The AI Bubble
Time to party like it's 1999!
At some point, anyone writing about TTRPGs has to write about generative AI. So let’s do that and get it out of the way.
I am not worried about AI, at least not in the way that you might assume I would be.
Generative AI is to AI technology as deep discounting was to the web in the 1990s. It was the hook that seemed obvious, exciting, and interesting. It promised to vaporize entire job categories. Physical retail was dead. Everyone would be shopping online.
And here we are, 25 years later, and about 16% of retail sales take place online. The firms that tried to make up for losses through volume are all long dead (Pets.com) or pivoted to functional business models (Amazon’s shift to AWS).
Discounts were the dumb, inefficient, but seemingly obvious application of the web. They were the byproduct of leaders with limited imaginations trying to retrofit a past they barely understood to function in a future that scared the crap out of them.
While online sales are an obvious fact of life, it didn’t work out quite like anyone thought. Instead, the web turned out to be a (dangerously) efficient vehicle for serving information relevant to a specific user’s interests, largely in the form of advertising.
AI will undergo a similar transformation. We’re at the point in the 90s when everyone is adding “.com” to the end of their logo in hopes of catching the wave. That wave will peak, the bubble will burst, we’ll deal with the headaches of a few quarters of recession, and the dumb money will flow out. The nimble mammals who are left behind will then get to the business of applying the tech to actually useful ends.
Generative AI is basically a less accurate web search that non-technical people can use. If I need art for a project, I can do Google image searches and find what I need for non-public facing assets. I can do the same for text. The training material IS the material. It’s all out there, accessible, searchable, and usable.
Generative AI forces me to wrangle with prompts and weird outcomes when I could just search the internet for what I need.
So what do I think AI will do for TTRPGs? Outside of the broader issues of triggering a recession when the bubble bursts, it will do nothing to them. AI is expensive to deploy and maintain. TTRPGs aren’t a business that benefits from them. There are likely new, adjacent game models that could use them. We saw TTRPGs give rise to text-based MUDs and later Everquest and World of Warcraft as more people came online, bandwidth grew fatter, and hardware grew cheaper. I think the same thing will happen.
At least in the 1990s, we got cool tchotchkes. Where’s the Kozmo.com messenger bag equivalent for AI? This time, we’re just getting the recession. Sorry.
I’m going to play devil’s advocate here. It’s a bit more than smarter search, but along those lines, maybe we could say it is trending toward exact search. I agree with Jason in that we are in our infancy of AI. Maybe I would say it is more like Yahoo. Plus it can repurpose at a great rate and drive rapid adoption of good ideas (or bad—so fingers crossed).
Training new models is trivial now, Mike. And we can run those models with little more effort than we run our laptops at home. In fact, many of us have over powered game machines and massive data stores that can perform generative crunching just fine.
That said, the TTRPG industry has drawn a hard line on behalf of creatives. I believe that will whittle down, starting with Oracle like customer service, improved logistics management, and moving through ever so slowly as to be another tool for the artist, the writer, and the designer. But it will be interesting to see what happens and how creative people leverage it.
Where I fall in line is that there will be a bubble or at least many failed attempts until the energy consumption drops in model training. And just as with search, we will see lots of startups whittle down to a few massive corporations. What we did not have with search was large tech companies with 100s of billions in cash. So it should all be very interesting.
We're in the Ask Jeeves phase of AI.