AI Tools in Traditional Tabletop Wargaming

As soon as I got over the idea of AGI eventually ending all life on planet earth, I starting thinking of how I could use the new Large Language Model AI stuff in Wargaming.

I am specifically talking about OpenAI’s APIs which are related to that ChatGPT thing everyone is talking about.

My first idea was using it to QA rules.  Many rule books are available in PDF these days.  I wanted a chat bot style interface that I could use to ask questions about a given set of rules and hopefully reduce the time spent looking up rules during game play.  This is what it looks like as a discord bot:

Discord is great as it gives you a chat sort of interface out of the box.

I also set something up as a python flask app (website for you none coders).  Keep in mind this is a proof of concept and not a commercial product so go easy on my lack of web design skills.  Here is what it looks like:

The web app version allows the user to select a set of rules and submit a question.  It returns the answer and the reference text where the API was looking to get the answer.

This is all fairly primitive so far and not publicly available.  Making something for use outside my friend group would require a lot more thought about security and cost.  There are probably some legal questions too about creating a public product from someone else’s intellectual property, in the case of the author or publisher of the rules.

The actual data behind these POC apps are stored locally in something called a vector store on my own PC.  When you submit data through the APIs according to the privacy and terms of use published by OpenAI, they do not keep that data to train their AI.  Note that this is not the case for ChatGPT that most people are familiar with!  Everything you put into the public version of ChatGPT can be used to train the model (meaning they may keep the data), unless you are using the new private mode.   Never put your personal information into ChatGPT!

In my next entry, I will go into how this actually works and maybe another use case I have which is learning wargaming rules by answering AI-generated multiple-choice quizzes.

I am super curious as to other wargaming use cases for LLM APIs anyone else can think of.

If you are a coder playing with this stuff like me, maybe you’ve made your own AI wargame assistant, which I’d like to hear about as well.