e398 — Stable Diffusion Genius

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horse in a stable with diffused light
Photo by Jacob Jolibois on Unsplash

Happy New Year!

In this episode, Andy and Michael M get together to reflect upon 2022 and prepare for 2023.  First, the co-hosts touch on the very special audio episode of the behind the scenes BCS webinar, and Michael R’s drop in on .  Then, they marvel on how far has come in the past year.  How might you know whether the show notes were written by the bot?  Perhaps the multiple uses of the word the might be the clue.  The the the the.  Or maybe not.  Seriously though, determining whether an AI wrote some text, generated an image, or composed a 3d model will likely become more and more difficult with the advances to be made in the coming 12 months.  Interesting Engineering gives several amazing advances from 2022, among them, a way to 3d print wood.  

Closing out for the last recoding of the year, and turning and eye to 2023, Andy and Michael discuss Robin Sloan’s writeup.  It resonates strongly with them – to remain curious, to try new things and keep an open mind.  A marvelous message to carry into the new year.

Does your bot have a question for the Games At Work team for the new year?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

Selected Article Links

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT webinar: Behind the scenes at the Games at Work dot Biz podcast (AGM)

Games at Work: A Very Special Episode

Michael Rowe on Weeks End show

Apple Machine Learning Research paper: Stable Diffusion with Core ML on Apple Silicon

MIT Technology Review article: How to spot AI-generated text

TechCrunch article: OpenAI releases Point-E, an AI that generates 3D models

Interesting Engineering article: We can now 3D print as much wood as we want without cutting a single tree

Interesting Engineering article: 22 best innovations of 2022: IE celebrates a year in engineering

hackster.io article: Finally an Open Source Capture Cartridge for the Original Game Boy

TechCrunch article: Meta acquires Luxexcel, a smart eyewear company

Within

Robin Sloan post: A year of new avenues

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A Very Special Episode: BCS Webinar

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images of Ian Hughes, Michael Rowe, Andy Piper and Michael Martine from the BCS Webinar YouTube recording.
BCS Webinar with Ian, Michael, Andy and Michael recorded 12 Dec 2022

In A Very Special Episode, Andy, Michael and Michael were thrilled to be the guests of Ian Hughes on an unscripted webinar on the Games At Work podcast.  Ian is the Chair of the BCS IT Animation and Games Development Specialist Group.  The video webinar was recorded Monday, 12 December, and this is the audio feed of the video for the Games At Work listening audience.  If you’d like to see why the cohosts say that they have “faces for radio”, have a look at the YouTube recording in the show notes below! 

In this 58 minute free ranging conversation, Ian leads the discussion with the Games At Work cohosts, getting a detailed look at the origin story and what it takes to make a podcast that has continued weekly for nearly a decade.  Michael, Andy and Michael each share personal insights about the podcast, guests that have come on the show (such as Ian himself!), and what makes the endeavor tick.  Spoiler alert: it is a combination of curiosity, dedication and camaraderie that make the difference for this podcast.

Learn whether there was a radioactive spider somewhere in the distant past.  Discover what “pressing the big red button” means in the context of this show.  Understand what goes into the audio engineering on a (nearly) weekly basis for over a decade.  Engage with the cohosts with your ideas, and get them to talk about news stories you find interesting.  Reminisce about the DogearNation podcast – but do not go to the website! All this and more on this Very Special Episode, as the team runs up to major milestone episode 400.

This set of show notes lovingly handcrafted (not by ChatGPT or another bot).  Drop us a link or an idea for the upcoming episodes over at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and maybe it will be on the historic episode 400!

Selected Article Links

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT

BCS webinar: Behind the scenes at the Games at Work dot Biz podcast (AGM)

Feeding Edge blog post: What does it take to make the long running Games At Work dot Biz podcast or any other for that matter? 

Games at Work e397 – Chatty Bad AI (reflections on the BCS webinar)

dogearnation podcast graphic image
dogearnation podcast graphic image

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e397 — Chatty Bad AI

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speech bubble
Photo by Volodymyr Hryshchenko on Unsplash

Andy, the continuity cohost, is joined this week by Michael R.  After reflecting on the BCS behind the scenes webinar on the podcast, the cohosts get things started with a few games, notably Star Wars Galaxies.  Then, continuing on the ChatGPT theme from last week, Andy introduces an article where the subject is a bot, supported by people, who step in from time to time when the bot needs a little human intervention.  The surprising thing is that the human assistants to the bot started using the language of the bot in their everyday lives.  

In addition to talking about Lensa, the pair also discuss Riffusion, which generates spectrograms from a prompt which may then be played as an audio file.  Super cool – give it a try! 

The New Stack lists the top 5 internet technologies for 2022.  Generative AI, Fediverse, Cloud IDEs (early in the year), Open Metaverse and Decentralized Storage.  Of these topics, the Games At Work team have discussed each at some point this year, with the possible exception of storage.  

Are you a bot?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz (our home for now) and let us know! 

Selected Article Links

BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT webinar: Behind the scenes at the Games at Work dot Biz podcast (AGM)

I love that is still going.

Star Wars Galaxies emu Dark Rebellion uses integrated D20 systems for ‘complex and immersive adventures’

massivelyop.com/2022/12/11/sta

— Theo Priestley (@tdp) 2022-12-13T23:47:09.900Z

Wikipedia article: Star Wars Galaxies 

Ars Technica article:  Amazon Games branches out, announces it will publish the next Tomb Raider

TechDirt article: Getty Images Watermark Shows Up In Latest Square ‘Final Fantasy’ Game

The Guardian article: Becoming a chatbot: my life as a real estate AI’s human backup

these kids are so used to bots being at the end of the submit button, more so that i was used to experiencing at that age, so i keep that in mind and respond to such reports along the lines of "hey i want to help, but this is not how you talk to people to get it." and they often apologize, genuinely! i get a lot of "i didn't realize this was a person" which is incredibly mature once you get past their original message calling my mom gay because their bot code doesn't work lol 2/5

— jenn schiffer (@jenn) 2022-12-02T20:45:16.757Z

"Out of 100 avatars I generated, 16 were topless, and in another 14 it had put me in extremely skimpy clothes… I have Asian heritage…My white female colleague got significantly fewer sexualized images. Another colleague with Chinese heritage got results similar to mine."

Incredibly important story from Melissa Heikkilä about how the viral AI avatar app Lensa repeatedly undressed her without her consent, and its grotesque fetish for Asian women.

technologyreview.com/2022/12/1

— Karen Hao 郝珂灵 (@karenhao) 2022-12-13T01:10:25.596Z

TechCrunch article: UPDATED: It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images

Riffusion

https://www.riffusion.com/?&prompt=madonna+and+elton+john+lullaby+duet&seed=51211&denoising=0.75&seedImageId=og_beat

The New Stack article: Top 5 Internet Technologies of 2022

Corel Gallery Clipart Mastodon Bot

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e396 — GAN vs GAN

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three robotic hands typing on a typewriter - does not appear realistic. image generated by www.crAIyon.com with the following prompt "silver robot hands typing on a typewriter"
image generated by www.crAIyon.com 11 Dec 22 with the following prompt “silver robot hands typing on a typewriter”

Andy, the continuity cohost, is joined this week by Michael M.  The cohosts get things started with all things ChatGPT, which has been all over the news in the past few days. The concept of generating text that could then be fed into an image generator, which in turn may be used to create a virtual world experience in a project workflow.  This could easily create a tailored, randomized and customized experience for the user, especially those that are expert in seeding the prompt for ChatGPT, and then in turn, the image generating software.  In these early days, expertise in writing the proper prompt is highly valuable, much as is the expertise that Andy has developed in being expert in wielding search engines.  Critical thinking and analysis of what is presented to validate the “truthiness” of generated text, images, worlds will be more and more important in the future.  Michael and Andy muse on how there may be in the not too distant future bots / AI that can do such expert analysis.  

The pair talk about a recent news story about an AI vision invisibility cloak.  Going back to the archives, there was a Games At Work discussion about an invisibility cloak designed Duke University researchers — see the show notes for a link.  

In a reversal of a previous board decision to allow the San Francisco police department to allow remote controlled robots to use deadly force, the city’s board of supervisors have voted against such use.  Related to the San Francisco article is Daniel Suarez’s fictional novel Kill Decision, which has been discussed in several prior episodes — see the notes below for two of them.  Incidentally, the notion of making yourself “invisible” to AI is also a subject in the novel. 

Waze is in the news for a couple of reasons.  Andy and Michael talk about Waze getting an in-car app in Renault vehicles and the further integration with the Google Maps team.  They also remember the early days of the app when users competed to map new (to Waze) roads by “road munching”.

Winding up this episode, the cohosts touch on Dungeons of Daggorath and cyber security challenges in Vanuatu.  

What would you have ChatGPT write/assemble for you?  Have your bots 🤖 drop our bots 🤖 a line at @gamesatwork_biz and let us know! 

Selected Article Links

TechCrunch article: UPDATED: It’s way too easy to trick Lensa AI into making NSFW images

Mashable article: People will ask ChatGPT anything

DoNotPay.com 

Wikipedia article: OpenAI

OpenAI.com 

ChatGPT

Ian Hughes’ novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt

Wikipedia article: Generative adversarial network

Games at Work e163 — Chat Me Maybe?

North Carolina School of Science and Mathematics (NCSSM)

The Verge article: AI-generated answers temporarily banned on coding Q&A site Stack Overflow

The Register article: Stack Overflow bans ChatGPT as ‘substantially harmful’ for coding issues

Vice World News article: Chinese Students Invent Coat That Makes People Invisible to AI Security Cameras

DukeStories article: From Invisibility Cloaks to Satellite Communications

The Verge article: San Francisco reverses plans to allow police robots to kill suspects

Games at Work e250 — See Clearly Now

Games at Work e150 — Cyber Dementors

We had a lot of second life virtual campfires (often thanks to @timelessp gadgets with a chat interface to spawn them) in 2006. Looking forward to AI powered just asking for what we need as per midjourney “a meeting around a campfire for 10 at sunset” but in 3d space.

— Epredator (@epredator) 2022-12-07T11:55:54.997Z

The Verge article: Waze gets built-in car app for the first time

Gizmodo article: Google Is Combining Its Maps and Waze Teams Amid Cost-Cutting Pressure

Some time back I adapted the fantastic PC port of the classic game Dungeons of Daggorath to run online via . To play it, point your browser (desktop or mobile) at:

daggorath.online/

— Nathan Byrd (@cognitivegears) 2022-12-02T15:53:45.067Z

Dungeons of Daggorath

NPR article: The Pacific island nation of Vanuatu has been knocked offline for more than a month

Tuvalu government 

Tuvalu, The First Digital Nation

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