Drop The Pilot?

Yesterday's post was meant to be about the upcoming release of Tarisland. As you'll know, if you read it, that isn't quite how it turned out. Things began to spiral in the second paragraph and didn't begin to straighten out again until close to the end. 

As I improvised around the topic of digital ownership, I threw in a number of quite specific references to Spotify. Some of those came from my own memories of news items I'd read this year. Google Search provided the links. Others were found for me by Microsoft Copilot.

I only had the idea of using Copilot because I'd seen someone else do it first. Noizy Gamer posted a detailed article entitled "Using AI To Examine CIG Reaching $700 Million In Revenue" which I found interesting, not so much for what it said about Chris Roberts' almost superhuman ability to keep the Star Citizen funding coming but more for what it implied about the current state of so-called Artificial Intelligence in the context of research.

On a number of occasions, writing here about AI, I've said that one thing I'd really like from the new tech would be an unpaid, virtual research assistant. I have been known to engage, albeit sporadically and ineffectively, in some half-assed, amateur investigative journalism on the blog, mostly involving games and who's really making them - or making bank on them. Those posts always involve a lot of googling and skimming through tedious company websites, which isn't always the most thrilling way to spend an afternoon.

I wouldn't say I don't enjoy it because I do like doing research but it would be very handy to be able to hand off the more brain-numbing grunt work to an AI. And I have tried but until now the results have been so unreliable I've had to check every claim before I used it, meaning I might just as well have done the leg-work myself.

Noizy seemed pretty satisfied with the results Copilot came up with, though, and he's orders of magnitude more experienced in this kind of research than I am; much more qualified to judge how useful and trustworthy the information the AIs are returning from his requests. That thought came into my mind as I found myself somewhat unexpectedly extemporizing on things I really knew very little about in the opening paragraphs of yesterday's post. 

I'd already realized that if I was going to keep making sweeping statements about Spotify, I'd have to provide some evidence for them. Why not combine finding the information with a test run for Copilot? So that's what I did.

First, I had to find Copilot itself. I like to avoid getting locked up in Microsoft's ecosystem whenever possible so I don't usually use a Microsoft browser or a Microsoft account, although I have both should I need them. For this, I didn't bother with either. I just googled "Copilot" and took the first link. I did find it mildly ironic that I went immediately to Google to find a Microsoft product but not until after I'd already done it.

Once I had Copilot onscreen I found out there are effectively three versions available. You can pay £19 a month for a subscription to use Copilot Pro, which seems like a lot to me. There is a free month's trial at least, so you can test it out and see if you think it's worth paying that much. 

Alternatively, you can log into your Microsoft account for free but more limited access to much the same suite of services. Or you can do what I did and just ask questions without logging in to anything. I was quite surprised that was allowed. 

The free, unregistered version turned out to be fine for what I wanted. I only had to ask one question and a follow-up to get all the information I needed for the post. I simply asked Copilot to give me all the recent news stories involving Spotify and when the results came back looking like they'd been put together by Spotify's Head of PR, I rephrased the query to ask for all the news that had received a negative reception. That did the job.

When you ask Copilot a question, you can set three "conversational styles" for the output: Creative, Balanced or Precise. I wondered what effect that might have on accuracy but in fact it just changes how the AI "talks" to you, not the content of its replies. Or at least that's how Copilot says it works...

I picked Precise and got a nice, polite, formal set of answers. I like my research assistants to be professional, not familiar. I hadn't specified a number of results but both times I asked I got four news stories back and not the same ones each time, which makes sense since I'd changed the paramaters.

The results looked perfectly convincing but don't they always when you're dealing with AIs? By far the best part of the experience was that all of them came with citations and hyperlinks to the source material. 

There's a warning right on screen when you use Copilot, telling you the output is provided by AI and should be checked, which was the case back when it was still Bing, only then you had to go look at the tiny footnotes to see the sources. Copilot streamlines the process so all you need to do is click the links in the results themselves to check how accurate the data-gathering has been.

And it was entirely correct. All the links went to appropriate sources, which I was then able to reference in my post. It was nothing I couldn't have done with a Google Search but it was faster and easier. 

In fact, as far as I can tell, it was a Google search. Or, I guess, a Bing search, since this is Microsoft we're talking about. The AI framed the results with a polite introduction and sign-off and presented them neatly on the page with summaries, which certainly made it quick and easy for me but in essence it was pretty much the same set of links I could have pulled off the first page of Google.

This morning I asked Copilot to give me "a chronological list of superhero movies from the 1960s to the present day". I have it in mind to write a post about the CW adaptations of various DC heroes and whether their meandering, discursive approach fits that publisher's traditions and history better than big MCU movies have served Marvel, which is one hell of an undertaking and one that requires a lot more research than I can be bothered doing at the moment.

Copilot's response was less comprehensive than I expected, albeit still quite useful. I was hoping for a neat list of movies, suitable for cutting and pasting straight into a post. What I got was nothing much more than a gussied-up set of search results, complete with links, citing some very obvious, high-level websites - Letterboxd, Wikipedia, IMDB - plus one that felt less familiar but right on the money, the Superhero Database. 

It felt so much like a Google search thought I'd run a comparison check. I pasted the same enquiry into Google and got the same three, well-known names in the first four results, with a blog called Fights, Tights and Movie Nights filling in for the Superhero Database. 

I'm not drawing any conclusions from this minimal experimentation and I'm certainly not casting aspersions at Copilot (Which used just to be Bing AI.) or AIs in general. I don't know if Copilot's direct competitor, Google's Genesis (Which used to be Bard.) or ChatGPT (Which is still plain old ChatGPT and which also powers Copilot, just to make things even more murky.) could or would do better.

If you're interested in finding out, I refer you to the New Scientist article "Battle of the AI bots: Copilot vs ChatGPT vs Gemini", which I found by the simple expedient of typing "which is the best out of Copilot, Gemini and ChatGPT?" into Google. (Spoiler - "they’re all fairly matched"). Or you could ask the AIs themselves, I guess. I asked Copilot and it broadly agreed with New Scientist, concluding "the best choice depends on your specific requirements".

What a bunch of fence-sitters! And how insufferably polite!

My own feeling is that, for my particular purposes, I can't yet see much difference between what any of them is offering and just running the same query through Google. In the end, what I'm usually after is links, anyway. I need documented evidence to stand up whatever point I'm trying to make and for that I need to be able to cite a source. For that, I don't actually need a research assistant, just a gofer. By using AI to do my searches for me I'm basically hiring a Lamborghini to take me to the corner store.

What I do feel has changed is the degree of confidence I'm willing to invest in AI to shortcut some of the more tedious aspects of doing research. While I could have found all the same links with a Google search, Copilot undoubtedly made the process faster and less tedious. 

I don't generally need to check half a dozen possible sources to confirm a point I'm making in a blog post. One will do just fine. If Copilot or Gemini can do the winnowing for me and cut fifty or so Google first page results down to four or five, complete with a short precis, that's very helpful. Not game-changing or paradigm-shifting... just helpful.

Which leaves us a good distance ahead of where we were last time I did this. So, progress! Whether it will really make writing posts any quicker I very much doubt but I think that's probably down to my inability to know when to stop typing rather than any shortcomings in the software. Maybe my next experiment ought to be seeing how well Gemini does as an editor.

I probably need one of those more than I need a research assistant anyway.

Notes on AI used in this post.

In this case, we're only interested in the pictures, both of which were generated within Copilot itself. That required me to log in with my Microsoft account, which disturbingly required just a single click and no details. I may need to purge my cache. The images themselves were created by  DallE 3, to whom Copilot delegates art duties.

The header is supposed to be the three named Chatbots, Copilot, Gemini And ChatGPT, relaxing in a bar after work. The full, somewhat overwrought prompt, which I failed to record for posterity, asked the AI to imagine it was the illustrator of a 1970s comic book, something which wasn't remotely evident in the resulting image. I also changed the image to landscape and re-envisioned it as a "block print", one of the offered options. 

The second picture is the result of the prompt "Here is a line taken from an article about AI: "What a bunch of fence-sitters! And how insufferably polite!" Please provide a sutable illustration. It can be in any style but must be a drawing or painting, not a photograph." I then altered the result in the same fashion as the first.

Both images are unmitigatedly tedious and uninspired. They absolutely look like they were created by AI, not least because each of them has issues with feet going in the wrong direction, alhough I guess we can't conclusively prove which way an AI's feet ought to go... 

I wouldn't use either of these images other than to make a point about the quality of Copilot itself in the context of this particular post.

Wash That Stain Away - The AI Way!

Back in January last year, when we first heard the surprising news that Microsoft wanted to buy Activision-Blizzard, certain voices suggested the deal might be closed by that summer. Mostly, though, the feeling seemed to be that it would be wrapped up by the end of the following financial year.

It's taking a bit longer than that. The deal is still up in the air more than fifteen months later. I confess to finding the whole process largely mystifying. Angry Onions tried to explain to me in the comment thread to a post over at TAGN, why so many national and regional authorities get to have a say in whether two commercial entities can merge. I understood his reasoning but I'm still somewhat hazy on what supranational mechanism could stop them if they wanted to do it anyway.

Polygon has an excellent, lucid and understandable timeline of progress to date, in which it's stated that "...the Competition and Markets Authority — unlike the FTC in the U.S. — still has the legal power to stop the merger from happening." Exactly how or why a regulatory authority in the United Kingdom should be able to derail a process involving two multinationals of American origin, while the American authorities themselves are apparently powerless to do so without the help of the courts is, I fear, something I'd probably have needed to study either law or economics at University, rather than English, to understand. 

Because I now seem to be incapable of thinking of a question without immediately feeling the need to Ask an AI (Great Gameshow idea there...) as soon as I finished typing that last paragraph I ran the problem past Bard, who gave me a very clear and unequivocal reply.

 I asked

If the CMA continues to block the proposed Microsoft acquisition of Activision-Blizzard, but all other relevant regulators approve it, can the deal go through?

Bard replied

"No, the deal cannot go through if the CMA continues to block it. The CMA is one of the regulators that must approve the deal, and its decision is final. If the CMA blocks the deal, it will not be able to go through, even if all other regulators approve it."

I didn't ask Bard for any background information but Bard really likes the sound of its own voice. It's like one of those annoying people you meet at bus stops who, when you ask them when  the bus is due, insist on telling you the entire history of public transport all the way back to the introduction of the steam-powered omnibus in 1833. (I googled that, just so you know it's not the sort of information I keep in my head.)

As Bard explains it

"The CMA is concerned that the deal would give Microsoft too much power in the cloud gaming market. Microsoft already has a strong position in the console gaming market, and the CMA is worried that it could use its power to stifle competition in the cloud gaming market.

Microsoft has tried to address the CMA's concerns by offering to license Activision games to competing cloud gaming platforms. However, the CMA has not been persuaded by this offer.

Microsoft has said that it is considering appealing the CMA's decision. However, it is not clear whether an appeal would be successful."

Not content with merely contextualizing, Bard then began to extemporize, shifting to the conditional to suggest some possible ramifications:

"If the deal is blocked, it would be a major setback for Microsoft. The acquisition of Activision Blizzard would have given Microsoft a major boost in the gaming industry. It would have also given Microsoft a significant foothold in the cloud gaming market."

Finally, in a move that both surprised and mildly disturbed me, Bard expressed what seems very much like an unprompted, personal opinion:

"The blocking of the deal would also be a setback for the gaming industry as a whole. The acquisition of Activision Blizzard would have created a more competitive gaming industry. It would have also given gamers more choices."

Would it, though? Are we sure about that? I mean, I might have expected something of the kind from Microsoft's Bing, given the issues involved, but from Google's pet AI?

If AIs are going to start acting as though they have opinions and personalities, it's going to open up whole new vistas of possibilities, not all of them appealing. Think of the possible PR disasters when AI-generated celebrities make public appearances! Surely one of the biggest attractions of artificial artists for their handlers is tractability? Reliability? Innocuousness? Okay, that's three attractions but you get the idea.

 If I'd authorised and paid a lot of money for an AI pop star, I'd like to think I could rely on them not to, oh, let's say, picking something purely at random, find themselves arraigned for imaginary acts of "public lewdness" or "firearm possession and assault", even if it was only in the court of public opinion. Then again, maybe it wouldn't be so terrible...

 

Those incidents, traumatic and embarrassing as they may have seemed for the stars involved at the time, became turning points in their lives and careers. As a direct result, George came out and continued to be a much-loved entertainer until his untimely death, while Adam received the help he needed with his mental health issues and returned to being... well, Adam Ant. It's still fine to like George Michael and about as fine as it ever was to like Adam Ant, who is, after all, the man who wrote both "Whip in my Valise" and "Goody Two Shoes", two wildly contradictory accounts of what has been widely assumed to be one life - his own.

 

Things don't always turn out that well, sadly. I'm sure we can all compile our own lists of artists, performers, entertainers, writers and musicians, the mere mention of whose name in polite conversation would be considered in the poorest of taste. To speak approvingly of their work would be positively unthinkable. 

Simon Reynolds posted a fine meditation on the way even the chance of learning something unsettling about one of your favorite artists makes searching for information about them a fraught process. It's a problem I run into almost every time I compile another music post. 

 

In the piece, Reynolds refers to a recently-published book on the subject; Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma by Claire Dederer. The book has four and a half stars on Amazon but it was rather poorly received by the Guardian's reviewer Rachel Cook, who called it "thin", "ill-researched" and "crude". I have a proof copy but I've yet to start on it so I'll reserve judgment. I will say I'm looking forward to reading it, though.

The core problem both the book and Simon's post address is whether, once you know awful things about awful people, it's possible to go on enjoying their not-at-all-awful work. And if it is possible, is it advisable? Or even permissible?

I am not going to answer that question here. Obviously. I'm not God. Or your spiritual adviser. Or your mother. Neither am I going to express a conviction or even, really, much of an opinion. What I am going to do is ask some more questions. Helpful, aren't I?

We might appear to have strayed some distance from the ostensible topic of this post, the Microsoft/Blizzard story, but trust me; there's a connection. Like many would-be consumers of Blizzard's not-all-that-varied portfolio of games, the revelations of the last few years have put something of a crimp in my willingness to participate, due to not wanting to be seen to be complicit. Put simply, I'd quite like to play World of Warcraft once in a while but I don't want to look like any more of a hypocrite than I usually do. I said I wouldn't play WoW until something changed and as far as I can see, nothing has.

I was rather counting on the Microsoft acquisition to draw a line under the acts of the old regime and allow me to at least imagine a fresh page had been turned. It's a fairly flimsy fig-leaf, given many of the purported perpetrators are probably still sitting at the same desks but I was raised as a Quaker and the concept of forgiveness, not to mention turning the other cheek, is a hard one to erase.

All of which leaves me wondering both where I'll be, morally, if the deal falls through and how, specifically, it will affect me in the future as a potential Blizzard customer living in the legal jurisdiction that derailed the whole thing. If I was Bobby Kotick (Euuuu!) I'd be tempted to cut the pipe to the U.K. and carry on without us. Can he do that? 

There's another aspect to all of this that occured to me while I was trying to find an AI model of Lana del Rey so I could hear what it would be like if she were to cover some of my favorite songs by people she's probably never heard of, let alone heard. Or even by me (Same thing, obviously.). I found myself wondering exactly where the fault-line of corruption lies.

Simon Reynolds uses the word "stain" to describe the way the misdeeds of a creator seep back through the timeline to discolor even the work they made before they did the things we revile them for now. He muses on how far back you'd need to go before listening to Michael Jackson might feel comfortable again; "In the aftermath of watching Leaving Neverland, I found myself speculating pointlessly: "well, probably he wasn’t abusing anyone circa Off The Wall. "  Thriller – hmmm.... gets a bit cloudier."

He doesn't mention it but there's another element to consider: how about cover versions? Hardly anyone is willing to admit to listening to Gary Glitter after the things he's done but damn, Rock `n` Roll Part 1  is still thrilling half a century later, isn't it? If we can't enjoy the original, what about the version The Undertones recorded for John Peel in 1980? 

Does running a song through the filter of another artist wash out that stain? Or does it just spread the taint to whoever was thoughtless enough to cover a monster in the first place? Does it make a difference if the cover was recorded before or after the news broke?

It's complicated but I can make it more so if you want. Sticking just to front-persons for a moment (The question of whether the drummer's indiscretions invalidate the reputation of the entire band being another difficult-to-parse moral poser.) what if you could replace the offending singer with an artificially generated artist of your choosing? Okay, maybe Rock 'n' Roll Pt 1 wouldn't be the best example, what with Gary contributing not much more than the occasional "Hey!", but if you were to strip his vocals out of, say, I'm The Leader of the Gang (I Am), and replace them with Freddy Mercury, who everyone loves...?

 

Tricky, isn't it? Especially when you factor in the moral quandaries over whether it's acceptable to have one artist cover another without the participation or even the consent of either. 

You can project this into gaming if you like feeling uncomfortable with all your choices. Getting back to Blizzard, if I were to try to sidestep my moral misgivings by signing up to a rogue server running a version of current content, assuming there are any, would I be clear of complicity because none of my time or money would benefit Blizzard? Better yet, maybe the sheer illegality of it would even count as an active strike against the evil empire itself! Let's stick it to The Man, right?

Or would I still be mired in moral misgivings by dint of my continuing enjoyment  of assets and concepts originally created under the same regime I purport to despise? At what remove does something become clean enough for the stain not to show any more? I mean, I drink Fanta sometimes. Doesn't make me a Nazi, does it?

 

Damn. I hit Godwin's law! Time to stop.

Work Night Grab Bag

Title says it all. Let's start with a couple of updates on the MicroBlizzard story. It's playing as "Microsoft buys Blizzard" in this part of the blogosphere because no-one around here much cares about Call of Duty or Candy Crush. Some coverage I've read from sources not obsessed with mmos, however, seems to think it was mainly King that Microsoft wanted, to further their penetration into both non-PC and console markets, not to mention China.

If so, it seems at least that the never-ending shenanigans at Blizzard opened the door for the opportunity Microsoft had been waiting for. An article at NME, a surprisingly reliable source of information on gaming these days, claims "Activision Blizzard misconduct allegations allegedly led to Microsoft acquisition."

The thing that seems to be excercising people more than anything about this whole affair is what's going to happen to Bobby Kotick. The obsession with the man seems positively unhealthy. I find it weird to think that a year or two ago I'd never even heard of him and now I'm seeing his face and hearing his name every single day. It'll be nice when that stops. Thanks to Syl for the link to the Twitter feed that claims Bobby's done for but no-one seems to agree when he'll be going, only that, as Wilhelm puts it, "he will get to walk away dragging a giant sack of money like the goblin he is."

If anyone needs further proof of Bobby's goblinhood, try this for size: as reported in the Wall Street Journal and repeated by Gamesindustry.biz, "Kotick had expressed interest in buying multiple video game press outlets in an attempt to adjust Activision Blizzard's perception in the news." Apparently he had his eye on both Kotaku and PCGamer. That's some serious Lex Luthor, super-villain strategy, right there.

Counter to the "Anyone but Kotick" narrative, I've seen quite a few people bemoaning the loss of their once-favorite developer to the grey, corporate maw that is Microsoft, to which I'd just like to say it could have been a lot worse. As the NME revealed (In the piece linked above.) "Activision apparently looked for other interested parties, including Facebook parent company Meta."

Forget playing World of Warcraft on XBox. How'd you like to have to sign up to Facebook before you log in? To Meta, sorry! Meta! 

Enugh of that. For now, anyway. I'm sure there'll be plenty more for month after month until the deal finally goes through. Which it will.

Time for some pretty pictures. I'm taking way more shots in Chimeraland than I can possibly use even in the long-ass, rambling posts I've been writing about my new favorite game. Here are some I couldn't squeeze in.

I think the idea is you seek out these big beasts and hunt them. They get flagged on the map in various ways. All the ones I've come across so far are non-hostile. It seems a bit off to just kill them because they're BIG. 

One of the huge waterspouts I mentioned yesterday. I'm hoping they suck you up and throw you across the map but as yet I haven't managed to get inside one to find out.

It's hard to tell from this shot but that's a giant sword stuck in a mountain. It makes the Claymore in Antonica look like a toothpick. I climbed all the way up there and someone had built a house next to it. Also, note the flurrying leaves in the foreground. Some of the visual effects in the game are gorgeous.

There are lovely touches all through the game. I keep noticing little details. When my fox plays her lute she floats off the ground. Don't know why, she just does. 

Also, the face of the loot is a reflective surface that acts as a mirror. At least I think that's what's happening in this shot. Or maybe it's painted that way? I'll have to look more closely next time she takes it out for a strum.

And finally, let's close with a couple more from that NME 100 to Watch list or whatever it was called. Essential Emerging Artists, that was it. Makes them sound a lot more important, doesn't it?

Nick Mono singing about how he really wants a girl like Effy Stonem, who's a character in Skins, a show I've never seen because I'm not eighteen any more, sad to say. Whoever wrote the squib for it in the list flags it "for fans of Easy Life and Rex Orange County" which, being quite keen on Rex, is why I picked it out. It sounds nothing like Rex Orange County, does it? More like any number of classic two-chord motoriks from everyone since Jonathan Richman. Reminded me of Brimful of Asha more than anything.

That one was NSFW by the way but no-one plays this stuff at work, do they? I like the guy in the comments with the inevitable "Here before this blows up" line. That was three months ago. It has just under two thousand views. I like it.

Do I detect a bit of a Camera Obscura vibe? I love the sax and I'm generally not much of a saxofan. I made that up, saxofan. Think it'll catch on?

And that'll do for now. Gotta save some for Sunday.

Who Had "Microsoft To Buy Blizzard" In Their Prediction Post For 2022, Then?

I'm going to do a proper post later today but I just came back from lunch to see this and I thought I might mention it...

Microsoft acquires Activision Blizzard

Or so GamesIndustry.biz has it. At first it looked like the ink wasn't quite dry on the deal yet, according to the sub-heading...

Sources tell Wall Street Journal a deal is near

but a bit further down in the piece we get confirmation direct from Microsoft...

"This acquisition will accelerate the growth in Microsoft's gaming business across mobile, PC, console and cloud and will provide building blocks for the metaverse'"

Because of course it's all about the metaverse.

The deal apparently went through at around $70b and makes Microsoft the world's third-largest gaming company, behind TenCent and Sony.

Bobby Kotick carries over...

"Microsoft has said that Activision Blizzard CEO Bobby Kotick will continue to serve in that position, but will report to Spencer after the deal closes"

Right. Sure. Of course he does.

And now we return you to your regularly scheduled programming, which is going to be, yes you guessed it, more about Chimeraland. All the stories that matter, here on Inventory Full.