Had a puzzle thrown at me by my DM this weekend.
I have scales but no wings, I guard treasure, precious things. Though I breathe no flame or fire, My riddles stir minds to inquire. What am I?
!a book!<
He admitted it was written by ai. I did not guess correctly.
Scales?
AI doesn’t have a mind to do mental leaps, it only knows syntax. Just a form of syntax so, so advanced that it sometimes accidentally gets things factually correct. Sometimes.
It’s more advanced than just syntax. It should be able to understand the double meanings behind riddles. Or at the very least, that books don’t have scales, even if it doesn’t understand that the scales that a piano has aren’t the same as the ones a fish has.
It doesn’t understand anything. It predicts a word based on previous words - this is why I called it syntax. If you imagine a huge and vastly complicated series of rules about how likely one word is to follow up to, say, 1000 others… That’s an LLM.
It can predict that the word “scales” is unlikely to appear near “books”. Do you understand what I mean now? Sorry, neural networks can’t understand things. Can you make predictions based on what senses you received now?
Well given that an LLM produced the nonsense riddle above, obviously it cannot predict that. It can predict the structure of a riddle perfectly well, it can even get the rhyming right! But the extra layer of meaning involved in a riddle is beyond what LLMs are able to do at the moment. At least, all of them that I’ve seen - they all seem to fall flat with this level of abstraction.
I was guest-DMing. After 1 person hilariously failed a challenge that another player came up with a completely different solution, they were presented with a thick stone door. On the door was 5 markers. On each marker was a different symbol…a flame, a bolt of lightning, a snowflake, skull and another I cant recall maybe a star.
The person who hilariously failed the first challenge kept trying to push the markers with their bare hands, and each time I said “nothing happened”, so she tried a different one, tried pushing it harder, tried pushing 2 at a time, tried hitting it with her weapon, which I asked if it was magical and she said so, then kept trying the same thing over and over again. She kept talking over everyone and I even think she said “this puzzle is stupid”. I was seconds from scream “look at the symbols” when someone took a swing at it with their radiant sword that things started clicking into place in their heads. The dumb one then tried using a level 2 fire spell and I think let out an audible groan.
In advance I made sure all players had cantrips of these particular damage types while building this puzzle and she wants to use a level 2 spell. For reference she’s an OP druid (because she cheats on all her rolls), has a higher AC than our barbarian and more HP than our paladin, yet considers herself “squishy” and stays in the back peaking out behind cover to shoot with a crossbow, and takes it as a personal attack that everyone hates her if any enemy does damage to her.
Sooooo whos dick was she sucking to be allowed to keep playing
I let my players make checks: “what would my character know in this situation?” History roll. Me as DM: “your character would have gone to kindergarten and learned the number 2”
