RPGs, LLMs, Citational Ethics, and Lineage

30 Aug, 2025

At of Dice and Dragons, Scot Newbury chose the use of AI in TTRPGs as the topic of August 2025's RPG Blog Carnival, immediately after Prismatic Wasteland announced the Appendix N blog bandwagon. I know it might not seem it, but this is a bit of a coincidence; the bandwagon has me thinking about influences and, specifically, it has me thinking about citational ethics. As it happens, some of my biggest reservations with LLMs, image generators, and similar technologies¹ are citation-ethical.

I learned to care about citational ethics in university, studying English literature as an undergraduate and as a graduate student and then completing a Master's degree in library and information studies. It wasn't just that we were required to cite our sources correctly in our coursework, though that training surely had an effect; it's also that the two disciplines I studied particularly emphasize why citation is important. First, citation is at least a little bit about giving credit where credit is due, academia being a profession where recognition for one's work is vitally important for success. Second, and more importantly, citation is about making sure people can check your sources, about making yourself accountable for those sources. Third, and maybe most important of all, citation helps record your intellectual genealogy.²

Charles Darwin's first sketch of the tree of life, 1837, cropped (Wikimedia Commons)

One thing that became clear to me is that you don't really understand an idea until you understand its history and its context. Most people, most of the time, don't need to understand an idea completely; a partial, ahistorical understanding is enough for their purposes. But there are times when it is important to understand where an idea came from. It is therefore good, important even, for each person to reveal where their own ideas come from, as best they can. Now, obviously in many cases that's impossible; I talk in my own Appendix N post about the difficulty I have in tracing my influences. But, if you understand how important the history of an idea can be, you'll understand how important it is to at least try.

In other words, citational ethics is a form of honesty, in a few different ways.

In the case of a ttrpg blog like this one, citational ethics don't require very much. They require that you properly cite or, where appropriate, link to your sources; if you can't do that for whatever reason (such as when you can't find the source again), then they at least require that you acknowledge that. They also require you to quote your sources accurately, trying not to misrepresent them. And citational ethics require that you acknowledge when you use a source that plagiarizes another, also identifying the original source.³ It is even better if you avoid reading plagiarized work entirely, if you can, and certainly it is very difficult to cite a source ethically if you know it is plagiarized but you do not know who it has plagiarized.

I suspect by now you can see where this is going.

Much ink has been spilled on the topic of LLM's rampant copyright violation. Although I don't like copyright law as it currently exists, I do nonetheless think we need legal protections to ensure that small, independent artists can make a living off their work, or else most artistic work will be made by, and according to the interests of, large companies and occasionally governments. Until and unless universal basic income frees artists from the need to monetize their creativity, we're stuck with the additional need for at least some version of copyright. That also means we have to actually enforce copyright law, especially against violations of it as flagrant as those of OpenAI and similar LLM companies. With respect, Marcia B. of Traverse Fantasy is wrong to say that LLM's copyright violations are "not our business": for those of us who publish work of any kind (which includes bloggers like Marcia, Scot Newbury, and me), it is exactly our business. But like I said, much ink has been spilled on this, so I don't feel a need to spill more.

Much less ink has been spilled on the topic of citational ethics, but this honestly bothers me more than the copyright violation does: the chain of citation stops at OpenAI. Sure, ChatGTP sometimes cites sources, but only in very specific ways; it cannot provide sources for all the work that undergirds its basic functioning. I don't know how it works well enough to say just how many sources it meaningfully draws upon with each response it generates, but the impression I have is that it's a theoretically enormous amount, possibly everything in its corpus. Regardless of whether it can provide its sources, it certainly doesn't. Citing ChatGPT is pointless: it cannot give credit where it is due, it cannot make itself accountable for its information, and it cannot preserve its intellectual genealogy. And this all also true of Gemini, Suno, Midjourney, and the rest. As a matter of citational ethics, you must not use these generators for public or professional work except under the most unusual circumstances.

That's a question of public and professional work, however. Scot isn't asking how we use LLMs in our game blogs, which are indisputably public. He's asking about our game tables, which are probably best thought of as private, where citational ethics do not apply.⁴ My answer to that is mostly that I don't care. I've done it, but I wouldn't do it again; as with Xaosseed, I don't think the quality of the image generators' output is good enough for the effort it takes (or the embarrassment I'd feel). Unlike Xaosseed, though, my artistic skills aren't good enough that I can often do better than the free image generators can do, nor can I always find what I'm looking for online. I fully acknowledge that there are uses for these things at the game table, even if I don't plan to use them going forward.⁵ I really don't care if you use them, so long as you don't spend money on it and so long as it doesn't leave your home game.

(I must make a confession here: during the COVID quarantine, I posted to Twitter some art generated by Wombo's Dream and some text generated by ChatGPT. I had not at that point seriously considered these toys as citational ethics problems. I won't do it again. For this reason and others, I'm not about to shame anyone for having posted a few pictures made by an image generator. We all make mistakes.)

There are of course other ethical questions, to do with environmental costs, user safety, and misinformation. I'm skeptical that a few of these problems are as bad as many of my fellow LLM-detractors claim, but some are quite serious. However, I don't think these issues can be addressed at the level of casual consumers with free accounts. I'm not therefore going to expect you, on any of these grounds, to stop using image generators and LLMs to make assets for your D&D game, so long as you don't pay for them. (I'll change my mind, though, if I see better evidence that per-generation environmental costs meaningfully exceed those of a TikTok video.) Similarly, the copyright issues aren't going to be solved at the consumer level, as long as you aren't using Midjourney and its ilk to replace assets you'd otherwise buy.

Can I reasonably expect you to care about citational ethics like I do? Probably not, and I guess it wouldn't matter if I did. I certainly can't compel you to care about them, and I don't think I could give a rational argument for citational ethics from first principles, because I don't think you can make rational arguments for any values from first principles. Still, citational ethics matter to me, and it is reasonable for me to repeat that clearly, calmly, and consistently. I would like you to care more about citational ethics than you probably do, and as one part of that I would like you not to use art generated by Midjourney, or text generated by ChatGPT, on your blog or social media posts.

But maybe I can get you to see how beautiful citational ethics can be. On my "Party" page, I quoted "a Collection of things arranged in order" (interfictions, October 2016), a poem that my friend Sunny Chan wrote. Here's a longer excerpt:

Sometimes people use the word “bibliography” simply to mean works cited, a proclamation of intellectual honesty in list form, a pre-emptive defence against charges of plagiarism. But there’s also something mystical about bibliographic citations. They invoke the muse after the fact. They hint at provenance, at pedigree, at parentage. They’re a glimpse into what had to come together in order to birth a new narrative. Bibliography is heraldry.

Is there not a beauty in that? Is there not a beauty in citation as heraldry, as something like a family tree? I hope you can see that citation is not only honest, but also beautiful.

#rpg blog carnival