I was very interested to read Norm Smith's latest blogplost on 'Battlefields and Warriors' on generative AI within gaming, specifically in terms of scenario generation, 'The Impacts of AI'. To make sense of my post, it will definitely be worth your while to read his first.
The central claim is that generative AI does not really create, but it basically just steals stuff and reformats it. This felt testable, so I have had a go, but before I link to the results, I held a few things in mind:
If I were asked, even if just asked myself, to create a Wars of the Roses scenario, to what degree would I fall back on things which I had read and then slightly re-package them? How would I come up with a creative solution which wasn't also a very unlikely scenario i.e. the scenario had to be both creatively different but also highly plausible? What, in terms of generating non-historical scenarios for historical miniatures games, would I consider to be sufficiently different to be not merely copying? In Norm's test, the differences between his own internet-published games and the AI-generated scenario, seem to be minimal (he didn't link to his own scenario directly)...what would happen when I tried it? In short, I would try to apply the same standard of judgement to AI behaviour and performance as I would to human behaviour and performance.
The results are here. Essentially, I asked the LLM (ChatGPT5 - Thinking mode) to create three scenarios. I have included the prompts I used, but to summarize:
Scenario One - a Wars of the Roses scenario for about 5000 combatants per side, each with a roughly even chance of winning.
Scenario Two - a scenario appropriate for Norm's own Piggy Longton campaign.
Scenario Three - a Wars of the Roses scenario, no further guidance.
And then I posted them up as a page on this blog, with no changes and some very light formatting.
I am no expert on The Wars of the Roses. I would say I have more than a passing acquaintance, but no expertise at all, so I don't know if these scenarios are minimally repackaged historical battles - there are no battles immediately springing to mind. I also don't know if they are repackaged human-written and published scenarios, although again, nothing immediately sprang to mind, but my knowledge is even more limited here. So, if anyone can see through a thinly disguised historial or imaginative scenario please let me know! The challenge, to be clear, is not to find points of contact, it is to find something which has been basically been copied and very minimally changed - i.e. if a human had written it, you would have considered that human had copied it.
Disclaimer: I don't use AI to generate the scenarios I play personally.
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