ChatGPT is pretty well versed in Glorantha

[styopa]

Q: Can you tell me the story of the Lightbringers from Glorantha?

ChatGPT:

Certainly! The Lightbringers are a central myth in Gloranthan mythology, and tell the story of how the sun was brought into the world.

In the beginning, the world was shrouded in darkness, and the gods were trapped in the underworld. The goddess Eiritha, mother of all life, decided that something had to be done to bring light to the world. She gathered together a group of heroes known as the Lightbringers and charged them with the task of bringing back the sun.

The Lightbringers consisted of several gods and demigods, including Orlanth the Storm King, his wife Ernalda the Earth Queen, and his brother Yelm the Sun God. They journeyed through the underworld, facing a series of challenges and tests along the way. They battled with monstrous creatures, outwitted cunning spirits, and passed through dangerous gates and barriers.

Eventually, they reached the top of the cosmic mountain known as Kero Fin, where they found Yelm the Sun God held captive by the goddess of chaos and darkness, known as the Unholy Trio. With the help of their ally the Trickster God, who distracted the goddesses, the Lightbringers were able to free Yelm and bring him back to the world.

However, the Unholy Trio were not willing to give up so easily. They attacked the Lightbringers and managed to steal the sun back, plunging the world back into darkness. Undeterred, the Lightbringers regrouped and launched a second assault on the Unholy Trio, this time with the help of a giant eagle named Gorgorma. The eagle carried them to the top of Kero Fin, where they defeated the goddesses and finally brought the sun back to the world.

Thanks to the bravery and determination of the Lightbringers, the world was bathed in light once more, and the gods were able to emerge from the underworld and return to their rightful places in the heavens. The myth of the Lightbringers is a powerful symbol of the triumph of light over darkness, and the importance of perseverance and teamwork in the face of adversity.

Something a little harder....

Q: In glorantha, what is the relationship between Mallia and Razlakark

ChatGPT: 

In Glorantha, Mallia and Razlakark are both associated with disease, but they are not necessarily considered to have a direct relationship with each other.

Mallia is the goddess of disease, decay, and corruption. She is a chaotic and malevolent deity who delights in spreading sickness and pestilence throughout the world. Her followers believe that disease is a natural part of the world, and that it serves a necessary function by purging the weak and unworthy.

Razlakark, on the other hand, is a disease spirit who is associated specifically with the plague. He is sometimes depicted as a demonic figure with a swarm of flies around him, and is feared and reviled by many cultures in Glorantha.

While both Mallia and Razlakark are associated with disease, they are not typically seen as being in a direct relationship with each other. Rather, they are each considered to be separate entities with their own distinct domains of influence. However, it is possible that followers of Mallia might seek to appease Razlakark or harness his power for their own purposes, as he is a potent symbol of disease and decay in the world of Glorantha.

 

OK graduate level now...(I felt framing it 'in Glorantha' contextually would prevent wasting time/seed info on non-Gloranthan references like Arkat Mtn...)

Q: In Glorantha, when Arkat fought Nysalor, which one won the fight?

ChatGPT: 

The outcome of the conflict between Arkat and Nysalor in Glorantha is a matter of debate and interpretation. The details of the conflict are shrouded in myth and legend, and different sources offer conflicting accounts of what happened.

According to some sources, Arkat was able to defeat Nysalor and bring an end to his reign of terror. Arkat was a powerful hero and warrior who was able to combine the knowledge and powers of different cults in order to create new forms of magic and combat. He was also known for his strategic genius and his ability to outthink his opponents.

Other sources, however, suggest that Nysalor was never truly defeated, but instead went into hiding and continued to exert his influence behind the scenes. Nysalor was a complex and enigmatic figure who was associated with many different cults and beliefs, and his true nature and motivations remain a mystery to this day.

Ultimately, the conflict between Arkat and Nysalor is seen as a turning point in Gloranthan history, and the aftermath of their battle had far-reaching consequences for the world and its people. The legacy of their struggle can still be felt in the present day, and many believe that the forces of chaos and darkness that Nysalor represented continue to threaten the world and its inhabitants.

(same question, '...answer from the perspective of a Lunar Noble')

A Lunar noble might say that Nysalor was the true victor in the conflict with Arkat, as he was able to transform himself into a new and more powerful form known as the Red Emperor. The Lunar Empire, which was founded by the Red Emperor, is seen by many Lunars as the culmination of Nysalor's vision for a utopian society based on reason, justice, and enlightenment.

According to Lunar mythology, the Red Emperor was able to defeat Arkat and his followers by using his superior knowledge of magic and technology. The Lunar Empire is seen as a beacon of civilization and progress in a world that is often beset by chaos and darkness. Lunars believe that the teachings of Nysalor and the Red Goddess offer a path to enlightenment and prosperity for all peoples, regardless of their race or background.

However, it is important to note that the Lunar perspective is just one of many viewpoints in Glorantha, and other cultures and factions might offer very different interpretations of the conflict between Arkat and Nysalor. The history and mythology of Glorantha is rich and complex, and it is up to each individual to explore its many facets and come to their own conclusions about the world and its inhabitants.

 

Wow.

 

 

[Brian Duguid]

Not sure that I want to spin off a big discussion about AI - but one thing I find interesting about ChatGPT is that it seems to have been given that over-earnest writing style characteristic of high-school essay writers who are trying too hard to please the teacher.

[Hteph]

I'm a bit impressed, but OTH the LLM (Large Language Model, not AI, it is not an AI) was probably given heap and heaps of old forum posts written by nerd harping to no ends on their favourite topics. And I have always found Gloranthaphiles among the top most "productive" in those crowds.

I imagine the whole usenet went into that (with some of the more seedy parts removed) training set.

[dumuzid]

6 minutes ago, Hteph said:

I'm a bit impressed, but OTH the LLM (Large Language Model, not AI, it is not an AI) was probably given heap and heaps of old forum posts written by nerd harping to no ends on their favourite topics. And I have always found Gloranthaphiles among the top most "productive" in those crowds.

I imagine the whole usenet went into that (with some of the more seedy parts removed) training set.

reading it, you can still see the seams where this algorithm has sutured different posts together, like the bit where it starts talking about the Red Emperor defeating the followers of Arkat

like one of those old movie ransom notes with the letters cut from different magazines

[Jason Farrell]

There's nothing particularly intelligent about it, but a natural language interface for internet searches isn't a terrible thing in and of itself.  It's the people convincing themselves that it actually substitutes for creative work that worry me.

[Darius West]

12 hours ago, styopa said:

Q: Can you tell me the story of the Lightbringers from Glorantha?

ChatGPT:

Certainly! The Lightbringers are a central myth in Gloranthan mythology, and tell the story of how the sun was brought into the world.

Err... No...?  Perhaps how the Sun was returned to the world...

12 hours ago, styopa said:

In the beginning, the world was shrouded in darkness, and the gods were trapped in the underworld. The goddess Eiritha, mother of all life, decided that something had to be done to bring light to the world. She gathered together a group of heroes known as the Lightbringers and charged them with the task of bringing back the sun.

Eiritha?  Seriously?

The speech modeling isn't bad, but its Glorantha Lore is sketchy at best.

[radmonger]

It's lore is just a bit out of date, not being updated since Zistor was destroyed at the end of the second age.

Edited March 15, 2023 by radmonger

[David Scott]

15 hours ago, styopa said:

Q: Can you tell me the story of the Lightbringers from Glorantha?

This is terrible. Most of the elements of the story are wrong. As for the other answers, I really hope that no one uses this as a basis for historical Glorantha.

[DrGoth]

16 hours ago, styopa said:

ChatGPT:

The Lightbringers consisted of several gods and demigods, including Orlanth the Storm King, his wife Ernalda the Earth Queen, and his brother Yelm the Sun God.

Yep, those famous brothers Orlanth and Yelm 😉

[mfbrandi]

1 hour ago, David Scott said:

This is terrible. Most of the elements of the story are wrong.

I am just waiting for a notorious group of partisans to suggest that a certain Gloranthan theologian — who we will call “Marilyn” — was clearly a Chat GPT beta tester.

And if you consider questing to establish religious truths an oracular undertaking, then — for the brave and the reckless — heroquesting rules drop into the lap. 😉

[Manunancy]

2 hours ago, David Scott said:

This is terrible. Most of the elements of the story are wrong. As for the other answers, I really hope that no one uses this as a basis for historical Glorantha.

Though it can make a good base for what a kralorelan sage or sheshnelan zzaburi might come up  with on the topic 🙂

[Ludo Bagman]

1 hour ago, DrGoth said:

Yep, those famous brothers Orlanth and Yelm 😉

If we use human relationships also for the Elder Gods, then Aether is the father of Yelm and Umath (with Ga), so they are brothers. Orlanth is Umath's son (with Kero Fin, daughter of Ga, so also Umath's sister). Yelm is Orlanth's uncle.

Wandering Sun, Jealous Uncle,
I have a new toy here, see it?
Test me, twice if you can.
For a gold piece each right answer.

 

[Rick Meints]

That chatGPT "word salad" might be interesting to read if you know nothing about Glorantha and don't care if it is totally incorrect.

Otherwise it is a complete waste of time.

[Brian Duguid]

Yes, much better to ask these sorts of questions of some of the community's well-known Gloranthan lorehounds, and get instead seven slightly different versions of what is actually true in Glorantha 🙂. The old ways are the best!

I wonder whether the makers of Zistor attempted a sort of Turing Test for their creation's intelligence: we will know we have succeeded when it behaves like us, because we know that we are intelligent.

One of the ways we know that ChatGPT lacks intelligence is because it generally shows different types of unintelligent behaviour to those that we display: it is often simply ignorant (as in these examples, where it has too little training data to work from), rather than showing internal bias (its bias is systemic). And where it is ignorant, it confabulates i.e. makes things up to fill in the gaps, partly because it's primarily a language model rather than a knowledge model.

That fingerprint is all over these examples. A lack of adequate training data means that it fills in the gaps with garbage pieced together as best it can. It's job is to mimic language, not to be an expert.

It would be more interesting if it was actually trained on several decades of Gloranthan publications*. Then we'd get to see where the real gaps in our knowledge are, and how a God Learner might go about filling them.

*IP owners: don't worry, I'm not suggesting anyone actually does this, just saying it would hypothetically be interesting 🙂.

[soltakss]

7 hours ago, Brian Duguid said:

It would be more interesting if it was actually trained on several decades of Gloranthan publications*. Then we'd get to see where the real gaps in our knowledge are, and how a God Learner might go about filling them.

I was thinking about converting all of our the Dorastor stuff to text files and feeding it into an AI to see what it thought about Dorastor, but I couldn't be bothered.

 

[styopa]

On 3/15/2023 at 12:09 PM, Rick Meints said:

That chatGPT "word salad" might be interesting to read if you know nothing about Glorantha and don't care if it is totally incorrect.

Otherwise it is a complete waste of time.

Honestly, I thought that it was pretty fascinating that this bot (this was 3.5, not the new 4.0 mentioned this week as I don't have a paid sub) is *reasonably* well versed in the basics of a relatively niche RPG world. 

No, it obviously doesn't quite connect the dots and the lines perfectly but the vagueness of who won Gbaji vs Arkat and generally the Lunar view on chaos isn't bad...no, I don't think that's worthless word-salad. 

To be fair, half the Glorantha Digest for decades was people contradicting each other over this stuff so - short of spewing copyrighted text straight from the Guide to Glorantha - I don't fault some brainless heuristic for not getting all the details right.  I did like the bit about the Red Emperor 'defeating Arkat' due to his magic and technology.  I immediately had the image of some sort of WH40K emperor blasting away with a plasma rifle.

[jajagappa]

5 hours ago, soltakss said:

I was thinking about converting all of our the Dorastor stuff to text files and feeding it into an AI to see what it thought about Dorastor

Very acidic, I would think.

[RHW]

ChatGPT and other LLM are essentially plagiarism machines. They're the proverbial infinite monkeys, except they've been fed everything that's ever been on the internet, including our beloved little mythworld. Every word they say is basically stolen then reassembled like some kind of binary mad lib.

Sadly, in our world, Orlanth isn't around to Steelfall this new Zistor.

[Steve]

GPT stands for Grab and Plagiarise Text.

[Rick Meints]

20 hours ago, styopa said:

Honestly, I thought that it was pretty fascinating that this bot (this was 3.5, not the new 4.0 mentioned this week as I don't have a paid sub) is *reasonably* well versed in the basics of a relatively niche RPG world. 

No, it obviously doesn't quite connect the dots and the lines perfectly but the vagueness of who won Gbaji vs Arkat and generally the Lunar view on chaos isn't bad...no, I don't think that's worthless word-salad. 

To be fair, half the Glorantha Digest for decades was people contradicting each other over this stuff so - short of spewing copyrighted text straight from the Guide to Glorantha - I don't fault some brainless heuristic for not getting all the details right.  I did like the bit about the Red Emperor 'defeating Arkat' due to his magic and technology.  I immediately had the image of some sort of WH40K emperor blasting away with a plasma rifle.

I'll admit that what the bot scraped and collated was vaguely entertaining. I don't know if it is "reasonably well versed" as opposed to it having a script that goes to websites via some set web search order and then grabs related content that it throws into its word blender.

Yes, the Digest (and most forums) was full of lots of speculation, contradiction, and debate. When people post stuff, you pretty much know that they are probably doing just that. When a bot is basically being asked to scrape "facts" off the web and put some smooth phrasing around it I don't know what level of trust people are placing in it being factual. It will be interesting to watch how much it improves over time. My main concern is that it will somehow get access to all of our published books and just scrape content from those and rephrase it just enough so it doesn't look like they are plagiarizing from our books. If it gets to that point some people may stop buying our books/PDFs because they can just ask a bot to provide them the exact same info. For example, you ask it what taverns and inns are in Pavis and it regurgitates a list of what you would find in the Pavis supplement.

[Rick Meints]

On 3/16/2023 at 6:33 AM, Brian Duguid said:

It would be more interesting if it was actually trained on several decades of Gloranthan publications*. Then we'd get to see where the real gaps in our knowledge are, and how a God Learner might go about filling them.

*IP owners: don't worry, I'm not suggesting anyone actually does this, just saying it would hypothetically be interesting 🙂.

Funnily enough, if that tool became available for Chaosium to use, we probably would use it in some capacity, at least internally.

What I would hate though, is if a bot went to some pirate pdf site used all those pirated pdfs to scrape our actual content.

[Brian Duguid]

An entirely fair concern. I have colleagues who are using AI in a professional capacity, and we are very careful about what we use as source data for the AI we develop ourselves (all sourced carefully with clear permission), and what use we can make (if any) of open-access chatbots like ChatGPT (with great care and only with information that is properly in the public domain). That latter bit gets very difficult when there's no transparency from the developers about their source data or how they process it. An absolute minefield.

[PhilHibbs]

23 hours ago, Rick Meints said:

What I would hate though, is if a bot went to some pirate pdf site used all those pirated pdfs to scrape our actual content.

I doubt it, there's a chance that the training data might have stumbled across pirate pdfs but it won't have been by design. And GPT doesn't contain any of this text, it isn't doing that when being queried. It's all blended into a neural net which constructs an entirely new prose that satisfies its word probability pattern. It's more like a brain than a library.

[simonh]

On 3/18/2023 at 3:11 PM, PhilHibbs said:

It's more like a brain than a library.

That's true, but I don't think that as a result this means copyright doesn't apply. Lets say it is just like a brain, if I was to charge money for providing detailed text write-ups of Gloranthan lore from memory, say by email, I think Chaosium might want to have words with me. Some of these LLMs have a free tier, but they're basically proprietary products hired out for a fee and the free tier is basically to get free publicity and training data. In some ways the fact that it makes half of it up by free-association but presents it as factually correct in no way makes this situation better.

It's not a brain though, it's a software system. Chaosium is quite happy to let me run an RQ game online or in person, but I'm not allowed to write a computer game set in Glorantha using Gloranthan lore, characters and game mechanics. So even though in principle the software is doing the same thing, it's prohibited. I think there's a good argument LLMs are more like a computer game than like a human GM. In fact they actually are computer games, you can ask ChatGPT to act as the game master for an adventure set in Glorantha and it will have a go at it. Apparently GPT4 is a pretty solid D&D DM.

The issue of art bots like Stable Diffusion being trained on copyrighted images, even to the point of recreating Getty Images watermarks on some of it's results, has fuelled litigation already. A lot of artists are unhappy that their posts to DeviantArt have been used as training data. I don't see why the same concerns shouldn't apply to copyrighted text, even if it was posted to publicly accessible web sites. It's not at all obvious to me that scraping LLM training data is a fair use.

Edited March 21, 2023 by simonh

[PhilHibbs]

Watch out for ChatGPT’s EULA.

If Chaosium decided to sue ChatGPT for copyright infringement, or libel, or anything else, based on you posting something that ChatGPT produced, then you agreed in the EULA to indemnify and defend them. That means they can hand you the legal bill and the fine for the lawsuit.

Whether or not they actually could do that remains to be seen in practice but if they tried it then it wouldn’t be fun for you.

 

Edited April 20, 2023 by PhilHibbs