Adventures in ChatGPT (part 2)

 In part 1 I described my concept for a building based on an upside-down tetrahedron, and how I wanted an "artistic" representation of it. Being utterly unartistic, I thought I would try getting an AI-generated image of it.

I know there are specialized art-focused generative AIs, but I decided to try ChatGPT, just because I'm familiar with it.

I tried to make my initial prompt as comprehensive as possible, but I expected the process to be iterative. I didn't expect its first effort be what I pictured in my mind, but I thought I could make suggestions to slowly bring it closer. 

 Our conversation went like this.

A large building standing in a park. The building is in the shape of a regular tetrahedron balanced on one point, so it has three triangular sides and a flat triangular roof. It is about 40 stories tall, dwarfing the people and trees in the park. The sun is at a low angle.

That's clear, right? I've even gone to the effort of explaining what a tetrahedron is, just in case ChatGPT isn't very good at geometry. A child could understand it.

First lesson: generative AI isn't as clever as a child.

Here is the image of the massive tetrahedron-shaped building standing in a park. Let me know if you’d like any modifications!

Well... it's massive. And it's standing in a park. On a point(ish). But it's not a tetrahedron, by any stretch of the imagination. So I'm just going to be blunt:

This is not a tetrahedron. A tetrahedron is a regular polygon with four triangular sides.

You're absolutely right! A true tetrahedron should have four triangular faces, not a flat top. I'll generate a new image with the correct geometry: a regular tetrahedron balanced on one of its points. Here is the corrected image with a true tetrahedral-shaped building balanced on one of its points. Let me know if you'd like any adjustments!.

What? "A true tetrahedron should have four triangular faces." Correct. So what the heck did you just draw? I mean, it's balanced on a point, I'll give you that. And you've remembered to add in the park. But other than that, I'm not impressed.

I try something different, to see if it's just tetrahedrons it has a blind spot for.

Make it more like an upside-down pyramid

Here is the image of the upside-down pyramid-shaped building, balanced on a single point. Let me know if you need any further refinements!

Well, again you've got the point part right. But you clearly have no idea what a pyramid is like, either.

That's not a pyramid

I see the issue! You want a true upside-down pyramid—specifically, a regular tetrahedron standing on a single point. I'll generate a new image that better fits your request. Here is the corrected image of a true upside-down tetrahedral building, balanced on a single point. Let me know if you need any refinements!

Wait, wait, wait, there's a lot to unpack here. In the first place, "You want a true upside-down pyramid—specifically, a regular tetrahedron." So now you think a pyramid is a regular tetrahedron? It's not, you're just making facts up as you go along. And that image is neither a pyramid nor a tetrahedron.

Ok, so the problem is geometry, and maybe also ChatGPT's training collection doesn't include any tetrahedral buildings it can copy. Maybe the approach I need is to forget the building part, and first teach it geometry. Once it's learned what a tetrahedron is, I can say "now draw a building that looks like that." Maybe.

Do you know what a 4 sided dice is?

Yes! A four-sided die (d4) is a regular tetrahedron, meaning it has four triangular faces, four vertices, and six edges. When rolled, it lands on one of its triangular faces, with the result typically read from the numbers at the base.

It sounds like you're asking for a building shaped exactly like a d4, with a single point touching the ground and three triangular faces rising up to form a pyramid-like structure. Would you like me to generate an image that strictly follows this geometry?

This is amazing. I really didn't expect this level of success. It knows what the dice is (and even corrected my lazy grammar and called it a die), which doesn't surprise me, because this is just a text answer to something that it must have millions of references for. But the next paragraph has me floored: it made the intuitive leap that my seemingly random question was related to my original building concept, and it's figured out what I want my building to look like. This has really impressed me!

yes please

Here is the image of a massive building shaped exactly like a four-sided die (d4), balanced on a single point. Let me know if you need any adjustments!

Nooooo! Oh my god, you were so close to genius, and now you've reverted to being an idiot child.

This is so depressing.

And so we continued. I spent an hour talking to this idiot child.

Here is an image of a perfect tetrahedron balanced on a single point. Let me know if you need any modifications!

You're absolutely right again! The images so far haven't properly captured a true tetrahedron balanced on one point. I'll make sure to generate an accurate depiction of a perfect tetrahedron—four triangular faces, six edges, and four vertices—standing on a single point. Let me try again.

I never got my tetrahedron.

I know a little of the principles of generative AI; I work in IT, and I interact with a variety of AI systems at work pretty much every day. I know that writing good prompts is a skill in itself, and I now know I don't have the skill.

Generative AI may be the way of the future. But it's not the way of today. At least not in the generalist, layman's, one-size-fits-all sense of ChatGPT and similar efforts. Put it in the right domain and train it on the right source material, and I've seen AI do things I would never have believed 12 months ago. But you need to know its limits. It's not the solution to everything. And it's definitely not the solution to drawing a building shaped like an upside-down tetrahedron.

Of course, I would be very happy to be proven wrong :) 

Adventures in ChatGPT

I wanted an artistic rendering of Star Guard headquarters. That's how it started. No, I need to go back a bit before that, because I need to explain Star Guard headquarters for context.

When I set up the Star Guard campaign, I didn't put a lot of thought into their headquarters building. I knew there must be one, and it must be on Bolusca, but as I had set up a situation which involved the players' team being mobile and rarely, if ever, going back to base, I put more effort into realizing their cruiser than I did into headquarters.

But inevitably, I thought of plots that involved them returning to headquarters. So I needed to describe headquarters. I wanted a building that looked interesting, because this was science fiction (seen through a 1960s/70s lens) and things had to look big and cool and preferably have fins. I went through a number of concepts: could it be somehow shaped like the star guard emblem? (too boring) could it be a pyramid? Maybe a tetrahedron? Could it be... an upside-down tetrahedron?

It's an improbable shape for a building to be, and therefore suitable for a comic-book SF concept. And it gives a large, flat roof that you can land a space cruiser on, which is an idea I was instantly enamoured with. And, well, the headquarters building of a group of interstellar super-heroes has to be upside down. (And some people reading this will understand why.)

As we were talking through ideas in a Game session, I even had a prop to illustrate what I meant:

(That's a 4-sided die, used in a number of different games though not in the game system I'm currently using. As you can tell from its condition, I've had it a long time.)

Once I had the idea, I drew up a plan view of the building. Because I like plans. This is just my rough first draft, I'll make it neater before I properly publish it on the web site:

So far so good. This is all I really needed: the concept, the floor plan, and verbal descriptions of the different parts of it the players needed to interact with. And for months, this is all we had, and it worked well.

Then one day I thought, wouldn't it be nice to have an artistic representation of how this building looks? But I can't draw ... oh, here's a great idea: I'll get AI to make a drawing for me!

And that's where the nightmare begins.

It's a long one, so I'll split this into two posts. Part 2 is here.

Too Many Names

I have been running the Star Guard campaign for less than two years (though plotting it for longer than that), and in that time I have created 161 characters. That includes every character important enough to have name; there are many more unnamed "extras".

To put this in some context: the original Strikeforce story had around 400 named characters before I gave up counting, and many more than that by the end.

Some of those characters are extremely minor, and I could sum up their role in a couple of sentences. Others have pretty detailed backgrounds and play major, or at least recurring minor, parts in the story. Eventually, I'll have all of their background written down. But to remind myself how much I've still got to write, I've made a list, the Encyclopaedia Galactica Biographical Index.

In a future blog post, I will apologise for my compulsion to use awful puns in character names. But not today.

Don't Ask me, I'm Just the Writer

After slaving away for hours to perfect my latest piece of writing, I had about two days of self-satisfaction after publishing it before people started telling me what I'd got wrong.

As I've explained previously, the Heroes Universe is a piece of collaborative fiction. I'm the one putting the words down on the web site, but there's a whole team behind me generating ideas for me to use. And they wasted no time in telling me I'd misrepresented several of their ideas in Room XIII.

So: Charlie Haversham wasn't 16 in 1940, he was 14. Yvette D'Evreux wasn't trying to steal a Spitfire when arrested, she was trying to steal a Hurricane. And a couple more minor points were of questionable interpretation.

My first thought was to rewrite the text and quietly republish the corrected version.

Then I realised, I'm writing in the persona of Sir Royston Thomas, and I wasn't mistaken, he was. So in my persona as his editor, all I needed to do was add some extra footnotes explaining that he was mistaken, but leave his "mistaken" text intact. Problem solved!

So that's what the "second edition" of Room XIII now contains. If you've already read the story, there's no need to read it again because nothing important has changed. If you haven't yet read it, you can read the "correct" version here.

I'm going to follow the same approach for subsequent chapters of Room XIII. It doesn't work for the other stories on the site, but it's appropriate for how I've chosen to write this one.

Room XIII

 The newest section on the site is the story of super-heroes in World War 2, which I've called Room XIII. Why that title? You'll have to read it to find out.

When I started developing the Heroes universe, I knew there had to be super-heroes in World War 2. Because that's when super-hero comics started. (Technically shortly before the war, but in practice the big boom came in the war years.) My biggest inspiration for this was Roy Thomas, whose writing for Marvel Comics in the 1970s made liberal use of actual 1940s' comic characters to add a depth of history to the contemporary universe he was helping to create. (He wasn't the first: Stan and Jack had begun it when they re-introduced the war-time character Captain America into their modern stories.)

So, inspired by this approach, I had a handful of characters in the Heroes universe of the 1980s whose backgrounds stretched back to those years, and although it never had a big impact on Strikeforce, it was still an important part of the mythology for me.

When I began setting stories in the universe's past, then, I obviously wanted to include World War 2 as one of the eras I covered. I had pre-established characters and concepts that I could use, but characters alone don't make a story. I needed a narrative setting that I could place those characters into.

My initial ideas didn't include super-heroes at all, which was a bit silly considering that was my whole inspiration for doing it. I started by imagining a group of French resistance fighters. My players vetoed that idea immediately, possibly anticipating it degenerating into a hunt for the painting of the fallen madonna with the big boobies (and, honestly, it probably would have). My next idea was having a group of ex-criminals recruited for commando missions (an obvious rip-off of The Dirty Dozen). I felt this had potential, but it didn't completely come together until I stopped resisting the idea of super-heroes ... or, more correctly in this case, super-villains.

So that's how Room XIII came into being. There were a few tweaks to the format, mainly driven by players' ideas, but the basic concept was strong enough to allow a range of different character types and a variety of different plot lines. And, most importantly, the narrative let me pick up plot threads that reached forward from previous eras and backward from the original Strikeforce stories.

There are a lot of chapters in this story, and I'm not going to be adding them quickly. But hopefully I've made the introduction intriguing enough to make people come back for them when they're written.