LargeLanguageMonster (Designate Bowl) [1/26, Open, No Entry Fee]

[QuestionCactus]

This is an online doubles tournament scheduled for January 26, 2025, four years almost to the day after QuizDroid Open II. Contact [email protected] with any questions.

Game Format
Teams will have exactly two players. Games will consist of four teams playing NHBB history-bee-style rounds with 20 tossups. Teams will score points for tossups and, in prelim rounds, exit the game when they reach 100 points.

Most importantly, the games will be played on the quiz-bowl variant called designate bowl (sometimes called two-headed monster). You buzz for your teammate and vice versa. Communication isn't allowed. You have to guess that your teammate will answer correctly.

Tournament Format
The tournament will begin promptly at 11am eastern and consist of 8–10 preliminary rounds and then a final. There will be live stats.

Question Set
The tournament will be run on LaLaMo (LargeLanguageMonster Set), a tossup-only set sort of at regular high-school difficulty or a bit lower but without a human writing team; the questions are all written by an LLM-based system and edited by a small team of 1-3 editors over the course of a single day (<24 person-hours). No guarantees are made to high quality.

Eligibility
This event will be open.

Food
Lunch will not be provided.

Registration
There's no entry fee.

Register here: https://forms.gle/XdWV7GnmoRJZhH4M9
Volunteer as a reader here: https://forms.gle/7VaJ7eE6iHNEwcv16

If you're interested in playing but don't have a teammate, consider signing up as a free agent and reaching out to others in the same position:
Sign up as a free agent here: https://forms.gle/8uYb18eDKVCWApMz8
You can view existing free agents on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

If you drop out within 72 hours of the tournament start time, you'll owe a $40 fee.

[Santa Claus]

I expressed this sentiment on the Discord earlier, but I do not think that players should play this set.

Using LLMs to help write questions is one thing but using them to produce questions wholesale is another. The use of AI as a means of replacing human creative output is happening in many spaces right now and is something that quiz bowl should aim to curtail within our community. There are the general ethical concerns concerning things like the sourcing and cost of training models, but I'm not going to pretend these are persuasive to most people. The problem as it directly relates to quiz bowl is that questions written by AI exist for the purpose of replacing writers and editors - why is this something we should support? Quiz bowl does not exist merely because people play questions, but because people write them.

I'm sure that for many the low cost and zany format of this tournament outweighs these concerns - the low quality may even be a plus ("haha look at how bad these questions are"). However, I'm also sure that many of you would have qualms if this set (which is described as "all written by an LLM-based system") were even slightly different; perhaps aimed at a different audience or costing some morsel of money. Comparison to these hypotheticals may seem unreasonable but I would argue they share their most important attribute with this set: being written by computers. If one is opposed to AI displacing serious sets at real competitions, playing this set merely serves as an opportunity to play low quality questions for cheap before it rises to the level of "unethical" - not a great payoff.

For the remainder of you who are fine playing AI-generated dreck, I hope these theoretical arguments about the future of the game have at least prompted a pause. To me quiz bowl is a game about people and the things they do - hopefully you can see the value in that.

[db0wman]

I expressed this sentiment on the Discord earlier, but I do not think that players should play this set.

Using LLMs to help write questions is one thing but using them to produce questions wholesale is another. The use of AI as a means of replacing human creative output is happening in many spaces right now and is something that quiz bowl should aim to curtail within our community. There are the general ethical concerns concerning things like the sourcing and cost of training models, but I'm not going to pretend these are persuasive to most people. The problem as it directly relates to quiz bowl is that questions written by AI exist for the purpose of replacing writers and editors - why is this something we should support? Quiz bowl does not exist merely because people play questions, but because people write them.

I'm sure that for many the low cost and zany format of this tournament outweighs these concerns - the low quality may even be a plus ("haha look at how bad these questions are"). However, I'm also sure that many of you would have qualms if this set (which is described as "all written by an LLM-based system") were even slightly different; perhaps aimed at a different audience or costing some morsel of money. Comparison to these hypotheticals may seem unreasonable but I would argue they share their most important attribute with this set: being written by computers. If one is opposed to AI displacing serious sets at real competitions, playing this set merely serves as an opportunity to play low quality questions for cheap before it rises to the level of "unethical" - not a great payoff.

For the remainder of you who are fine playing AI-generated dreck, I hope these theoretical arguments about the future of the game have at least prompted a pause. To me quiz bowl is a game about people and the things they do - hopefully you can see the value in that.

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but I don't view LLMs as some existential threat to quizbowl. Question writing is already basically charity given how little it pays, but despite the low pay, there's an oversupply of willing writers who want to share things they've learned. On top of this, the best clues are the ones that reward knowledge that could be accumulated by organically consuming content as an academic/hobbyist in a given field--which is a function an LLM cannot replace!

[Cheynem]

I don't know if AI is an existential threat to quizbowl, but I do find it a threat and offensive.

[etotheipi]

If one is opposed to AI displacing serious sets at real competitions, playing this set merely serves as an opportunity to play low quality questions for cheap before it rises to the level of "unethical" - not a great payoff.

Even if one is not opposed in principle to AI-written questions being used at serious tournaments in a (very, very, very far-off) universe where these questions are of the same quality as those written by humans, one should still not play this set.

The greatest risk AI poses to quizbowl (and to art) in my eyes has nothing to do with its replacing humanity or something to that effect and everything to do with what it will do on its way there. It is easy to imagine a near future in which an LLM or whatever is capable of generating questions that are low-quality but still playable, or at least editable into something playable (how many packet submissions consist of at least partially AI-generated questions these days?), and so could theoretically be used in "emergencies" - sets seeming like they wouldn't be finished in time, writers flaking last-minute, etc. I don't think it's too hard to imagine a head editor taking a not-insignificant hit to the quality of their set in exchange for a pretty significant reduction in workload and stress.

More generally, consider a situation like that of CO '23 (it had seemed in January or so that the set might not happen, but Alex and Henry stepped up, recruited editors, both wrote and edited significantly for the project, and ended up putting out a - in my entirely unbiased opinion - rather enjoyable CO). In a world where AI could have done some of the heavy lifting for a project like this one, would the community maybe have seen fit to compromise and take a lower-quality CO, in the absence of anyone stepping up to spearhead the project? Would as many editors and writers have volunteered to put in significant amounts of time on the set. have felt urgency of some sort, if they knew they would be bailed out by a computer if the set wasn't finished? What about a more extreme case, like what qbwiki calls the "5th of March incident"?

In case I haven't been coming off as Heideggerian enough: the main problem with this sort of technology is not that it does bad work, but that, by letting us fail or slack without consequences, it makes our work worse. Insofar as writing quizbowl questions is essentially an artisanal activity, AI in this capacity is deadly to it (as technology/technicity has been deadly to essentially every artisanal activity - so the Luddites, e.g., saw).

I think there will always be the occasional "bad actor" (I don't really want to make a blanket moral judgment - people often cut corners for very good reasons: schoolwork is more important than quizbowl; people say health also is but that I don't quite believe) who AI-generates their packet submission, but I think we would all significantly benefit from there being e.g. a community norm that AI is not welcome in question-writing.

Tl;dr, sorta: I know that this is not going to stop people from playing the tournament. But if you sign up, you should probably have a good think about why you value a little bit of "fun" more than the health of a community that has likely done a lot for you - more than, dare I say, principles.

...there's an oversupply of willing writers who want to share things they've learned...

With respect, it has been my experience that a not-insignificant fraction of these "willing writers," especially the younger ones, stop being so willing a month or two into set production.

[Stinkweed Imp]

In case I haven't been coming off as Heideggerian enough: the main problem with this sort of technology is not that it does bad work, but that, by letting us fail or slack without consequences, it makes our work worse. Insofar as writing quizbowl questions is essentially an artisanal activity, AI in this capacity is deadly to it (as technology/technicity has been deadly to essentially every artisanal activity - so the Luddites, e.g., saw).

just grind harder

[QuestionCactus]

I've added a free-agent registration form and spreadsheet if you're interested in finding a teammate.

Sign up as a free agent here: https://forms.gle/8uYb18eDKVCWApMz8
You can view existing free agents on this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ ... sp=sharing

We currently have six teams signed up.