical one. But even here it didn't seem good enough yet.

Sounds like this meme was made by someone who has never DMed a session in their life.

Not everyone has the luxury of having enough time to prepare entire campaigns from scratch, but still would like to play. And if they want to take shortcuts, who are we to gatekeep? (And no, premade-campaigns take up even more time)

When you tell them to prepare their own campaign then, they stay remarkably quiet.

~ DM who has been DMing long before LLMs became a thing.

I'm conflicted on this one, and I think blanket statements like this aren't useful. I'm not going to judge folks for what they do in the privacy of their own homes with consenting adults.

I've used AI to generate the tabletop token that I would have otherwise stolen from Google image search. Only now I have 12 different random soldiers instead of 1 soldier copied 12 times.

I would never leave the session prep to AI, because that's the fun part. Why would I outsource my fun?

I read this in Benny and Evelyn's voices.