Games At Work dot Biz

e413 — AI, your way

By Michael Martine | April 24, 2023 - 06:33 |April 23, 2023 Podcast

Comments Off

visual representation of data in the form of points of light — Photo by Ross Stone on Unsplash

Published 24 April 2023

Andy, Michael and Michael get things started for this edition of the podcast with several stories about AI. The first from the Washington Post deals with the dataset that makes up Google’s C4 – the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus. The data ingested into the large language models has an impact on the systems that use them, and in the case of C4, Andy noticed that his blog was included, and also noted that the Games at Work site was not. Many large language models do not disclose the websites incorporated in their models. The Washington Post article goes into more details about the provenance of the data, as well as the ownership of the websites ingested as it relates to how large language models are trained and challenges that may arise from that selection and training. Have a look in the show notes below to see if your favorite website was included in the C4 model. After a quick note about Microsoft’s SwiftKey keyboard including AI and a cool video of a BMO-AI robot demo, the team turns to the Turing test website aptly called “human or not”. This website randomly pairs the user with a human or an AI and allows for a 2 minute conversation concluding with the user voting whether the conversation partner was a human, or not a human (an AI).

Switching to television, the new show Mrs. Davis just out on the Peacock streaming service features an AI as a central character. Well, the show is just out in the US – the launch date in the UK is still to be announced – sorry, UK listeners! It will be interesting to see how this AI is treated in the show, even if the AI does not have an entry in imdb.

With such the focus on AI in the recent weeks, an article by Alex Murrell captures the attention of the co-hosts in multiple ways. There is a thought that AI will continue to accelerate the convergence of design toward what Alex describes as “the age of average”. Citing examples such as “Instagram face”, “AirSpace” (international AirBnB style), architecture and advertising, Alex highlights the trending toward the homogenization of style. Michael R points out that breaking from the average is a way of establishing distinctiveness, because it is avant garde and breaks from the popular. The advertising tagline of “X, your way” is another example that Alex points out, which then inspired the naming of this episode. Concluding the article with “When the world zigs. Zag.” reminded Michael M of the Cadillac advertisements from some years ago – see below for an example. Take some time to read this very interesting article in full.

Wrapping up the episode for this week, Andy, Michael and Michael conclude with a couple of notes about the Apple HomePod listening for smoke alarms and some rumors about the as yet unannounced mixed reality headset. An intriguing interview with Tim Cook in GQ gives some further color on the future for AR and VR.

Andy noticed that there is an upcoming LEGO exhibition in Raleigh for the local North Carolina listenership, which will interestingly be in the same space as the Van Gogh exhibit from last year.

Is your favorite website in C4? Do you feel that AI will accelerate the move to “the age of average”, or will it help people zag faster? Will the university in Spokane, Washington be happy with more zags? 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.

Selected Article Links

AI

Washington Post article: Inside the secret list of websites that make AI like ChatGPT sound smart

Allen Institute for AI C4 Search

Microsoft SwiftKey Keyboard

Diode Zone video: BMO-AI Companion Robot AI Demo

human or not?

imdb entry Mrs. Davis

The Guardian article: Mrs Davis review – fun yet frustrating series mixes religion with raucousness

The flattening of design

Alex Murrell article: The age of averages

An Apple a day

The Verge article: Apple HomePods can now listen for your smoke alarms

The Verge article: Everything we know about Apple’s mixed reality headset

GQ article: Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple

Art & Culture

WRAL article: LEGO art show coming to Raleigh

Games at Work e394: Immersive Ronto Experiences

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 36:11 — 42.0MB) | Embed

e412 — 3D or not 3D

By Michael Martine | April 17, 2023 - 06:14 |April 16, 2023 Podcast

Comments Off

3D picture of a book with a silhouette of a face due to the folds of the paper and light shining on it — Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

summary

Published 17 April 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael are back at it again for another edition of Games at Work after taking a much needed break. After starting off with a few of the current features in film in theater, the co-hosts kick off this episode with a set of stories about 3D vision that does not require a headset. One example uses holographic technology to render objects in 3D, and another example from Sony shows objects in 3D in a television style screen.

Then, shifting gears, the team considers a recently published paper and accompanying RPG simulation of a town populated with 25 AIs. Looking at similarities and differences with the Sims and Simlish, some intriguing ideas are floated about how generative conversational AI could be employed to continue the storyline of a game where NPCs (non-player characters) could be powered by the conversational AI in a non proscriptive manner to further the story of the game. This follows on the show notes from e410 and gives an interesting idea of how 25 AIs could be seeded into an environment with social rules in a GAN way to see what happens.

Continuing on the theme of AI, the co-hosts discuss a GPT4-powered program that is designed to correct bugs automatically, codenamed Wolverine. This in turn spurs a thought about self-healing concrete. An amazing Medium post explores how ChatGPT and GPT4 was used to play the role of a dungeon master in a game of Dungeons and Dragons. You have to read through this post to experience just how good this interaction was. Frederico Viticci of MacStories introduces S-GPT on MacStories. S-GPT is an iOS Shortcut that connects ChatGPT with the native iOS features in an amazing way. This reminded Andy of Short Circuit (the app, not the movie). Wrapping things up for this episode, the team concludes with the prompt library called Jailbreak Chat.

How many AIs would you want to put in your version of a small RPG Minecraft town? Would you want to have your digital assistant on your phone access GPT4, and if so, what would you ask? 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. We even talked about this during the show!

Selected Article Links

Current Theater & Film

Wikipedia article: The Super Mario Bros. Movie

Wikipedia article: Beetlejuice the Musical

Wikipedia article: Air (the movie)

3D spaces

StudyFinds article: Next generation of 3D virtual reality is here and won’t require a headset

Mixed News article: New 27-inch display from Sony offers 3D without VR headset

TechCrunch article: A decade later, this VR treadmill is finally ready to ship

AI

Ars Technica article: Surprising things happen when you put 25 AI agents together in an RPG town

Pre-computed replay of a simulation that accompanies the paper entitled “Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior.“

Ars Technica article: Developer creates “regenerative” AI program that fixes bugs on the fly

Interesting Engineering: DARPA is exploring self-healing concrete for military installations

The Register article: Turns out people don’t like it when they suspect a machine’s talking to them

Medium post by Obie Fernandez: My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM

MacStories article: Introducing S-GPT, A Shortcut to Connect OpenAI’s ChatGPT with Native Features of Apple’s Operating Systems

Short Circuit: An AI Assistant

Jailbreak Chat

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 38:41 — 44.9MB) | Embed

e411 — PavARotti is my CoPilot

By Michael Martine | April 3, 2023 - 06:14 |April 2, 2023 Podcast

Comments Off

interior of a theater, depth of field image showing red audience chairs — Photo by Kilyan Sockalingum on Unsplash

Published 3 April 2023

Michael, Andy and Michael have the information on which country is the happiest on earth: Finland! In a possibly related piece of news, the Finnish National Opera have created a 1:1 digital twin of their stage, which provides them now unlimited stage time for blocking, lighting design and much more. This reminded Michael and Andy of their VR experiences with the Royal Shakespeare Company’s performance of Dream. Then, the co-hosts break on through to the Otherside, reacting to the article and video from the Yuga Labs experience. The cacophony of voices and avatars teeming in the environment are simultaneously amazing and disconcerting. Rounding out the metaverse portion of the episode, Michael, Michael and Andy consider an article about jobs you would only find in the metaverse.

Switching gears to the ongoing fascination about generative AI, an article in Fortune spells out the workflow a university professor used to create a marketing campaign with the ChatGPT-powered Bing search engine, generate images with Midjourney, script a video with voiceover and “film” the video, all in the span of 30 minutes. Both Google and Microsoft have put out a great deal of content to show how they envision productivity increasing tremendously – a couple of short videos are included in the show notes below. It is quite simple to imagine from these articles and videos the integrated toolchain to go from ideation to instantiation faster than ever before. The co-hosts also discuss an article about how Microsoft’s Copilot AI is also being used to accelerate security through DevSecOps in an AIOps manner. A LinkedIn post by Peter Nixey provides an opportunity to consider the far-reaching implications of what was ingested in GPT3 and GPT4 from sources such as StackOverflow, and how this may change when knowledge is pooled into the transformer as weightings.

A rich treasure trove of articles the co-hosts did not have a chance to review on the podcast are included below for your perusal. And maybe for ingestion into GPT5. Who knows?

What performances would you like to see in VR? How can massively multiplayer environments be shrunk and simplified from the perspective of the user? How do you think Q&A exchanges will evolve in the future? 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.

Selected Article Links

so, @settinger designed and printed a comic sans typewriter ball so we're testing it on my IBM selectric this afternoon and it totally does work!

— Emily Velasco (@MLE_online) 2023-03-29T22:15:23.806Z

Printables post: Contest theme: Dice Storage (Finished)

Cults 3D design post: CAPYBARA DICE POND

Entertainment – TV, Video, Games, LEGO

Vice article: The Cure Tried to Stop Scalpers. Brokers Are Selling Entire Ticketmaster Accounts Instead

The Verge article: Paramount Plus has renewed Star Trek: Lower Decks and Star Trek: Strange New Worlds

Tje Verge article: The Diablo IV beta let players do a lot — but not pet the dog

Brickfanatics article: Fan-made coffee table combines two LEGO Star Wars UCS sets

Brothers Brick article: Across the fields of Pelennor, Gandalf rides to Minas Tirith

The Verge article: 9 cool new games from GDC 2023

Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 33:51 — 39.4MB) | Embed

e410 — Wonder Llama of Days Gone By

By Michael Martine | March 27, 2023 - 06:02 |March 27, 2023 Podcast

Comments Off

Photo by Carrie Borden on Unsplash

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.