I’ve been a fan of the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy roleplaying game (universally known as D&D) for more than 40 years now. I was hooked on it from the very first time that I played it and I still enjoy every session just as much today. I’m not sure if it’s a great idea to use it to train AIs, but I am not an expert (on AI, not D&D). Perhaps, however, it has an even greater role to play in the post-industrial economy.
D&D In The Real World
When it was first published in 1974, D&D was a revolution in game playing, creating the idea of a Dungeon Master (DM) who serves as referee and organiser, maintaining the setting in which adventures occur, while the players take the part of characters interacting in that setting. I love playing and I love being a DM. Apart from anything else, as CNN reported, “Dungeon masters embody some of the best traits that human beings can have.. They’re very generous, they’re very kind, they’re very collaborative, they are open-minded. They have the coolest accessories.”
Well, indeed.
The most recent edition, unofficially known as “5.5”, has taken steps to move away from some of the design choices set out in the original version of the game. The new 2024 Players Handbook moved away from “races” into “species” and detached character statistics from that aspect of characters and moved it to their backgrounds, a long overdue change in my opinion (orcs and elves are not “races”. Hasbro say that the new version of Handbook is the fastest selling D&D book in the history of the game. I’m not surprised: I’ve already bought two, because it makes the tabletop game so much better if the DM and the players each have a copy!
Why am I telling you all this? Well, as someone who started playing Dungeons & Dragons long before it was cool, and who still plays it today now that it is the hobby of movie stars and pop legends, I was delighted to discover that Meta uses D&D source books to train generative AI. I have a feeling that this may lead to one or two hallucinations here and there, although it should mean that Hollywood writers can avoid embarrassing errors in future scripts (such as allowing a druid to transform into an Owl Bear, which is a monstrosity, when the the class ability is to transform into beasts).
Remember that these hallucinations are not simply an occasional error in LLM output, they are feature of the way that LLMs work. You can certainly implement a variety of mitigations, but you are not going to eradicate them, and they have real world consequences. Remember when, earlier this year, Air Canada lost a court case brought by passenger when it tried and failed to renege on a fare offered by its AI-powered chatbot.
If you are interested in understanding more about the underlying theory, there are a number of useful papers on the topic. One is Xu, Jain and Kankanhalli’s “Hallucination is Inevitable: An Innate Limitation of Large Language Models” which shows that you cannot get rid of hallucinations in real world LLMs no matter what you do because they an inherent in the method. This limitation does not mean that there is no use for generative AI in financial services. There is plenty of work going on in Small Language Models (SLMs) right now. These are trained on fewer parameters, with weights and balances that are tailored to individual use cases. They hallucinate less (which should make mitigation more practical) and they are also faster and cheaper.
(I note that games can contribute here too. In a new paper from Google Deepmind on “Mastering Board Games by External and Internal Planning with Language Models”, the authors show that show that search-based planning can significantly improve LLMs’ playing strength across several board games and the pre-training method they use minimizes hallucinations, because their model is highly accurate regarding state prediction and legal moves.)
D&D Beyond Games: Social Capital
Moving beyond fintech, could swords & sorcery contribute more to the new economy? Well, yes. For a couple of reasons. First of all, as Pew Research point out, D&D is in many ways the origin of the metaverse, an imaginary creative space of social interaction and storytelling, the coming incarnation of the online world.
Secondly, it is a practical answer to tough questions about the economy and society. Andy Haldane, chief executive of Britain’s Royal Society of Arts (where your author is a Fellow) and former chief economist at the Bank of England, wrote an excellent piece about social capital in the Financial Times, pointing out the huge costs of “bowling alone” from sub-par growth to stalling social mobility, from the epidemic in loneliness to the crumbling of communities.
Haldane says that the erosion of social capital goes a long way to explaining some of our greatest scourges and I think it he right and I could not help but notice that in the very same issue of that august newspaper of record there is a report on Games Workshop joining the FTSE100. The article points out that while in the popular imagination Warhammer is about as cool as trainspotting, Games Workshop has plenty to teach the rest of corporate Britain!
It seems to me that if we want to boost social capital then Dungeons & Dragons, Warhammer and other such pastimes are a way to get people round a table and interacting once again! Stop kids from fighting with AI generated monsters in their 3D headsets and start them co-operating against real monster in the their 3D kitchens, schools and cafes!
While the need for national AI strategy is recognised and legislators are trying to move forward to support innovation while simultaneously growing net welfare, it seems to me that there is now a need for a national D&D strategy too. I stand ready to answer the nation’s call.
Happy Holidays to one and all!
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