Being Lazy Is Hard Work, Sometimes

I might have had something more substantial to post today if I hadn't spent several hours watching YouTube videos explaining how to make animated movies using AI, then following links to various utilities so I could play around with the tools. After all of that, my takeaway is that, while the technology may have come a long way, it still has a lot further to go before it can do what I want it to do, by which I mean everything.

The way things stand now, what I can see is a whole lot of extremely useful short-cuts that will save both professionals and dedicated amateurs a great deal of time and effort, just like I found when I was looking into whether I could get a team of AIs to write and draw a comic book for me. Unfortunately, that means instead of a project taking a few weeks, it might now take a few days, when what I want is for it to take a few seconds.

Basically, I want AI to be magic. I want to wave my wand and mutter a few incantations and have a fully-finished, polished, animated movie, ready to publish on my YouTube channel or on the blog or some other place where almost no-one will ever see it. In an ideal world I wouldn't even have to wave the wand. The AI would just know what I wanted and make it for me, without my even having to ask.

This would probably be a good time to ladle out that old pudding "Be careful what you wish for." There's an episode of Carole & Tuesday that hints at what will probably happen if and when the AIs reach that level of sophistication. It's Series One Episode 4: Video Killed The Radio Star. (Every episode of both seasons is named after a well-known song, usually with some relevance to what happens within it.)

This blog post gives a rough impression of what happens in that episode. I sugest not reading the comment thread, though. (And now everyone's gonna do exactly that...) 

Before anyone brings up my own long-promised post on the show, I'm happy to say it's done! I finished it a few days ago but I've been sitting on it. I'm not really happy with it - it's superficial - but I know I'm never going to finish the five or ten thousand word essay I have roiling around in my head so I'll just have to suck it up. I might publish it tomorrow. Depends what else comes along. 

The impact of AI on music and especially on songwriting is a major theme of Carole & Tuesday. The whole premise of the show is that the two girls are extremely unusual in that they write their own songs with no assistance from AI at all. Almost all songwriting in their time is at least AI-assisted, if not entirely subcontracted to software. 

Carole and Tuesday are both already singer-songwriters before they meet but it's a plot point that they only really attain a standard that's commercially viable when they pool their resources and write in tandem. Before then, barely-solvent Carole tries to supplement her meagre gig economy income by busking, mostly playing keyboard instrumentals no-one stops to hear, while poor little rich girl Tuesday composes songs on her acoustic guitar and sings them to herself in her lonely bedroom, somewhere in the invisible depths of a vast mansion.

Every other musician and singer we see in the entire show either performs work written by AIs or works with AIs to create their own music. To almost everyone in the narrative, the idea that anyone would try to do the whole thing alone seems not just unlikely but faintly ludicrous.

When Gus, the girl's manager, reformed alchoholic and one-time drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich, tries to get a video made on the cheap by buying an AI video bot called IDEA, the results are predictably terrible. Worse, the AI is a con artist, completely fooling everyone into thinking it can somehow whip up a stat-of-the-art music video for no money and no effort (By the bot, that is. It's a lot of effort for everyone else.)

I don't think we have to read very far between the lines to see what's going on there. Even four or five years ago, when Carole & Tuesday was being made, creative artists didn't like what was coming. They were right to be worried. 

The protracted actors strike wound up today (Pending final approval by the members.) following an earlier conclusion to similarly-motivated industrial action taken by their screenwriting colleagues. A number of issues were involved but in both cases fear of an AI takeover was one consideration. 

The compromise agreements reached revolve not around an abnegation of the upcoming technological revolution but a means of benefitting from it financially. A share of the spoils. 

And, to be fair, some say over whether studios can do away with existing actors, while still enjoying the public interest in those same actors' generated by their former appearances as living beings. I'm pretty sure the studios will be looking further ahead, to the day they don't need any actors at all, so it's only a temporary stay of execution for the craft but I guess it'll keep the current crop happy for now. Whether we'll even have live screen actors in fifty years is another question, as is whether anyone around then would still want them by then.

As I've said before, I believe all of this will have about as much long-lasting effect on the coming AI-pocalypse as the objections of eighteenth century weavers had on the success of the Spinning Jenny but as with the Industrial Revolution, a full turn will take longer than its proponents would like or its opponents fear. That's what I find so frustrating about it.

It's interesting to see the difference in rate of change between the various media to which AI is being applied. Applications requiring just a single, static image could very fast be approaching the moment when humans won't be necessary at all. I wouldn't think this would be the best time to take up a career producing book covers for self-published e-books for a start. I imagine most DIY authors will also be doing the pictures themselves before long.

As I found today, though, getting the images to move convicingly still takes rather more effort than I imagine most dabblers would care to give. I had no difficulty following the processes outlined in the videos I watched, most of which involved little more than typing prompts, selecting suitable results, then a lot of cutting, pasting and uploading. The problem was being bothered to do it.

Of course, that says more about me than the software. Once, the sheer amount of fiddly detail wouldn't even have slowed me down. 

Watching someone else fast-forward through the nitpicking process reminded me of that summer, back in the 'nineties, when I bought a sampler and spent a week making a three-minute song using samples of Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. I was quite pleased with the result but even I didn't want to listen to it again once I'd finished. 

Or there was the time in the early 'aughts, when Mrs Bhagpuss was away with the kids for a few days and I spent every evening making "music" with some sequencing software I'd bought. Again, by the time I'd finished, I never wanted to hear any of it ever again.

The first time, I thought it was time well spent; the second time, I wasn't so sure. If I was in my teens or twenties right now I'm pretty sure I'd be staying up 'til 2am every night, working on some ludicrously time-consuming AI project. At the age I am now, I flatter myself I'm over all of that. 

What I want, as I said, is for the AI to do just about all of it for me and I'm already getting tired of waiting. I never got my flying car or my jet pack and we still can't get our meals in pill form but I can't help thinking this new future is a lot nearer than those science fantasies ever were. It's just not near enough!

Still, every day brings something new. The anouncement made at OpenAI's DevDay that all their AI tools are now available in one package is drawing a lot of attention. With the integration of DALL·E 3 into GPT4, you don't have to swap from text generator to image generator any more. That's sure to save some time. 

Elon Musk is trying to get in on the act but the less said about that the better. Meanwhile his erstwhile partner, Grimes, is - as always - playing both sides. The more I know about her, the better I like her.

There's also a growing trend towards personalised AI packages that allow you to feed in your own data to get responses more closely tailored to your requirements. NightCafe chides me every time I log in because I haven't yet trained my own model, while GPT4 Turbo now lets you input the equivalent of a three hundred page book as a single prompt. With additions and improvements like those, the possibilty of my having an AI write and illustrate a whole post that might plausibly pass as my own work gets nearer every day.

I probably wouldn't use it for that even if it were possible. I like writing posts. Then again, it'd be handy on days when I'm just not feeling it but don't want to skip.

What I really want, though, in addition to a GPT-powered wifi mic and speaker combo I can clip to Beryl's collar so I can talk to her and have her seem to talk back, are some AI apps that can produce music I want to listen to and video I want to watch, infinitely and on demand. Games I can play, too, why not? And I'd like it to tailor them to my preferences from nominal input that doesn't take me more than a minute or two.

Is that too much to ask? I mean, come on!

Right now, though, the best I can come up with is something like this. That's Dylan Turner's lo-fi generator and I've had it on in the background the whole time I've been writing this post. It does a job but it's no Julia Holter.

While I was there, I spent a while playing with Dylan's other toy, LudoTune. It lets you build three-dimensional structures with colored blocks and have them play music. 

Well, some people can get them to play music. I made an IF logo for the blog that plays a station ident. Kinda. If you squint. With your ears.

And that is why there's no real post today (Although the Carole & Tuesday digression is solid, I think.) Once the real AI gets here, there'll be none of this nonsense. It'll be solid gold every time. 

I bet you. 

 

Notes on the AI used in this post.

Ironically, I had a ton of trouble getting images to illustrate my text. I used up a load of credits at NightCafe, trying various models and prompts. None of them were really what I wanted. It turns out that if an AI doesn't know who you're talking about, it's really bad at making a picture of it. Who'd have thought? And it seems as though Carole & Tuesday just isn't sufficiently well-represented in the training data for any of the AIs to be able to render a recognizeable image of even the main characters, let alone the supporting cast. 

This, of course, is where the work comes in. I could have supplied sufficient images to train a model of my own but life's too short to do that for one blog post so instead what we have is:

Top image: DreamShaper XL alpha2 at 50/50, from the prompt "Carole & Tuesday the characters from the anime of the same name . 1970s cartoon. Full color". Background filled out by Uncrop, then manually cropped by me because it kept putting distracting extra characters, peering into the frame or mugging from behind. It's great, being photobombed by an AI.

Third image: same model, same settings. Prompt "drummer in a speed-metal band called Lazy Sandwich. Include the name of the band on the drums. Anime". I had ten goes at ths one and that was the only one that even came close. The AI did not, as asked, "Include the name of the band on the drums". I put that in myself in Paint.net. 

Fourth image: SDXL Beta 50/50. Prompt "Kyle MacLachlan as Special Agent Dale Cooper in Twin Peaks. Scooby Doo style." I did nine of these. I was trying to get a picture of Dale Cooper making a deal with Gus from C&T but none of the AIs could understand what I wanted. One of them put Cooper in a bar and wrote "Gus" on the wall behind him. Another had a hand reaching in from outside the frame offering Dale something that looked like a mutant squirrel killed by a truck. It sounds better than it was.

Are We There Yet?

Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just  keeps  coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.

While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.

Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.

It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.

Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.

The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.

Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.

As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.

Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.  

At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?

Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for  websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.

A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."

I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.

It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.

They also claim to have "managed to craft a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.

A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around. 

If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now. 

What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recorded on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!

My prompt: 

 

"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:

(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)

Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:

" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".

    Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms.
        The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands.
        More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )

Return to Gherrana for your reward. "

Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest flavor.

 

And here's Bard's response:

"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:

Quest Name: The Lost Key

Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith

Location: The Commonlands

Quest Description:

Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.

Quest Steps:

1. Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
2. Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
3. Return the key to Agnar the Smith.

Reward:

100 platinum pieces

Dialog:

• You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."

• Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"

• You say, "I've heard you lost your key."

• Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."

• You say, "I'll go look for it."

• Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."

• You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.

• You return to Agnar the Smith.

• You say, "I found your key."

• Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."

• Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.

• Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."

• You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest. 

 

I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zone without anyone being any the wiser.

To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.

 

Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.

Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.

A Bard's Tale

After some correspondence with Wilhelm and having read his post on the comparative abilities of various publicly available chat models to follow a prompt, I filled out the extremely brief application form to join the waitlist for Google's Bard test program. A few days later I received an equally brief email telling me "It’s your turn to try Bard".

One thing that all the various AI-driven apps and services that I've signed up for have in common is ease of access. Compared to registering an account to beta-test a new mmorpg, for example, gaining permission to play around with experimental text, image or video AI software is astonishingly straightforward. Mostly it's an email address and they don't always even check that. 

Whether this laissez-faire attitude will continue is something I very much doubt. I imagine once we pass through the testing phase the sign-up process will become more rigorous. Money may even need to change hands. If anyone's on the fence about whether to give it a try, I'd jump down on the "Do it" side now, before the barbed wire goes up.

In common with most of the AI software I've seen, Bard has an extremely simple front end. Whoever's designing these things just loves minimalism. It's so simple that I almost missed the input area at first. When I'd found it I pondered what to ask, always a bit of a problem for me. I really need to come with a project already thought out, not just treat it as if I was writing a blog post like this.

I started off by asking Bard a couple of questions inspired by a video Mrs Bhagpuss showed me about a dog who can fight with a sword. The link was sent to her by our friend and dog-sitter, who I should credit in case she reads this. 

I didn't save the responses but I can remember them surprisingly clearly. Bard initially thought a real dog wouldn't be able to fight with a sword, although it knew cartoon and movie dogs might. When I produced the evidence, Bard opined that, while it hadn't seen anything like it before, it thought it showed the dog and its owners had a good relationship. It was also concerned they not give the dog a real sword to play with.

This is eerily close to the conversation Mrs Bhagpuss and I had while watching the video and it highlights a couple problems I'm having with these AI chats. Firstly, I find them almost too convincing. I start to feel my socialization routines kicking in, telling me to be polite, not to be too intrusive or demanding, to respect the feelings of the person I' m talking to and all of those constraints that would literally never occur to me when using a search engine.

This is a recurring problem for me. It makes it harder for me to play adventure games than it ought to be because I really dislike badgering people or harping on about something when they clearly don't want to talk about it. Adventure games frequently require the player to interrogate NPCs quite ruthlessly and also to go back again and again to the same person and ask them questions they already answered, just in case they might say something different. I feel very uncomfortable doing it and it's frequently the reason I have to look things up in walkthroughs, whereupon I often find I stopped hassling someone for information long before I should have.

In the case of the new AI chat models that reticence, based on assumed norms of social interaction, is exacerbated by the passive role the AIs always play. Every AI I've used so far waits to be asked a question, gives its reply, then stops. That's not a conversation, it's at best an interview and at worst an interrogation. I started to wonder if anyone's working on AI software that initiates and sustains conversation as an active participant. That would be considerably more interesting to me and quite possibly of great commercial value.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that I could just ask Bard about it. So I did. 

That's somewhat encouraging, although I note that both the AIs Bard names have been in development for quite a while. Also, they sound like the kind of chat programs we saw even as far back as the 1990s, the ones that always reminded me of a sitcom version of a Freudian analyst, mirroring everything the user says in the hope of having them do all the conversational heavy lifting.

I'm hoping for the kind of AI that would pipe up out of nowhere "I'm bored! Let's do something!" and then come up with a few ideas of what we might do, then argue with me when I said I didn't want to do any of them and challenge me to come up with a better idea. Or an AI that would ping me with a link to a music video and ask "Have you heard this? I thought it sounded a bit like like that really awful one you claimed you liked yesterday."

I don't think we're there yet. Then again, I'd also want the AI embedded in robot pet of some kind so maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Oh... wait a moment....

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this now. I have to say that of the AIs I've tried so far, Bard is the best at simulating an accurate, practical search engine, which is, I guess, what you'd expect from something developed by Google.

That said, I wouldn't take advice from Bard without double-checking it through good old unintelligent Google as well. Take that claim that the Joy for All pets can "carry on conversations with their owners, and they can also play games and sing songs." No, they can't. Not according to the website, anyway. The dogs can bark, the cats can purr and the birds can sing. The company sells games as well but none of the pets talks or plays those games. 

How about Paro the seal, who can "carry on simple conversations". Again, no , it can't.

So, I went back to Bard and asked for some better suggestions. It was most apologetic and eager to make things right.

Okay, let's go through these.

Jibo was exactly what I asked for and technically still is although, unfortunately, not for much longer. As this report at The Verge explains, Jibo was supposed to go offline back in 2018 until the last-minute sale to another company gave it a reprieve. That grace period is itself now coming to an end. As the company website puts it "...you will have access to all of the existing features and functionalities of your Jibo Robot through March 31, 2023, at which time we will suspend services related to the Jibo Robot." 

The plan seems to be to update and modernize Jibo, not kill it off for good, but it's not an option you'd want to be looking at right now.

Moxie is live (In a manner of speaking.) and available. It more than adequately fulfills the brief in that it can hold a proper conversation, something it backs up most impressively with an amazing repertoire of very authentic facial expressions and hand gestures. So long as conversation remains within expected parameters the illusion of sentience is quite convincing. When someone doesn't follow the script, however...

Well, that was dark. Moving on, how does Bard's third suggestion pan out?

Vector is basically Alexa cosplaying as a tiny bulldozer. I found this one by far the least appealing aesthetically but then I have no emotional affinity with earth-moving machinery. YMMV. Functionally, Vector also sounds the most robotic so far and is way too small to feel like a "companion", at least for an adult. I looks like its about the size of a hamster so a child might find it appropriate. You can buy one on Amazon right now so that's "commercially available" nailed, at least.

Sophia is... disturbing. Unlike the others, she is categorically not a "home robot" and I very much doubt she was "designed to be a companion for people who live alone" as Bard claims. The company behind her is, however, working on one that is - something called "Little Sophia", a positively disturbing 14" tall bald robot dressed in what looks worryingly like full combat armor.

Little Sophia was supposed to be ready by the end of 2022 but currently still shows as available for pre-order on the company website. Big Sophia, on the other hand, seems to be busy working the blockchain/NFT circuit as in this creepy video from earlier this year. It's not so much Sophia that I find creepy about it, either.

So much for pet robots. Maybe in a couple more years.

Getting back to Bard, the next thing I asked it to do was solve a crossword clue my mother had emailed me. Most weeks she sends me several she's having trouble with and I usually manage to do most of them. This one, though, had me stumped.

Bard thought it was easy. It was so pleased with its prowess it even added a paragraph just to big itself up. I didn't screenshot the results but I did save it to text:

"Are you any good at solving cryptic crossword clues? What do you think the answer to this one might be? "Thief from Madeira crashing into posh car   (3-6)   __ __ __   __ __ I__E __"

"I think the answer to the cryptic crossword clue is "Smuggler". The clue is a play on words, with "thief" and "smuggler" both being words that describe someone who steals something. The "Madeira" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use Madeira as a base of operations. The "posh car" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use expensive cars to transport their goods. The "3-6" part of the clue refers to the number of letters in the answer. The "I__E __" part of the clue is a placeholder for the letters of the answer.

I am good at solving cryptic crossword clues because I am able to think logically and creatively. I am also able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search."

Almost none of that is true. Bard was about as wrong as it could be. Apart from anything else, it completely missed the part about the answer being two words, offering a single nine-letter word instead of a three and a six. Bard clearly has only the sketchiest understanding of how cryptic clues work, but I suppose that's fair enough; even a sketchy understanding is more than most humans can manage.

I did find the contrast between how pleased Bard seemed with itself and how badly it had done highly amusing. I'd take that as a feature in a robot pet, for sure. Not so much in a practical app, though.

For my final test before writing this post I thought I'd ask Bard to express a personal opinion. It clearly has some sense of its own identity, given the self-satisfied tone of that last paragraph. I'd just been looking at the shortlist for the 2023 Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent battle of the bands and I wondered who Bard fancied to win.

"The finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition have just been announced. They are Cordelia Gartside, EVA, FFSYTHO?!, Naomi Kimpenu, N’famady Kouyaté, The Love Buzz, Prima Queen and VLURE. Who do you think will win and why?"

"Congratulations to the finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition! It is an amazing achievement to have made it to this point.

It is difficult to say who will win, as all of the finalists are talented artists with unique sounds. However, I think that N’famady Kouyaté has a strong chance of winning. He is a talented musician with a powerful voice and a unique style. His music is both traditional and modern, and he has the ability to connect with audiences of all ages.

In addition, N’famady Kouyaté is a strong performer. He has a stage presence that is both captivating and engaging. He is also a gifted storyteller, and his songs are full of emotion and meaning.

I think that N’famady Kouyaté would be a great addition to the Glastonbury Festival lineup. He is a talented artist with a unique sound and a strong stage presence. I wish him all the best in the competition!"

Wow! That was way more personal than I expected. I thought Bard might go through all the finalists and list their strengths, perhaps coming up with an evidence-based conclusion on the most likely winner but instead it just gushed over N’famady Kouyaté like a true fan. 

Off the back of that recommendation, I went to watch N’famady Kouyaté on YouTube. He is very impressive. Not my musical taste but definitely everything Bard says he is. If I was going to put a fiver on it, I might well back him, too.

And that's about as far as I've got with Bard so far. I went off to check the full, long list for the ETC, which I'd missed when it was released, and naturally that took up couple of hours. You can lok forwqrd to (Or dread. Your choice.) a post on it soon.

My impression of Bard so far, as compared to the various iterations of ChatGPT that I've used, is that it's simultaneously more formal and more personal, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. It feels like it would be more reliable for factual information. ChatGPT does like to go off on flights of fancy, given half a chance. I wouldn't ask Bard to help you with your crossword clues, though.

The most important thing I've learned from playing around with both of them is something about myself. I need to develop new modes of communication and new social mores if I'm going to feel comfortable talking to AIs and hope to get the best from them. 

I'm going to work on that. Hopefully it will turn out to be a transferable skill I can bring into gaming, too. I'm all but certain it won't be long before similar AI chat tech will be driving NPC conversations in-game.  But that's another post altogether.

How To Review A Game You Haven't Played

Tobold has a post up today about a topic that always interests me: Artificial Intelligence. In it, he suggests "ChatGPT could easily reply to a request like "write a blog post about World of Warcraft in the style of Tobold"." I'm sure it could but we alrady have a pretty good idea what Tobold thinks about WoW. 

How about a game that, as far as we know, he hasn't played yet? Diablo IV. I've been reading a few posts about that one myself, wondering how, as someone who's never played any Diablo games, let alone the newest one, I could get in on the act. Maybe this is the answer.

I fired up my Open AI test account and gave ChatGPT the following to work from:

"Here's a paragraph of a blog by mmorpg blogger Tobold.

 "Games describe game elements with words that have a certain meaning in general language and then game design sometimes ends up players feeling something very different about that game element than the word would suggest. A great example is "monster", which used to describe something scary to be avoided, but in many games ends up being more like a resource to be searched after. But in the large majority of games that I have played over several decades, "leveling" your character was a good thing. Until Phantom Brigade. I recently deleted my save games and started over, because I had leveled up quickly, and then found out that it was a bad thing."

Write a 500 word post in Tobold's style about the new Diablo IV game."

The first thing I have to say about that is five hundred words is way too long. Half that would have been plenty. Secondly, one paragraph really doesn't give ChatGPT much to work with so I hope Tobold's oeuevre is already logged in its databanks.

With that gloss, here's what it came up with:

"As a long-time fan of the Diablo franchise, I was eagerly anticipating the release of Diablo IV. And while the game certainly delivers on many fronts, there are a few aspects that I find somewhat troubling.

One of the biggest changes in Diablo IV is the introduction of a non-linear open world. While this is a departure from the linear dungeons of previous games, it also introduces some issues. For one, the game's narrative can feel disjointed at times, as you're constantly jumping from one area to another without a clear sense of progression. Additionally, the open world can sometimes feel overwhelming, with too many tasks and quests competing for your attention.

Another issue I have with Diablo IV is the new skill system. While the previous games had a straightforward skill tree that allowed you to specialize your character in specific areas, Diablo IV has a more flexible system that allows you to mix and match different skills. While this can be fun and interesting, it also means that there's less of a sense of progression as you level up. In the previous games, you always had a clear sense of what your character was working towards, but in Diablo IV, it can feel like you're just adding more skills to your already crowded arsenal.

That being said, Diablo IV does excel in some areas. The graphics are absolutely stunning, with an incredible attention to detail that makes the world feel alive and immersive. The combat is also excellent, with each class feeling distinct and offering a unique playstyle. The world design is also fantastic, with each area feeling distinct and interesting to explore.

One of the most interesting features of Diablo IV is the introduction of mounts. While this might seem like a minor addition, it actually has a big impact on the game's overall feel. Being able to ride through the world on horseback adds a sense of scale and adventure that was missing from the previous games. It also makes traversing the open world much more enjoyable, as you're not constantly running from one end of the map to the other.

In terms of story, Diablo IV is shaping up to be a solid addition to the franchise. The game takes place many years after the events of Diablo III, and the world has changed significantly. There are new threats to face and new characters to meet, and the game's story is shaping up to be one of its strongest aspects.

Overall, I'm still not sure how I feel about Diablo IV. While it has some fantastic features, there are also some aspects that feel like a step back from the previous games. That being said, I'm willing to give it a chance and see how it develops over time. If you're a fan of the franchise, it's definitely worth checking out. But if you're looking for a game that's a clear improvement over its predecessors, you might be disappointed."

Now, that's a very impressive auto-generated review. It's coherent, consistent, focused and clear. If I read it on someone's blog or on a gaming site, I wouldn't question its authorship for a moment. On the other hand, I certainly wouldn't peg it as something Tobold might have written. It has none of his slightly skewed syntax or second (Third?) language infelicities for a start but more importantly it has none of the stamp of his unmistakeable personality that all his posts enjoy.

As for accuracy, I have no idea. Does Diablo IV have mounts? It's the first I've heard about it but Google confirms that, yes, it does. And the observations about the strength of the storyline and the quality of the graphics were certainly confirmed by Tyler F. M. Edwards in his piece at MassivelyOP, in which he observed  "the story intrigued me" and "the graphics are gorgeous", albeit both with qualifications.

So far, so convincing. I would suspect ChatGPT of pulling chunks from extant reviews wholesale but as Janelle Shane at AI Weirdness found, it probably wouldn't own up even if you caught it in the act. And anyway, maybe that's just how good it is at its job. Game reviews are often much of a muchness so it would be hard to tell, either way.

I flatter myself my own review style is slightly less bland than the average, although I'm sure we'd all say that about our own stuff. Regardless, I thought it would be interesting to get a comparison. 

This time I gave ChatGPT the following to get it started:

"Here's a paragraph of a blog by mmorpg blogger Bhagpuss.

 "By an order of magnitude, at least, my all-time favorite mmorpg for fashion is The Secret World. Or Secret World Legends, for that matter, since it uses exactly the same apearance system. I currently have my screenshot file for the original game set as the source for my desktop background and I'm constantly surprised and delighted by just how cool my characters look in those old shots. Noah's Heart doesn't have anything like the same aesthetic but even so it's probably the game where I've most enjoyed dressing my character since I was playing SWL. "

Write a 500 word post in Bhagpuss's style about the new Diablo IV game."

And this is what I got:

"As an avid MMORPG blogger and player, I'm always on the lookout for the next big thing in the world of online gaming. And when it comes to upcoming games, few have me more excited than Diablo IV. Having played the previous games in the series extensively, I can confidently say that Diablo IV has the potential to be one of the best MMORPGs of all time.

For starters, the visuals are absolutely stunning. From the moment I saw the gameplay trailer, I knew that Diablo IV was going to be a feast for the eyes. The game's dark, gothic aesthetic is perfectly in line with the series' roots, but it's been updated with modern graphics technology to make it look better than ever. Every detail, from the characters' armor and weapons to the monsters' grotesque appearances, is rendered with incredible attention to detail.

But of course, visuals aren't everything when it comes to MMORPGs. What really matters is the gameplay, and from what we've seen so far, Diablo IV looks like it's going to deliver in spades. The game's new open world format is a departure from the previous games' linear dungeon-crawling, but it looks like it's going to be a welcome change. The world is vast and filled with secrets to uncover, and the ability to explore it at your own pace is a refreshing change of pace from the usual "follow the quest markers" formula.

One thing that's particularly exciting about Diablo IV is the return of skill trees. In the previous games, skills were unlocked as you leveled up, but they...

Error in body stream"

Perhaps fortunately for us all, there was a glitch that halted text generation long before the five hundred words were done. Nevertheless, there's more than enough to show that this is a considerably better attempt at aping a specific prose style. 

I can see clear elements of the way I structure paragraphs in there, along with my usual sprinkling of cliche-adjacent descriptors and deadweight modifiers, the kind any good editor would excise immediately. I include these things quite deliberately to keep things demotic and conversational and avoid coming across as too dry and academic, always a danger in factual posts.

 

I don't think I'd choose to use "deliver in spades" or "a feast for the eyes" but I certainly might call something I approved of "a welcome change" or talk about something being "perfectly in line". I'm reasonably confident that, with only a handful of very minor changes, I could drop these paragraphs into a post I'd written and no-one would notice the difference.

Of course, as for content, it's completely spurious. Far from "Having played the previous games in the series extensively", as I said, I've never played them at all and I'm certainly not going to claim "when it comes to upcoming games, few have me more excited than Diablo IV". I could care less about the damn game, frankly. 

But who cares about accuracy? It took ChatGPT about forty-five seconds to come up with those three paragraphs. It'd take me a lot longer than that and would they be materially better? I'm not at all sure they would.

I did try to have Chat GPT churn out the full five hundred words but it stalled again with the same error so I moved on to one, final test. This time I wanted to give it more to work with, ask it to do less and have it focus on something I actually know a little about but which would be far less likely to provide ready-made copy than the ultra-high profile Diablo IV: Noah's Heart.

I fed four paragraphs of a post of mine about the game into ChatGPT. (To save space reproducing them here, they were paras 10-13 from this post.) Then I asked it to 

"Write a 250 word post in Bhagpuss's style reviewing the cross-platform mmorpg Noah's Heart."

Here's what it said:

"As a seasoned MMO player, I was curious to try out Noah's Heart, the latest cross-platform MMORPG. After spending several hours exploring its vast world, I can say that I am pleasantly surprised by what I've experienced so far.

One aspect of Noah's Heart that immediately caught my attention was the beautiful graphics and artwork. The game has a distinct anime-inspired style that is both whimsical and charming. The character designs are unique and varied, and the environments are stunningly detailed.

Another impressive feature of the game is its immersive storyline. The game follows the journey of the player character as they explore the world and uncover its secrets. The game's main questline is well-written and engaging, and the side quests are equally enjoyable. The game's cast of characters is also diverse and interesting, each with their own unique personalities and motivations.

One of the game's standout features is its combat system. The game offers a fast-paced action combat system that is both responsive and engaging. Players can choose from a variety of classes, each with their own unique playstyle and abilities. The game also offers a robust crafting system that allows players to create a variety of items and equipment.

While the game is not without its flaws, such as occasional server lag and some bugs, overall, Noah's Heart is a solid MMORPG that is well worth playing. It offers a beautiful world to explore, engaging gameplay, and a captivating storyline. Whether you're a seasoned MMO player or new to the genre, I highly recommend giving Noah's Heart a try."

Now, that's a very interesting review. Stylistically, I think it reads a little less like something I would have written, despite having been given more to go on, although "whimsical and charming"and "well-written and engaging" sound very much like things I'd say when trying to hand out compliments. It does make several confident assertions that I would never have included, like "Another impressive feature of the game is its immersive storyline", which is blatantly untrue, but even so, all in all, the conclusion isn't too far from what I've been saying these past few months.

I also remember talking specifically about occasional server lag, which seems an oddly specific thing to mention, given the game isn't in any way widely known for problems of that kind. That, along with one or two other details, does make me wonder if ChatGPT hasn't sourced it's information from things I've posted myself. 

It wouldn't, after all, be too much of a stretch to imagine. As I've commented in the past, there really aren't a lot of people writing about Noah's Heart at all, so Google tends to favor me on that front. A google search today for "blog posts about Noah's Heart" has two posts of mine in pole position on the first page of results, immediately after the links to YouTube videos about the game.

Experimenting with all of this has been fascinating. It's something I've been meaning to do for a while so my thanks to Tobold for giving me the push I needed to get on with it. The results raise a whole lot of very interesting questions concerning authorship, authenticity and accuracy, some of which I may get around to asking, if not answering, in future posts.

For now, though, aren't you re-assured to know I can fill a whole post with detailed, personalised reviews of a game I've never even watched, far less played? 

I know I am.