I guess it makes a lot of sense for a bot that predicts the most likely response to generate generic fantasy worlds. I think a bot DM would work a lot better if it had access to tables of tropes, environments, monsters and order elements and could roll or pick from those to create the story.

In the same way combat should probably be handled by code specifically written for that purpose similar to video games. If such a robot DM would be developed like that it would probably do much better.

ChatGPT is certainly no good at a lot of aspects of storytelling, but I wonder how much the author played with different prompts.

For example, if I go to GPT-4 and say, “Write a short fantasy story about a group of adventurers who challenge a dragon,” it gives me a bog standard trope-ridden fantasy story. Standard adventuring party goes into cave, fights dragon, kills it, returns with gold.

But then if I say, “Do it again, but avoid using fantasy tropes and cliches,” it generates a much more interesting story. Not sure about the etiquette of pasting big blocks of ChatGPT text into Lemmy comments, but the setting turned from generic medieval Europe into more of a weird steampunk-like environment, and the climax of the story was the characters convincing the dragon that it was hurting people and should stop.