e479 — Listen Up, Outlaws! | Games At Work dot Biz

Published 2nd September 2024

Andy and Michael R. spend the show discussing advertising, AI, and games.

First up, there’s a shocking story from the excellent 404 Media that covers “the pitch deck” that Cox Media Group (CMG) uses to sell their clients on hyper targeted advertising using audio from our personal smart devices. Michael goes on to encourage us all to disable Automatic Content Recognition on our smart TVs with the help of a story from ZDNet.

In the AI segment, the co-hosts consider Midjourney’s move into hardware. Andy mentions a recent blog post of his own that looks at the good and bad ways that LLMs can be used. Bad folks are farming plays on Spotify and stealing revenue from real artists. And, why play a game that originally required a 33MHz i386 CPU with 4Mb of RAM, when you can use AI and burn megawatts of power to generate small parts of a new level?

To round things out, Michael and Andy talk the latest Star Wars game, a paper version of Oregon Trail, Dungeons and Dragons, and Michael’s desire to get a group together to play games in Demeo in VR.

These show notes were lovingly hand crafted by a real human, and not by a bot. All rights reserved. Since we post this sentence every week it does look a bit automated, though. Anyway! That’s our story and we’re sticking to it.