e410 — Wonder Llama of Days Gone By

Published 27 March 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael start things off for this edition of Games at Work with a set of #AI stories featuring the speed at which the landscape continues to evolve. In the past week, per an article from The Verge, Google’s Bard and Microsoft’s Bing chatbots are referring to and reinforcing one another’s hallucinations. This is reminiscent of the chatbot interactions from back in 2016 when people would put their home assistants into an infinite loop – check out the show notes for an example of this. The potential for deliberate misinformation insertion looms large in a way that even wikipedia editors may not be able to manage.

The new plug in capabilities for OpenAI’s ChatGPT announced this week provide for ways for ChatGPT to quickly gain additional skills and capabilities. It’s been well documented how mathematical prompts create problems for ChatGPT, however now with the ability to add plug ins, the sophisticated computations of WolframAlpha is now possible within the conversational AI interface.

An article from Polygon explores the concept of having generative AI produce the script for non player characters (NPCs) in video games. This could be easily extended to having the background characters have broader conversational involvement with players, fitting the genre, speech and including a degree of randomness to provide an even more engaging experience for the player – not only generating the script for these NPCs to “read”.

Turning to the metaverse, these ideas about conversational AIs turn toward the 3d representation of the NPCs and more. One article deals with how Epic’s MetaHumans could be animated using just the power of a person’s phone. Another one focuses on a couple that got married in a virtual Taco Bell – something that the co-hosts have seen before, once upon a time.

Wrapping up this episode the team touches on a cool LEGO lunar poster build, a Diablo IV update and news about a forthcoming Devo documentary.

What new skills would you like to see ChatGPT gain? How do you expect to determine what is true vs what is a generative hallucination? Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.