There has been a bit of pondering around the blogs I follow about the implications for AI. Heretical Gaming picked up on a post from the Battlefields and Warriors blog, both about how well or otherwise AI generates scenarios for particular periods and gaming styles. Having read the posts and subjected the generated scenarios to a little consideration (but not too much, real life keeps intervening and I’ve only got so many brain-cells), I suppose the answer is ‘All right, but not particularly brilliantly’. Or, in school terms, B-, could do better (possibly).
My pondering was interrupted by, of all organizations, The Bank of England, warning that AI companies were going the way of the dot.com bubble, which we all knew and loved from the early noughties. I have heard this from other sources as well, that basically the bosses for these companies will walk away from the collapse with millions of dollars in their pockets, while the suddenly redundant staff do not even get their final month’s paycheck. Welcome to the world of capitalism.
Mind you, that is not to say that AI is not with us to stay. A number of companies, I believe, operate almost exclusively online to this day and seem to turn in a dime or two, even as they avoid paying taxes on the same. The dot.com thing was a bubble, but the idea of online business remains. That suggests that the AI bubble might pop, but AI itself will remain, albeit a bit chastened.
On the other hand, I do fear there is something of a moral panic setting in about AI. It is a pain, as I know from my former colleagues who are still wage slaves in Higher Education, but it still can be outmaneuvered. I am still waiting for the first AI product that can detect the use of AI in an undergraduate essay, as well. These things often become a battle of wits and resources, as warfare often does.
Still, attempting to head back into the area of wargaming, I also read a piece by theologian Janet Soskice this week (for reasons which have nothing at all to do with wargaming, but bear with me). In Chapter 8 of her The Kindness of God: Metaphor, gender, and religious language (OUP, Oxford, 2008), she discusses Bakhtin’s discussion of the novels of Dostoevsky. Bakhtin argues that Dostoevsky created a new form of novel where the characters are not voiceless slaves of the author, but stand up to him, disagree with him, and even rebel against him. This is remarkably like characters in Biblical texts where various Israelites argue with God (starting with Abraham, but perhaps most notably Job). The point here is that the characters are not objects but subjects, that is, they are quite capable of doing their own thing.
I was reflecting then (ah, some wargaming content) on my recent campaigns, from the Very Mogul Civil War, the War of Stuart Succession, and, most recently, the ongoing 1600 – Something campaign in Europe. In all of these, the outcomes and moves were determined by dice and cards – initiative rolls, card draws to determine moves, GOOS rolls for reactions, and so on, let alone the randomness engendered by the wargames of the ensuing encounters. This gives, in my totally unbiased view, of course, a rather rich background to what was going on and the narrative trajectory of the campaigns.
So, the questions posed are, I suppose, twofold. Would an AI be able to come up with something like the back story to any of these campaigns, and would it be able to create a viable next move in the game?
I am not about to rush off and pose the question to a passing AI bot thing. They have, after all, been raiding my blog for training content for the last month or so (although that seems to have suddenly stopped, or are they just terminally bored by my deathless prose?). I have a vague idea as to how these LLM pseudo-AIs work, and I doubt if they would do a very good job unless I fed in the campaign rules and the diplomatic table, as well as perhaps the army lists and means of generating the random armies.
That seems to add up to a significant quantity of data to be input to an AI in order for it to generate the next move in my campaign. A LLM, after all, has to start from somewhere. I doubt if one would come up with the idea of wargaming a fictitious struggle for the crown at the end of the Tudor period anyway. That idea came from my reading of the history and some of the options available to the various parties. Now, an AI bot could do that, but most of the histories finish with what the outcome was, historically.
I suppose the result of this is that while I could load the campaign into an AI and get the next move, I may as well keep going with my dice, cards, and so on. It also keeps me off the computer screen and gets my imagination wondering as to how something came about, or what to do with an unexpected move.
And that brings us back to Dostoevsky, I suppose. As the WsuS indicated, sometimes in a campaign, the characters do the unexpected. Who imagined when I started off that the Spanish would win the throne after an English army mutinied because they did not like the ally of the main contender? The characters, with only vague sketches of their natures, certainly felt like they were running the show. An AI might have managed it, but I am not entirely sure how, nor whether it could have come up with a convincing reason why it happened. Maybe it could; as I said, I’m not about to rush off and try.
As with the dot.com bubble, and, indeed, with the moral panic about the ‘Google generation’, I imagine that the frenzy about AI will slowly settle down. It already has its uses, as online companies did in the noughties, but I suspect that too many people who are prophesying doom for the human race as a result, as well as some of the overenthusiastic commentators, have simply been reading too much bad science fiction.
