e478 — Doomed, I Say! | Games At Work dot Biz

Games at Work in Doom font from https://c.eev.ee/doom-text-generator/

Published 26 August 2024

Co-hosts Michael, Michael and Andy start things off on a fun note – a website that creates text in Doom, Minecraft and other fonts.

Next up, the team turns to Ian Hughes for two intriguing posts over the Feeding Edge. First up is Ian’s blog and video showing the power of midjourney.com, runway.ml and luma.ai . The second post deals with Ian feeding his two novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt into a local copy of Nomic.ai on his MacBook and conversing with his protagonist. The Games at Work cohosts are all hoping that this jumpstarts the writing of third book. Ian himself imagines how a generated metaverse could be created following the ingestion of the novels.

Sticking with the theme, the team then turns to the symbolism used by many firms to signify the application of AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, sparkles ✨ are used by Google, Slack and more. This sparks (heh!) a discussion on the power of such symbolism, and Andy shares a recent blog post he wrote on the subject, with a specific focus on a symbol for the Fediverse, specifically the asterism ⁂ unicode2042. This reminds Michael M of the symbol for therefore ∴ unicode2234.

Then, the co-hosts discuss the SAG-AFTRA agreement to partner with Narrativ for the use of audio voice replicas, and the arrangement allowing the people whose voices are being used to have a significant amount of control over how and when their voices are ethically used. Michael R points out that this may have some market limiting impacts for new voices.

Once the team completes the AI review, they spend a few moments on the world of games and gaming. A Guinness world record of 444 consoles hooked into a single television is a marvel. Tramsterfam is reminiscent of Townscaper. Other games include the Smithsonian’s partnership with Crayola, the newest Sid Meyer’s CivVII and an upcoming television series called Secret Level.

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