Kambara
Introduction
Welcome to Kambara, a wargaming magazine with content created entirely by AI. The first issue is available now, click below to download it completely free!
Musings from the Editor
My intention was to see how far the new AI models had come, whether they could pass as human authors and add something of value to our hobby.
You can read through the magazine and judge for yourself, but from my point of view I’d say some of the articles are huge successes, and others are perhaps the core of an idea that a human author could build upon. For this first issue I wanted AI to take the reigns, but if I do any further issues I suspect they’ll be a collaboration between human and AI. I’ve already started a joint game design effort with ChatGPT.
The biggest stumbling block right now is getting Stable Diffusion to generate images that are relevant to the articles ChatGPT comes up with. You can ask ChatGPT to come up with prompts for SD, but that just gets very confusing and the results are a little unusual. The image of Gronk was prompted by ChatGPT though, so it can work.
To create the magazine I used ChatGPT and NightCafe, two well established players in the AI world. It worth mentioning both of these can be used for free, though I have subscribed to NightCafe to get more credits (used for rendering images). I used ChatGPT-3.5, though for a subscription charge you can get access to the more advanced ChatGPT-4.
I didn’t write any of the content after the opening message, though there was some tweaking to get things in the right order, but I see that as editing rather than authoring. I also did all the layout design myself, not seen an AI tool that can do that yet. Adobe Photoshop did lend the AI a hand too with Content Aware Fill for pages which needed the background image extending. The new AI Generated Fill that Adobe are currently beta testing will massively help with this!
As a final note, I wrote my opening message before I read the fully AI generated interview with “me” at the end of the magazine. It was slightly uncanny how close it got to some of my intentions when the “Editor” described why they had set up Kambara!
I had great fun putting this magazine together, hopefully you enjoy reading it. If you have thoughts please do let me know. Would you read a second issue?
Sample Kambara Prompts from ChatGPT:
Below is a sample of some of the prompts I used to generate an article, the results can be seen in the magazine.
Write me the lyrics to a song a band of hobbits may sing as they’re setting out from their home on an adventure.
[ChatGPT created the song you see in the magazine]
Can you transcribe the music to accompany those lyrics?
[ChatGPT said no, but here’s a chord progression that might work!!]
What’s the title of the song?
[ChatGPT named it Stepping out from the Shire]
Give me a single short sentence describing the song for a contents page.
[ChatGPT gave me a sentence that formed the one you see in the contents page]
Sample Kambara Prompt from NightCafe:
Hand drawn band of hobbits setting out on a journey, sepia tone, pen and ink style
By preselecting a style, NightCafe automatically added the following to my prompt:
Hyperrealistic, splash art, concept art, mid shot, intricately detailed, color depth, dramatic, 2/3 face angle, side light, colorful background
