Anyone Want To See My Hippo Impressions?

Here's a fun quiz. I'm going to give you three lists of twenty names for wall and floor decorations you can make with the Tailoring tradeskill in Noah's Heart. One of the lists is taken directly from the game. The other two were suggested by Google's AI Chatbot Bard and by OpenAI's ChatGPT-4.

See if you can tell which is the real one.

List  A

Enchanted Moonlight
Serpent's Scales
Whispering Shadows
Blossoming Sakura
Celestial Cascade
Eternal Frostbite
Mystical Illusions
Dreamer's Haven
Emerald Enchantment
Dancing Fireflies
Twilight Whispers
Radiant Starry Night
Luminous Lotus Pond
Enchanted Rose Garden
Crystal Clear Waters
Golden Autumn Leaves
Whimsical Wonderland
Soaring Dragon Scales
Ethereal Aurora Borealis
Tranquil Zen Garden

List B

Atlas of Vast Land
Yearning Love
Fickle Dream
Flowery Years
Omniscient Forest
Misaligned Space and Time
Light When Happy
Half City Smoke and Rain
Glamorous Sand
Hippo Impressions
Warm and Moist
Dune Sea Rafting
Snowy Mountain Silver Fox
Hibiscus Jade Fat
On the Clear Spring Rock
Time Light Memory
The Sound of Jade
Heart Space
Golden Wind Relief
Splash Mountain Water

List C

Astral Sky
Crystal Forest
Eternal Sea
Fire and Ice
Forest of Dreams
Frozen Waterfall
Golden Desert
Green Meadow
Heavenly Garden
Icy Mountains
Jade Palace
Luminous Moon
Mystic Ocean
Night Sky
Ocean Waves
Pink Rose
Purple Rain
Red Sunset
Silver Moon
Snowy Mountain

It's obvious, isn't it? The genuine article is List B. 

List A is ChatGPT-4 and List C is Bard.

I gave the AIs List B as a prompt and told them what game it was from, in case they had the rest of the hundred floor and wall coverings you can make in Noah's Heart tucked away somewhere in their data sets. Then I asked them:

 "Please create twenty more names suitable for use in the game for new wall and floor coverings."

Bard very politely replied:

"Sure, here are 20 more names suitable for use in the game for new wall and floor coverings:" 

and churned out a list in about five seconds. Then it made an observation, without being asked for its opinion, as it likes to do, when it's pretending to be your friend:

"These names are all evocative and atmospheric, and they would be perfect for adding a touch of beauty and wonder to any player's home or base in Noah's Heart."

Bard is very chatty. It's easy to feel like you're having an actual conversation with it, not least because it often chips in with commentary or observations of its own that you haven't asked for and weren't expecting. It would make a pleasant companion or a companionable PA.

ChatGPT-4 is more pragmatic. Given the same prompt, it banged out the twenty suggestions like a hyper-efficient typist, one at a time, in bullet points. Again, it took about five seconds to generate the full list.

And both lists are absolutely fine. They would work perfectly in the context of the game. Many of the hundred real recipes have very similar names: Festive Fireworks, Modern Mocha, Forest Garden...

Actual in-game images. Collaged by me. By hand. No AI. Just me.

 

The thing is, I didn't choose any of those to jump start Bard and ChatGPT. I hand-picked twenty of the odder names, which wasn't hard - most of the names used in the game are odd. I wanted to see if the AIs, which used to have a reputation for returning quirky, off-the-wall, even disturbingly weird results, could come up with something stranger than what was in the game already.

The answer, disppointingly, is no, they couldn't. With perhaps the sole exception of Eternal Frostbite, I can easily imagine any of the rest of the AI selections appearing on a paint color chart at my local DIY store. It's a lot harder to imagine popping down to B&Q for a litre of Misaligned Space and Time or Hippo Impressions.

And that's one of the big problems with the current generation of AI chatbots, at least from my perspective. They're bland and getting blander by the iteration. Even Tobold's noticed so it must be true.

Craiyon misses the point again...

To me, another problem also seems to be that they don't really follow instructions all that well or perhaps I should say all that consistently. I'd be willing to accept that might have something to do with the prompts I'm setting them but it's not just me. 

Sometimes the responses are so uncannily thoughtful and nuanced you can imagine how an excitable person could convince themselves some kind of vestigial consciousness was at work. At other times, though, as in Janelle Shane's attempt to get AIs to create ascii art or even give the least sign they have a vague understanding of what it is, let alone whether they're any good at it, it's easy to get the feeling it's all just a colossal confidence trick, with the AIs showing all the confidence and gullible humans only too eager to be conned.

It is, of course, neither of these things. It's just a set of algorithms like countless others we use every day. Over time they'll be tuned and refined until all the rough edges have turned to safe, slick surfaces. Then they'll be used, either appropriately or inappropriately, for good or for ill and we'll all just have to get used to it.

If that scenario doesn't appeal, you can always comfort yourself with the thought that, unless and until they get a damn sight better, they surely aren't going to be replacing either genuinely creative human beings or good old-fashioned search engines any time soon. Except, of course, they're doing it already. 

Spotify had to remove a stream featuring Drake and The Weeknd today after it had racked up over 600,000 streams in a couple of days because neither Drake nor The Weeknd had anything to do with it. It was all done by AI. The ethical, political and legal battles are only just begining but if history is any indicator the ultimate victor will be the technology. It almost always is.

For now, I think we should all have as much fun with the whole thing as we can. We may end up looking back on this as a golden age of open-access AI anarchy, a bit like the early days of silent movies or radio or cable TV. It'll all get corporate soon enough and then we'll be sorry. 

Especially if we missed the fun while it was there to be grabbed.