e414 — Ed Balls | Games At Work dot Biz

Wikipedia article for Ed Balls Day, captured 30 April 2023

Published 1 May 2023

Michael, Michael and Andy get things started on Ed Balls Day for this edition of the podcast with a metaverse story about earning NFTs by playing in a derivative Minecraft environment called Critterz. Critterz describes itself as “The first fully on-chain NFT on the Etherium blockchain to enable P2E on Minecraft”. Moving on from Minecraft, the co-hosts turn to VR entertainment, this time in the form of a virtual rave by Fatboy Slim. Then, the team takes a look at the avatar enhancements now available from Meta via a TechCrunch article. Amazingly, per Meta’s newsroom post, users have created over one billion avatars!

Switching next to the field of games, Michael R gives some insight on his experiences playing Humanity during their demo period. The team discusses the TechDirt article about the Red Cross’ point of view on employing the Rules of War within games.

Next up, AI, as the news keeps on coming. An article considers how the conversational AI in SnapChat was first only available to paid subscribers, and now can only be removed from it’s prominent place by paid subscribers.

Then the team dives in on an intriguing post by Paul Squires linking the humanities with tech and AI. Paul writes “We are already aware that AI may become too powerful for engineers to handle alone, and this represents a massive and urgent opportunity for the humanities.” Michael M mentions how Harvey Mudd builds their curriculum on an integrated liberal arts approach to STEM education. Andy, Michael and Michael have discussed the importance of a broad education as critical to success in their technical field during other episodes. The articles from Kent Beck on Tidy Post and Mitchell Hashimoto on prompt engineering reinforce this perspective. The phrase ‘As an AI language model’ is a significant tell (currently) for where AI models are employed. In the Verge, fake product reviews are described, and the article concludes with the idea that determining what is AI generated text and what isn’t may be mathematically impossible.

Wrapping up the episode for this week, Andy, Michael and Michael conclude with a very cool article about the new LEGO Indiana Jones sets – the first in quite some time, and a story about iSpace’s lunar landing attempt.

What is your point of view on intersection between the humanities and technology? Do you believe that AI language models should have to disclose that they are AI language models?Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know!

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