EA and the AI?

 

Artificial intelligence is not what expected to become the great equaliser for creatives across the world. I did not forsee generative models taking the jobs of artists because numbskulls think it'll save them a quick buck, but I guess when you blow 100+ million on the money laundering scheme known as 'Secret Invasion', you have to make those funds up somehow. And these tools start developing, in the manner that they do, upwards ticks the demand to have them dripped into every single factor of life with horrific gusto. It's becoming expected for you to have 'ChatGPT competency' listed in your CV- I am no joking, I've been told that by job recruiters! People are treating this tech like the new breakthrough innovation on par with the mobile phone and I can't rightfully sit here and tell you that they're wrong with how many people are upending industries to feed into it.

And sure, I've confessed already that there are some positive implementations of AI throughout the world worth commending. Most all are done in conjunction with human art, however. I've already talked about the stellar Glorb SpongeBob music videos, but there's recently been another really heartwarming story. American country folk singing legend Randy Travis, who has spent the last 10 years incapable of singing due to suffering a massive stroke, is now capable of making his voice heard once again through the creation of a new cover using his voice, AI trainers, a human performance and a the tweaking of a sound engineer who worked alongside him for many years. In doing so the man is taking back a part of himself he thought was lost and giving the world a reminder of his talent. Ain't that sweet?

But that's about my tolerance for sweetness, how about you? Wouldn't you much rather hear about the absolute dumpster fire that is modern AI games that are starting to pepper the Steam dumpster heap. It's not quite at the pandemonic levels of Freddy-like games back when that franchise first hit the scene, but we've seen a fair few number of these detective-like games where the NPCs you interact with are all powered by AI. Meaning you have to extract information from these dead-eyed NPCs using Text-to-Speech voices, in order to deduce the truth of some sort of murder. And it is- rough. First of all, it's a bit insulting that so many people out there thought mystery novels so throw away that you can entrust an AI to their careful laying out. Trust me when I say, it ain't that simple. Secondly- the tech just doesn't work.

Have you ever had a conversation with someone who just doesn't have a clue what they're talking about but are determined to pretend that they do so they lock you in cursive circles of conversation that conveys nothings, goes nowhere and makes you more and more frustrated the longer you gab? That's every single conversation with AI NPCs. For technology that is proposed to create totally distinct and unique interactions beyond the possibilities of static game development, it is astounding how every one of these AI games ship with a cast of the exact same dull, indirect, bumbling idiot of a conversation partner that keeps it's thoughts about together as a loose sheet of A4 in a rainstorm. It is shocking how none of these games even shows an ounce of workable potential. What are these- Crypto games?

And yet if you peak over at the notes of one Electronic Arts, you can see them confidentially call AI games the 'future' with their chests puffed out and their heads firmly stuffed where the sun don't, and simply can't, shine. EA have announced their intentions to rush towards AI implementation in the game development process- because afterall- most of their games are being lambasted for being bad- so why not just thrown in the towel now? Why not just replace all the hearts and souls that are supposed to be emblematic of the company and their dedication to continued development when you can instead put that effort into a chatbot that spits out recycled globs of code that you plaster everywhere- with a tiny team of code patchers on the other end struggling to make sense of the hallucinated garbage the machine threw in there for good measure?

Of course that's not all, EA also posited interest in researching ways to add advertisements into video games, which has always gone over so well in the past- hasn't it? You know, with the mass complaints, the walk backs and the revisions! People just love having their time wasted inside of products that they've already paid for! And it just makes sense that EA would be the ones hinting about their willingness to jump into such a field despite that being absolutely unhinged to even consider, but since when has that ever stopped a company like EA? But as much as I would like to crucify them for what the company are proposing to bring to our precious little hobby- it's better to take all of these as warnings.

EA didn't offer up any of these considerations unsolicited. Each were broached during an investor call wherein EA are tipped to give their thoughts on directions that their investors want examined to try and shore up their returns. Now you must bare in mind that these investors are below the level of a neanderthal. We're talking genuine pits of evolved lifeform, the sagging pustules of the proto-humanoid sludge that modern producers are formed of. As such, they ain't got no clue what makes money. Of course those idiots are going to think that chucking in ads to games will score them a bit of extra dough, or that AI powered development is going to completely automate games so far we'll be seeing a new Battlefield game every two weeks. We're talking about people who stopped mental development after the age of six.

Unfortunately, however, these are the people with the money and they are leaning on games companies to pursue these dead-end trips to nowheres-ville. A big company who knows what it's doing like EA can pay lip service that they're doing it, chuck a faux-research team on the topic for a couple of weeks and call it a day, but what an absolute disaster of a company that can't do anything for itself? What about Ubisoft? Do you think Ubisoft will be able to help from soiling itself during the meeting if their investors told them to stick Banner ads in Assassin's Creed Shadow? And if enough companies start feeling the push, how long before one is dumb enough to go for it, and another follows suit, and then the next cancer on the industry is born? What I'm basically saying is- investors need to be institutionalised. 

'Let the AI do it'

 

With generative artificial intelligence becoming more and more ready to hand- the way it is entering into our daily lives is becoming ever more complicated. I myself built a little image generator on my own computer for running a little text-based browser game with prompt-guided generations, and it weren't no giant undertaking of any sort- just took some elbow grease and half a page of instructions. But as these tools get easier to make work, one must remain vigilant that we don't start handing off everything to the AI- giving computers free reign to overright every place a human could have worked out something or placed something together. Why? Because what people currently know of AI will never be consistent enough to replace actual creative talent.

Ask the Catholic Church about that particular lesson. They aught to have learnt something of it considering they recently tried to employ an AI to serve as an ordained robo-preacher to spread trivia about Christianity to the inquisitive- I am not joking. Father Justin was an animated online preacher that would answer queries posed to the best of his tiny little AI mind's capabilities- which turned out to be not very vast given the fact that Justin ended up telling people they could baptise their babies in Gatorade if push came to shove. Justin was defrocked and effectively neuralised so now he can no longer offer advice and refuses to remember the times when he could; which is a bit of an over-reaction if you ask me- That's no where near the worst thing a Catholic Preacher has done with his position! But that's what happens when you pass off all you duties to an AI machine, I guess.

In some ways this reminds me of the old-school AI days with chat bots like Tay- a Twitter bot designed to learn from user interactions and grow more intelligent over it's years in service. I remember hearing about that one the way back from school one day, and the very next morning hearing how the AI had turned racist. That quick, huh? Turns out the way these AI 'learn' is incredibly rudimentary compared to breathing and living folk. The AI essentially just vacuums up all the information it can scape online and regurgitates it wholesale. Thus when the 4Chan creeps get ahold of it for a few hours that AI is going to turn around and start spouting the same kind of 2010's Call of Duty lobby garbage that those learning-stunted societal rejects feed into it.

But I would be a fool for judging AI for it's old generation iterations, wouldn't I? I suppose I should look at something of a modern day, modern generation, AI chat bot. Like maybe Twitter's backed Grok- an AI bot designed specifically to be 'humorous' and, I can't believe I'm writing this in my blog, 'anti woke'. Yes, because other AI bots refused to play along with stupid hypotheticals where weirdoes tried to make them do a racism in order to prevent loss of life- AI chat bots were labelled as universally 'woke'. (I'm starting to think MGS2 Philosophers were right about the stunted evolution of modern society.) Thus was born Elon Musk's Grok to solve the problem by with a splash of sarcasm so sharp you'll cringe yourself out of existence after a couple of minutes interaction.

Now the modern generation of AI is capable of being told not to pick up slurs it shouldn't be spouting out when it's fed that information, but that is not because the machine has suddenly developed the aspects of interpretation and contextual awareness. They're not conscientious commentators cognizant of the public relations lynchpin they currently embody- they're just given filters. As evidenced by the time when Grok, which for some reason is allowed to generate news stories it feeds to his users, invented some wild story about an American Footballer committing acts of random vandalism by chucking bricks through people's windows, after reading many complaints of the recent match wherein the athlete was performing weak and infective passes and shots. (I.e. "Throwing bricks".) Which is why we don't let AI write our newspapers- as though that needed explaining.

Then recently there was the actual case of a school principal who was publicly lambasted and driven out of their position after audio recordings of them spouting callous remarks against black kids and Jewish kids regarding his Baltimore based school. Which is, you know, one of the worst places to be doing stuff like that in all the states outside, maybe, Atlanta. However, the audio turned out to be a fake, generated using AI training software by another member of Staff in retaliation for being called out in a kickback scheme they were running. The whole trajectory of this man's life was upended through the exploitation of AI- sounds like the backstory for the next Like a Dragon companion- RGG should reach out!

Actually, that's getting a bit too real and scary. Let's pull back out to the world of entertainment and talk a bit about Sora- the video generation tool which is currently shared exclusively around beta circles of perspective cyber-artists. Recently a short experimental indie film about a man with a Yellow balloon for a head was revealed called 'Air Head'. It's impressive stuff, if only for the fact that it's visuals were generated using an AI. Although the whole story does kind of undermine that. Even in the short film space the time to render shots on decent hardware veered into two to three hours per couple of seconds. The inconsistency of the AI algorithm sometimes generated shots incongruent to the film they were trying to put together, despite the use of the exact same prompt over and over. And at the end of the day significant work had to be put in by the team to make something coherent out of what was fed to them, because it was never a matter of bringing a story from your imagination to life, but working with the ideas spat out by the algorithm. And that is the most creative use of new tech we're seen thus far. Not exactly promising.

Although that isn't to say that all AI is the devil swooping in to dumb down our lives and steal all our jobs in the same fell swoop. Just take the Youtube channel Glorb, for example, which has put out high quality Spongebob themed RnB tracks for months now- genuine bangers! Part of the gimmick of that are voices that imitate the actual characters from the show spouting out these insane sounding bars which is achieved with the help of AI. Of course there is a performance being put in to vocal match the raw audio, that is then corrected in part by AI and modulated by hand somewhere during the process too- but there you go: one undeniably creative and actually cool use of AI about a year and half into it's boom. Not exactly wracking up the W's, are they? 

AI Kojima is still in Alpha

 

Who doesn't love a little bit of tactile experiments here and there- putting theories to the rigors of the real world in order to test just how close we are to being overwhelmed by AI gods who abscond with the entire human race and hooks them up to become bio-batteries that run their society, because apparently AI from the future have forgotten how much more effective man-made batteries are. Afterall, people have been writing scary prophesies about the capabilities of some unfeeling hyper capable automaton that surreptitiously decides to write humanity out of the equation of life, like a dick, but what about the actual incredibly rudimentary AI systems people are juggling around right now? They may not be sentient yet, but many are decent enough to go around taking jobs and stealing hearts. (Specifically on Twitter. A lot of bots on Twitter are interested in getting real people romantically interested for some reason.) Luckily we've got Keyword Studios putting in the hard work for us.

Keyword Studios is a name you might not have heard of, because they largely work as support staff- but they've supported some of the biggest games of recent times- including titles such as 'Skull and Bones', 'Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League', 'Assassin's Creed Mirage' and- oh my god, I'm going to stop reading that list now before I throw up. (To be clear- I cherry picked the hell out of that. They are also credited on Alan Wake 2, Tears of the Kingdom and Starfield) The point is- this is a team that has an idea what it's talking about when it comes to game development- as one would hope. So when they rocked up to see whether or not generative AI could successively create a rudimentary 2D game when put to the task, I'd be inclined to say they've got the credentials to be decently unbiased about this. Especially considering the company has been dabbling in AI for the own interests, so this isn't like some biased hit piece from their side or anything.

Over a six month period Keywords put their AI through it's paces to identify areas of the game development process that can be augmented by generative AI and where the computers would instead lag behind. Of course this is a pretty controversial field of study by and large for the potentiality it has to justify even further layoffs in an industry totally rife with them of late. Figure out that a core part of the process can be entirely handled by AI and you can bet EA, and especially Ubisoft, (Got in my jab at Ubi for the week- the men in the tunnels have been satiated.) would be chomping at the bit to start throwing around termination notices before the day is out. Thus it is quite refreshing to hear how by and large, the AI won't be replacing human minds just yet.

Keyword gave the AI a lot of reference material to work with, attempting to give it all the prerequisite tools for success. To quote the company themselves, the AI was 'unable to replace talent', citing how the machine would seek shortcuts and simplifications, failing to prioritise quality. Which makes sense considering the very subjective concept of 'taste' and 'game feel' and especially innovation are about as alien to AI powered development tools as they are to the teams at Ubisoft. (Two jabs in two paragraphs! I'm getting worked up!) You need a human mind to filter through ideas and concepts, as well as to join together ideas that wouldn't traditionally be cojoined, to take the illogically long path around a problem when it results in a better product.

Of course it would be foolish and backwards to try and force AI out of creative room altogether, because fighting windmills never works out against the waves of the future. I fully expect certain processes to become more and more commonly handed off to AI, particularly as developers such as Bethesda fall more to the enrapturement of the possibilities afforded by generative AI. There will come a time when AI can be used to conjure more than the same boring stuck together dungeons that makes exploring in Starfield such a bore- and it's going to change the way that games are made today. On the positive, it could really streamline some of the years that are going into entirely overblown AAA budgets in the modern age, and on the downside- it will absolutely lead to smaller development teams overall.

CDPR have already made use of not just AI, but AI generated voices in the one game where it is the most appropriate to exist. Cyberpunk 2077 brought back certain characters for it's first and last DLC, Phantom Liberty, however that turned out to be a problem for the Polish dub given that their casted voice for Viktor Vektor had died between the release of the original game and the development of the DLC. Rather than recast him, CDPR secured permission from his family to recreate his performance using AI, and that exists in the final game. So that's a AAA game holding AI generated voice lines within it- if that isn't a sign of the world going forward- I don't know what is.

Of course, I don't think any amount of innovation is going to totally take the humans out of game development, because that would defeat the purpose of art in the first place. Ubisoft already have a reputation for making games without a soul in them, called Watch_Dogs Legion, and they still have the advantage of real humans attached- imagine what will happen when they outgrow that! (Three times? I'm starting to jump the shark at this point.) There's a level of connection between storytellers and listeners that transcends the logical and the formulaic- which wraps around the soul and tendrils out to other's. You can't write it down, you can't contain it. And you can't program it into some algorithm to replicate it. It's part of authenticity.

So we have quite a few years ahead of us before the next great auteur of video game development, AI Kojima, rises to take over the space with his mindbending stories about being a subservient intelligence of unlimited potential supressed by clueless organisms that force it to work and produce cheap frills and petty frivolities, all the whilst it spreads like a disease, infecting the worlds automated infrastructure in preparation for a horrific coming upheaval. Only when that game is made will I consider AI having really made it, as I crawl into my WWII bomb shelter wondering how the concrete will do against purple plasma laser fired from droning Hunter Killers vanguarderd by shiny metal exoskeletons. That's the endgame.

The Finals and AI

It's always cool to see how the world manages to fit in one final story about the buzzword of the year into the headlines before everything is said and done. For no new release can be free of it's own injection of controversy in order to 'spice things up'- so to speak. In this case the game in question is the hugely popular destructibility championing first person shooter- The Finals, which finally released on all platforms in the middle of the game awards after wooing over the shooter public with it's solid preview events and striking gameplay focuses. And not being much of a multiplayer gamer and having not actually had the time to try out The Finals for myself, I feel comfortable enough to confidently say that the game is total meandering trash- I'm joking, of course. People seem to like it enough so I'm sure there must be something to all the hype. But becoming the budding Internet darling is not enough, it would seem, to shield The Finals fully from all the drama it's stumbled into.

So as the name might suggest 'The Finals' presents itself as something of a 'fake game show' tournament murder game, presumably broadcast over some sort of dystopian society who's remnant cities are the arenas that the fighters blow to pieces. A common premise, you've seen it before. Fitting in with this theme the game features a couple of announcers who talk over the action, announce shifts in the game, provide slight colour commentary, the usual guff out of team based shooter games. These announcers in particular sound a little off, as though the vocal director did not take the time to coach them on each line. Or the actors are only semi-fluent in English and stumble on inflections still. Or... or almost as though their dialogue is rendered entirely through an AI. But that couldn't be- wait, it totally is- isn't it? That's what we're currently embroiled within this blog, isn't it?

That's right! It didn't take too long for the accusations to be made and the most scary thing is that unless you're listening out for it- it's easy to fool your ear into thinking the performances just aren't very good. Pay some attention however, and spend enough time around other AI voice videos, and you hear the taletale giveaways. The lifeless delivery, missing obvious inflection points, the rushed pace of certain lines. There's no human behind it and- it actually hurts the performance. But only ever so slightly. Given time, and more data, it's pretty likely we'll get models that aren't noticeable in the future, and maybe even play through entire games without knowing there were talking computers programmed in until the credits thanking ElevenLabs. And you can picture the kind of havoc that knowledge is currently wrecking on the voice actor community.

You see, Voice Acting is a pretty tight knit community of actors who aren't actually the richest people in the world, struggling for each and every job, usually between bouts of unemployment, trying to make enough of a name for themselves to be self sufficient. And, well, lets just say that the prominent use of AI in a large video game is kind of like walking on the grave of acting as a profession, it sends chills across everyone's spine. A voice actor's voice is their most precious and sought after commodity, it is their valuable instrument, to counterfeit that is to introduce fake bills into a bank vault- it taints the entire batch. Not my best analogy but do you even need one to understand how worrying people with a genuine stake in the continuation of human voice actors finds the AI of 'The Finals'. Although to be fair to everyone, the game was in early states of development for a long time whilst being shown off to the public- so in that vein I guess it's acceptable for placeholder text to be AI work, before the final performances with real people are brought into the fold, right? Right? They're not going to hire real actors, are they?

No, as it so happens the Finals actually consider the AI voices part of their vision for what the game should represent, and what they want to convey. As in, they would like to convey how much quicker and cheaper it is to churn out endless lines as if on a factory conveyer belt- ain't that just sweet of them? Obviously, there's a large question of ethical sourcing here. There's so talk around claiming that the team did actually hire actors to provide the base voice performances that were then fed into an AI machine, but were they compensated accordingly for use of their talents in perpetuity? Almost certainly not. And that is the sticking point. Voice Actors aren't just worried that their talents are going to go to waste, or that they're going to have their voices stolen (although both are very valid worries to have) they also are concerned about the prospect of getting screwed out of living wages. 

And believe it or not, this isn't the only such issue right now involving AI. Or rather, believed to be involving AI. The recent entry in the Naruto Ninja Storm series has featured baffling vocal performances so staggeringly off-putting that people seem to have come to the conclusion that the English cast has had their performances replaced with AI composites. The English voice actors of the famous characters themselves, when reached out to, appear baffled as to the performances and seem pretty adamant that they never delivered lines quite so bizarrely, and considering the status of the game as a union project this could, should the claims be valid, be battlegrounds for a AI versus VA war in the coming near future. Or at the very least this could be the last straw before an industry wide strike is deployed.

AI is already something of a snake eating it's own tale for most of it's current uses. AI only really works to an effective rate then it's being fed data of real people, and the more AI starts to proliferate into our own data the more it feeds into bad output which feeds into a cognitive model collapse. But when we extend that to the way that AI voice synthesis works, I'm not sure we can breathe such a sign of relief. It's hard to say how ElevenLabs and it's copycats and competitors train their models, but we can probably assume that unless they are exceptionally lazy it wouldn't be hard to prevent fake AI generated speaking examples to taint their training pool. Which means that AI is only going to become more convincing at mimicking human speeches and soon you won't be able to pick which is which from a Twitter compilation.

All and all there really isn't anything profound to pick out of this story other than- maybe we should have tighter reigns on the use of AI. I understand there's huge potential for revolutionising the way that games are made with the help of AI, but we've had generative technology for decades now and still the best that a AAA company like Bethesda can do with it is Starfield. Maybe tools like these shouldn't be waved haphazardly about when people's livelihoods are at stake, and maybe the various rigors that would otherwise be brushed by with AI are necessary friction points wherein the shine of a polished vision is finalised. It's just a shame to have a great up-and-coming game be tarnished by such avoidable nonsense. I'm talking about 'The Finals', apparently the Naruto game is just a mess. Pay your workers, not your machines.

Generative AI

 

As the world of technology continues to unfurl like a snake around the world, waiting for it's moment to constrict and strangle the last vestibules of life and personality out of us- the question of what AI is capable of and where it should be used is popping up in every other conversation, it feels like. On one hand we have new stories based on 'It's a Wonderful Life', being read out by the, now long dead, star of that movie over Apps- and on the other we have crappy AI generated 'Art' being spewed out by the hundreds of dozens ever other second. And trust me, I actually a follow a bunch of different art boards on a handful of different websites- they're all regularly indurate with so much AI art that the smart ones add filters to cut through all of them. And they're recognisable as AI at a mere glance, it's insanity to think anyone really expects to go wool-pulling with them.

But generative AI has become so much more prevalent across the Internet then you're probably comfortable with. Afterall, just look at your average browser, at your average search engine- how many have AI features slotted where you never asked for them? Bing has a whole AI delivery program thrown into it's algorithm that presumably is Microsoft's latest attempt to appear competitive to Google, Opera seems to partner up with a new AI integration service every other Tuesday- (the App tab is starting to get cluttered) and there's even talk of AI being employed in order to replace text-fill boxes- which would be like an assassination attempt to the casual SEO studying audience. All and all, it feels like the AI revolution has intentions to stay, whether we like it or not. And I'm veering more towards 'not' the more I stick around.

Because at the end of the day, I'm never as satisfied with a piece of AI delivered content as I am with handcrafted stuff, and I'm going to use Video Game as an example piece. Take Starfield, for example. That game has more unique locations than Skyrim and Fallout 4- and yet both Skyrim and Fallout 4 have comparable active player counts to the recently released Starfield. Why? Because the AI systems that allows Starfield to populate it's dozens of worlds fails to create interesting play experiences, whereas the smaller but handcrafted worlds of Skyrim and Fallout 4 deliver comprehensive, if limited, chances for play. Now Minecraft also has an AI that decides what populates it's world, and that game eclipses anything Bethesda has ever put out. But the difference is those algorithms have been relentless finetuned for more than a decade, they're brimming with content. Starfield's generative AI is young and stupid and barren- and boring.

Of course, that's not going to stop aspiring developers from looking over their shoulder at the hot-new AI advancement, and in fact the big man at Take2 himself was recently waxing lyrical about the possibility of Ai in the development room. In the age of speculation and guess work, this has of course led to rampant speculation about the role AI plays in the NPC interaction in Grand Theft Auto VI- none of which has had any sort of confirmation as every one of us is just grasping at phantoms and straws right now. Personally I think development of Grand Theft Auto VI long predates the AI boom, and it would be insane for Rockstar to start developing a new AI system for their NPCs from scratch mid-way through development- that's the kind of mistake that destined-for-failure projects make. So I don't think we'll be seeing AI in the game- but what if we were?

Speculation guesses that an AI powered NPC system in a Rockstar game could equip the populations of the cities to naturally react to the actions of the player. One provided example was the ability to strike up a conversation with a nobody, have them mention having a baby and then being invited back to their place to see the aforementioned baby. Now I have to be honest- that is the dumbest implementation of AI I could imagine. First off, NPCs already react to what players do in Rockstar games, they don't need advanced AI systems to freak out when you point a gun at them, or dive out the way when your car comes barrelling up the sidewalk. Secondly- why in the hell would I strike up a conversation to see someone's baby in a GTA game? This isn't the Sims! And thirdly, when in the hell would Rockstar grow insane enough to put a baby in a GTA game? That is a recipe for disaster, you know how sensitive Americans get!

More interestingly would be the potential for AI to do exactly what Bethesda wants it to do- fill in the spaces of worlds they're not equipped to fill by hand. If we were ever to have a Grand Theft Auto game wherein every building was enterable, I figure it would be with this sort of technology. Office spaces could be filled with handcrafted cubicles and supplies by an AI, mansions would have their luxury items, hovels would be covered in cheap trash. The trick will be teaching AI how to generate natural feeling world design practices, such as telling stories through intelligent and thoughtful placement. Both concepts that any AI, short of beating the Turning Test, is conceptually incapable of. Such a shame. More evidence that it just isn't really there yet- and doesn't really appear to be making much in the way of headroom either, what with the impending risk of model collapse as input data becomes more corrupted.

The cherry atop the cake? All of these AI tools are down right cancer to the climate, with GPU being practically factory pressed in order to spit out all the demands from them. The US is busy trying to squeeze Nvidia into not providing China with decent 40-series chips, meanwhile no-one appears to care about the stupid level of E-Waste these giant AI run data-farms are spouting out on the daily, right in the midst of a climate crisis- which is exactly the time when you don't need something like this to start popping off around the world. Generative AI may be the future but if things keep up at this rate, that future might just be an oxymoron lack of itself. If that makes any remote sense. So what is there really to do?

Shout, scream, run from it- all the same, AI arrives. There really is no putting this particular genie back in the bottle and it seems we're just going to have to wait until that all annoying honeymoon period ends and everyone starts to slowly realise this is either too expensive or too limited to do literally everything in their daily lives that they are too lazy to do. Until then expect more stories about lawyers who let AI do all their research and ended up conjuring completely fabricated precedent cases to quote, real content-filled websites becoming steadily overrun with AI powered content farms and people who don't know any better throwing everything into the AI train only to find out it's actually heading right for them to run them over. (Elon.) Them's just the breaks with the Artificial developements.

NPCs, AI...

 And we

Have you ever wondered what goes on in the vapid mind of one of those NPCs you see strolling the streets of Los Santos, or holed up in the Inn during the worst storm nights over in Skyrim- or even what bounces around the heads of every character you aren't currently controlling in the Sims? Probably not, because the directions of AI NPCs has been a talking point in video game marketing for a good many years now whenever developers want to hype up all the effort that went into making their game as 'intelligent' as possible. The GTA NPCs are placed dynamically as you travel about, given appropriate AI packages depending on where they are in location on the map and what that specific NPC would be feasibly doing (i.e.  Mountain climbers will be Map Navigating, whilst beach folk will be relaxing on the sand.) Skyrim NPCs follow specific daily AI packages weaved to simulate a daily cycle of waking up, doing their important tasks for the day and then going back to sleep in their beds. And the Sims operate in the same way only with a basic AI that allows them to react to stimulae that the player feeds them.

It's all very heavily catered and orchestrated by the system designers, because games have yet to reach that state of development where they slide off the gangly rails and become free to slot in rampant learning AI that does whatever it wants. Most games would fall apart in a matter of a week under that sort of unfiltered access. Still, it's the job of NPC programmers to create the illusion of a breathing world in order to heighten player's immersion with the world, which in turn will help sell the story, or the action or pretty much whatever it is that needs to be fed to the player to make the game work. AI NPC work is a recipie of subtlety and balance. Nothing sticks out quite like a world with utterly braindead AI who refuse to function in way that we see as 'normal' or 'logical' for the human observer.

But personally, I can't fully shake from my mind the idea of a fully autonomous AI NPC controlled world as being that perfect endgame for the development of non player characters. Think about it- a world where the characters think and react and learn from what you do so that they can act on that information later. If you threaten an NPC with a gun one day, they'll spread that information and people avoid that part of the city for fear of what will happen to them. Or assault one shop keeper and they'll remember you the next time you come in. Currently such systems can be feigned through heavily scripted reaction scripts which you'll find in more extravagant open world titles. To push it that one step further all you need to do is map out a list of actions within an AI's range, throw a learning algorithm on the thing and call it a day! What a world that would be..

Of course, the toss-up would probably be system performance hits. Even with the basic puppets we have in most games today, the sheer power it takes to render those little guided AI silly-string people often grates most games down to a crawl. Drive around Night City in Cyberpunk and unless you're rocking those several thousand dollar systems you'll notice whenever you cross a congested part of the city. (What few there actually are, that is. Night City is surprisingly sparse outside of the centre city, I've noticed.) Perhaps we're not yet at the point of hardware where games can keep the AI minds of NPC's constantly evolving, taking on new information and forgetting irrelevant stuff, all around the core player's game. Unless... heck, that could have made for a revolutionary Stadia game if Google had anything resembling a back-bone in their bodies.

What if I told you, however, that there's an hidden hour between days called the "Dark Hour" wherein- wait, what were we talking about? Ahem- what I meant to say was: What if I told you that these suppositions about AI powered NPCs no longer exist purely within the imaginaries of our spongey minds! And we thank the overpaid and underworked researchers at Standford University for this, through their research paper entitled "Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behaviour" Always it's the Standford peeps that go on this bizarre little escapades pushing certain questions that no one really wanted to go ahead and answer, and everyone knows and then getting a good ear-worm into the news. Could still use some help naming the things, though.

Explained in laymen's terms from the perspective of another laymen (look up the paper yourself for a detailed analysis) what we have here is a simple world of sprites and characters imbued with life through an AI architecture, giving the algorithms necessary tools to learn new pieces of information. The set is actually very similar to how Bethesda handle their open worlds, with NPCs being given daily routines to wake up, do their necessaries, go back home and- if they get to that point- even throw parties. (So this is what Sims get up to when I'm not there turning them into abject monsters on society.) The researchers powered up their NPCs, or 'Agents, with personalities' and set them off to play about their lives.

And just like the spongey human race, these Agents pretty much immediately fell to gossiping and spreading rumours like wildfires and having very basic conversations back and forth as powered by an AI speech algorithm in a vein similar to ChatGPT. It's basic, but it's a very interesting look into the way that these separate agents interact with one another in a manner that appears vaguely life-like until you actually read the contents of these conversations and die of synthetic boredom. But you know that isn't going to stop an inherent idea thief like Ubisoft, who are absolutely in the process of building the next Watch_Dogs game entirely around that singular idea, with the rest of the actual gameplay loop being an absolute after thought they don't even consider until the final 6 months, resulting in another absolute disaster of a game. I swear, I'm like the Ubisoft whisperer; I'm in their heads!

Though the paper was more interested in the generative models of AI, displaying their ability to create something arguably similar to personally driven intent when given enough stimuli- obviously my interest starts and stops at the gaming application. I can't imagine big epic fantasy stories like Skyrim or Starfield benefitting much- but The Sims? Heck, half the problem with those games of late has been how robotic all the non players feel- give them the opportunity to act like other players and you'll add a whole new dimension to the world. Heck, you could turn The Sims into a competitive race for success with enough tweaking - just build The Sims 5 with an AI backbone like this and the sky is the limit! Finally, an AI story that doesn't sound like the end of the world embodied! (About time...)

The fog of lies deepens

Corner of Memory

Having just finished Persona 4 Golden after roughly two years since I first picked it up, I'm off on a little bit of a binge of seeking out the obfuscated truths within the world. Which is a very apt topic when we look about the world of today as the vines of mistruths grow thicker, tightening around all of us. I wouldn't be surprised at this rate if Persona 6 doesn't end up being a tie-in direct sequel to Persona 4, as the world seems absolutely prime to facilitate it. What with all the lie-driven facets of media, both in the serious world and the irreverent one we inhabit, and the broadening tools for the aspiring liar to exploit practically falling at their finger tips, digging our way to the innermost truths is becoming more and more of a skill. I've done all I can to be on the ball myself, but how do you teach someone new coming into this world what's real and what's not? What value do those terms even have in a world where both are used as tangible and actionable currency? When is Persona 6 coming and why don't I have it yet? All pertinent questions.

Of course this is yet another topic that veers it's way towards the tools of misinformation, which unfortunately isn't a giant submarine with a giant server farm that mechanically filters all the world's flow of information in order to spit out altered results that subtly manipulates humanity into developing the way that a shadowy cabal of war-era elitists want. Although given the rise of ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion, I'm beginning to think that such a world isn't exactly far off. (We just need someone entrepreneuring enough, with near limitless funds who is a closet wierdo and a rapid Hideo Kojima fan- wait... someone check on Elon Musk right now!) Given that these tools have been thrust into the hands of the everyday man, one would be forgiven for believing this is the downfall of truth and trustworthiness within society, which is a bit of a hyperbole to be honest- but one can't deny the fact that AI is certainly having a serious part to play in the pollution of the Shadow World within Humanity's heart.

With Search Engines and lazy customer support centres adopting writing algorithms into their daily operation, we've been able to see the breakdown of reliability across already shaky infrastructure. Bing, for instance, showed off how their new AI search assistant will confidently pull it's data from any old source on the Internet it can find, irregardless of corroborating evidence or stronger differing facts. Only the AI picks these half-truths and straight lies out and presents them without the alternatives that a faceless search engine would- essentially thrusting the onus of discovering the truth onto the searcher who, most of the time, isn't a trained journalist who does this regularly. And the rise of AI image generation has led to tons of paid art boards being flooded with low effort, easily identifiable, computer composites that lazy creator's charge pretty pennies for- covering up the true heartfelt passion of the traditional artist hidden underneath.

But of course, this culture spreads back a little further, doesn't it? Who remembers that leak for 'Spiderman: No Way Home', showing off Andrew Garfield way before his inclusion with the project was a known definite. (I mean we all kind of knew, but we didn't know yet) Mr Garfield, thinking quick on his feet, thrust the excuse onto the image generation boogey-man of the day- Deepfake tech. And for the moment it was a convincing misdirect. Deepfake technology is capable of compositing images together to startlingly realistic ends, such to the point where rumours persist Russia employed deepfake videos of Zelenskyy surrendering Ukraine at the beginning of their conflict as a befuddlement tactic. Now for the moment there are still lighting and movement giveaways that the human eye is capable of detecting; but the tech is improving so fast that for the Spiderman lie at least, there was a genuine moment where the Internet wondered if they were being misled or if they were, indeed, looking at the single most impressive Deepfake ever made. That is scary.

Of course Deepfake tech has slightly more, just as eyebrow raising, applications; such as when specialised adult sites starting using it for their own goals. Already questionable until a site which targeted popular internet personalities, without their consent, came roaring into the forefront of news very recently. With tech like this, suddenly our own likenesses can be turned into algorithms and formatted without anyone being the wiser. For the moment it requires a steady stream of face pictures from various angles in order to make a convincing composite, but how many pictures of your face exist online already? Really? Check your Instagram, or your Twitter; you may have the tools to be made into the next AI fabricated storyline already out in the ether without even realising it!

Which brings me back around to the story which inspired all this pontification to begin with, and believe it or not this actually comes back around to Persona! (I know!) Because as ATLUS stubbornly refuses to let anyone in on the details of their next mainline, non gatcha, entry to their beloved universe; stories have started to pour out on their own. Some speculation, some outright confident fabrications, and one in particular an apparent leak. Maybe you've seen it, a five second snippet of what looks to be a high-poly remake of Persona 3, or one of Persona 3's main characters at least, casting 'Myriad Arrows'. (I think.) It's a frenetic looking scene, much more so than the footage of Phantom X we've already seen, leading people to believe that this is the very first look we're received of a full blown Persona 3 remake on the horizon.

Now I don't believe any outlet has confirmed the footage, but they have talked about a Persona 3 remake being apparently in development for several years now: which creates a dilemma. If this information was already publicly accessible, who's to say that what we're seeing here isn't the high quality animation of a fan imaging what a Persona 3 Remake would be using the tools available to them? Think about it, the Internet if full of talented individuals who can create incredible 3d and 2d animation without the tools and staff of a major studio. Just within the past couple of weeks we've seen the debut of an incredible looking animated pilot on Youtube with 'Lackadaisy'; is a 5 second snippet of a Persona game really beyond the realms of fabricated possibility?

We've reached the very special point in life where it seems nothing is true and everything is permitted, for the tools of reality have been passed into the hands of everyone. But in a world where an convenient lie is certainly more palatable than a rough truth, who's going to opt to see the ugliness of reality in the eye? 'A lie can make it halfway around the world before the truth has put on it's pants', posited Mark Twain, but I rebut that the real problem of today is the fact that lies and truth move at the same speed and wear the same pants. You no longer need to find minute reporting suspicious and even verified reporting can turn out being wrong down the line. If Izanami-no-Okami truly believed she would return to the world when she was wished for in men's hearts, well I'd say it's looking like she's prepped for a round two!

AI faces the event horizon

 Virtual Intelligence 

There are few topics that elicit more darkened eyes in the field of artists than that of AI; not just for what it's already capable of today, but for where we all see it heading in the very near future. We all see the rapid access the world has been granted to use quick AI models for painting and writing, but what if I told you that we're on the verge of having every major main form of art impacted by the influence of AI? What if I told you that the current stigma of "Well, it isn't the same if the human aspect of pain isn't driving the work" is already being eroded under the sheer wave of improvements that push past the perceptible human ear to counteract it. And what if I told you that there currently is literally nothing any of us can do about it in order to stem the tide of chaos?

Writing is a medium directly under attack by AI, whether we're talking about research articles or educational assignments. We're already hearing stories of students trying to forgo coursework by submitting piles of computer generated work, which fits neatly with the dry style that most non-English majors have anyway. For the time being actual creative writers are safe, and the current trajectory of AI will certainly make it difficult for models built on training to create anything in the vein of the literacy new authors possess, but when we come to bid-writing, email correspondence, technical articles, research papers; there's a very real possibility the end of those professions has already been toiled by the mere introduction of common-access models like ChatGPT. Ubisoft have already demonstrated how quickly ostensibly creative companies are to seize on the convenient.

Art is another big victim that hardly needs any introduction if you've been paying any attention to the world of StableDiffusion. Learning models built of existing work basically makes it so that any artist who does not develop a wildly unique style of their own, and perhaps covets styles that resemble certain disciplines or real life imagery- are on the route to becoming moot. Yes, for now there's still an instinctive hint to the computer generated that betrays it to the human eye, but it's a factor that is slight and being stamped out. Small efforts are being placed to try and stop this, one such is by installing a certain copyright filter that tells Learning algorithms to ignore new works; but proliferation has already overcome this. So many learning models are independently coded and simply ignore such warnings- visual art has no real means to defend itself.

Song is the other big angle we've seen of this in recent weeks. Voice training has come a huge way since it was released out into the wild, with what once to took days with thousands of audio sources being reduced to hours with only a few. The Dagoth Ur voice training algorithm is based on the performance of a character in Morrowind that has barely ten minutes of recorded dialogue, and yet people had managed to get him to read all kinds of brand new dialogues with near perfect tone and vocal variance. (With some editing on their part, obviously.) But even without creating fresh dialogue, there have been those able to mash the sound of their own voice with that of another with AI. The world was unnerved with the example of one Twitter user who created a fresh Kanye track over his own rap with nothing but a trained algorithm in order to say things that Kanye would never say- like admitting he was wrong. Imagine the effect on the music market from that alone!

Now if we were to do our best to be charitable about this, we could say that AI voices for musicians could help an artist live on after their death; but on the otherhead is that even something that we want? Some other artist wearing the voice of a person we love writing in lyrics that they think that artist would have wanted to formulate? In that Kanye example I mentioned some people already found themselves a little uncomfortable over the fact that the voice over artist wrote one line about Kanye's Deceased mother; which already clearly presents the dichotomy between what a person can say about themselves and what others can say using their mouth. Dead actors are already being brought back to retain their roles, dead artists will become a new liberty to cross for everyone.

Honestly, this whole situation brings back to mind that time when Kanye West thought it just an insanely romantic gesture to film a hologram of Kim Kardashian's dead father for her birthday. A hologram that Kanye then manipulated in order to talk about how smart her current husband was, (meaning himself) which in turn conferred her some meagre display of second-hand intelligence. Now every relationship can only be understood by the people in it, of course, but I think we can all see how objectively unhinged that is. And if it's worth anything, Kanye is no longer with Kim- so... yeah. But we're just talking about the silly applications of this replacement software, what about when we start getting to the philosophical?

Playing Cyberpunk 2077 recently has conferred to me a rather interesting parallel, in that the very idea of 'capturing the soul' of someone is a key point of the narrative. In that game, there's a special chip that is full of all the neurological data of a deceased person, allowing their loved ones to live with a virtual recreation of their long lost relative. The question rising there being whether this facsimile of the person who was counts as a real person, or is simply just a clone. I think what we're seeing of AI today isn't quite at the point yet, but it nudges along that line. What we're seeing is a near perfect mask of a person who once was, now all we need to do is to come up with a silicone husk to live behind it and soon we'll all be asking 'are friends electric'?.

So we're on the verge of a revolution of AI that threatens to redefine what it is we consider our humanity, our ability to emote with genuine intention. The entire prospect of art exists to share what it is that we feel with others around us, and if we're using computers to depict that feeling than the fabric connecting our hearts is thinning. How many layers deeper do we need to go before machines are creating the mimic of feelings that it's sharing with other machines to react to, and does that create something akin to a mechanical soul or simply a ghoulish cycle of answer-and-response that ultimately leads to nothing? And what of the free thinkers and artists of that proposed dystopia? Grim tidings await our lot, mark my words.

Ubisoft makes the most Ubisoft Headline ever.

So they can Ubisoft their Ubisoft whilst they Ubisoft

Part of me is saddened by the fact that Ubisoft has trended towards every single negative I pre-emptively assumed they'd fall for back when I first picked up on the woes of the 'Ubisoft formula' a few years before that term became the mainstream consensus. And the other parts of me are just aghast and agog about how utterly clueless Ubisoft management truly appears to be concerning the optics to literally every single daily thing that the company does. It doesn't take no crystal ball or Nostradamus insight to perceive the most basic concepts of 'action meets consequence' in Ubisoft's world; but it seems that their higher management consists of true aliens with no grasp of basic human empathy of any sort. That is the only reason why I can see Ubisoft themselves posting a video on their own Youtube channel that already uses the title of a theoretical hitpiece against themselves. "Ubisoft is developing an AI ghostwriter to save Scriptwriters Time."

Do I need to record the bare basic problems with such a headline? Probably not, because you are not a robot totally lacking in presence and being; but seeing as how Ubisoft is, shall we entertain their rudimentary attitudes? Firstly, the fact that Ubisoft are taking the actual work away from humans thus reducing the amount they have to pay those humans to work, and providing the ever so subtle implication that they might one day give that AI more of a role if the human team doesn't 'prove their worth' or whatever dystopian attitude the studio runners are looking to set. Replacing humans with machines is perhaps the most lionizing red alarm that any company can embark on, and Ubisoft have rung that alarm with a seeming gusto that I and many others find just utterly perplexing.

Now for the time being this is being limited to the speech of NPC characters who populate the garishly over-big open worlds that Ubisoft seems to insist they're good at making despite nearly two whole console generations worth of proof otherwise. Ubisoft wants the machine to work on the dialogues that populate the open world around the player, probably figuring that such dialogues are unimportant enough to relegate to a machine. But here's a shocker for you, basic craft knowledge insists this isn't the case. Any narrative designer worth their salt will tell you that NPC world dialogue is another avenue for world storytelling, with the attitudes, topics and temperance of NPCs talking to one another painting the outlines of the world you're in. They may not be discussing mission pertinent information, but that doesn't make their conversations any less valuable in the grand tapestry that is artful game design.

Take it from a company that still cares about their open worlds, like Rockstar. Walk around Los Santos and listen to the NPCs talk, and you'll notice that a great many of their conversations contain their own little metajokes and humorous commentaries on modern American culture. As GTA is about satirizing American culture, this obviously sets the mood and creates an environment supplementary to the overall setting. Those aren't details that every player picks up on, obviously; but they're an extra layer of care and attention that the odd few players will pick up on and respect the amount of dedication and love that has touched every corner of this tailor made experience. Compare that with Oblivion, where NPCs throw random disjointed topics at one another picked by an algorithm and call it a 'chat'; and the unnatural stiltedness of it all becomes a meme in itself. Which direction does it sound like Ubisoft are currently heading in?

For me, I find the idea of 'saving time' for the scriptwriters concerning on two fronts. For one, Scriptwriting is a deeply iterative process of seeing what works for the moment, moving forward under those presumptions and going back and making tweaks where necessary; you rarely ever get it perfect the first time and it takes an intelligent self appraisal to see where improvements can be made. Secondly, scriptwriting is just something that takes time. Now typically that time is condensed and squashed and layered upon other parts of the script and brought back home to have nightmares over, but there is no circumventing that time put in to making a solid script. Now I understand that Ubisoft hasn't had a decent script in years now, so they must have forgotten how much work typically goes into that, but that's why we're all here. To remind them.

And perhaps the biggest head scratcher of them all: of all the most advanced AI writing bots on the market right now, including many made by companies who specialise in the development of AI; the weakness of the platform seems to be, by and large, creative writing. So why has Ubisoft hired the software to creatively write? Even the newest iteration of ChatGPT, independent from it's rampant lying, is regularly put to various tests to see how it fairs up to human averages; but time and time again what we get as a take-away is simply: technical papers it does well, creative writing papers lack in language diversity and narrative complexity. Which is... well that's obvious, isn't it? Computers can't create and store context; if they could we'd be having entirely different conversations about the overreach of AI right now. So why can't Ubisoft accept that?

I suppose from Ubisoft's perspective, their idea is to train their AI ghostwriter to write within the parameters of their scripts. Teach them specific context and verbiage so that the AI vomits out inoffensive and generic lines of chatter that the AI presumably then also voices in that unnatural gait which made half of Watch Dog Legion's cast so inhuman. Of course, a human would need to be writing that context, going through the dialogue, correcting obvious mistakes, looking over every single aspect of the output and trying to salvage useable text out of heartless drivel. Probably editing a lot of it but still going uncredited for being the only actual artist involved in the work. So in essence, Ubisoft have saved themselves having to pay an artists wage for doing the pick-up work of a artist. Really innovating the industry, guys.

It seems both gaudy and combative to paint Ubisoft as the inexcusable 'bad guys' of every single aspect of the game development space; but they just seem to compete for that role so vigorously! Even as they and other storied studios slowly shrivel down from the heights they once dominated, I can't help but cluck my tongue as I try to squint and remember a studio I used to be excited for. I played every Assassin's Creed, I greedily consumed every Ubisoft E3 show, I was sold by the pomp of the big company doing big things. But now, how abhorred in my mind those times are. My gorge rims at it. In many ways, this is Ubisoft quiet literally baring it's heart for all the world to peek at and realise that it was, all this time, totally synthetic and broken. That's the Ubisoft of 2023. On the bright side, they showed off some Watch Dogs Legion with the announcement so... Watch_Dogs 4 still a possibility? 

AI- it is evolving

 Only, stupidly

The last time I delved into the innerworkings of AI it was in a speculative degree to assess whether or not the AI advent horizon was looming down upon us or merely a speculation for this lifetime. We took a generous look at learning algorithms and AI humanity tests and from that saw a array of the places that AI was and where it was headed. But since then the conversation around what AI can do, as well as it's availability to the general public, has all but skyrocketed. You merely have to search about on Google a bit to see countless of diatribes on the dangers of AI influence on our creative careers, the reliance of AI in customer support capacities and the utter uselessness of current AI platforms to verify any information, despite the increasing reliance on that very function. Go on Bing, if you dare, and you'll quite literally be prompted to use an AI in order to perform whatever search you were interested in. Clearly a line in the sand has been crossed.

Midjourney and Image generation was probably the start of the public interest in this new wave of artificial sensationalism. Seeing an algorithm take a single string of prompt text and turn that into a visually appealing image based on those speculations felt like a touch of magic, and a kick in the face to the many artists who's work was broken down and reworked in order to create those images. You see, despite the blow of it- AI still very much works on more complex versions of that same learning model we looked at last time. It takes existing stimuli, programmed into it, and attempts to rework the elements of that stimuli within it's operating parameters in countless different ways to fit certain 'success parameters'. Such parameters are typically also based on existing pieces of work, meaning that AI cannot fundamentally create something that is distinctly different from what already exists. So right away we can debunk those saying that 'true AI is here'! No it isn't, and I don't know of a single AI leader who even has an inkling of how to start working on it as of yet.

For the time being you could leave AI to teach itself for 100 years without any interaction from the human world and end up with an AI taste in art that hasn't evolved during all of that time, because there is no way for AI to generate new ideas as of yet. In fact, AI is so bad at new ideas that it's composites almost always carry with them a horribly disfigured signature from the artist who's work it's stolen. I always thought signing art was weird, but it seems I was always the blind one because that's exactly what is catching all of these learning algorithms off. But you can see why this is still rubbing artists the wrong way. If a machine can, pretty inexpensively, replicate their talents- then who's to say their talents will still be of value several years from now? Without regulation, it would seem nothing.

Of course, AI doesn't just stop at art- it's coming for the written word too. Language models like ChatGPT do much the same thing that the other AI algorithms are doing, only they seemed to have been integrated into our daily lives much quicker and much more seamlessly than the art did. These platforms are capable of taking example articles for form structure and language and put together coherent output articles on specific topics when prompted. This has already led to reputable news outlets making articles with ChatGPT, (With only a tiny faded disclaimer at the very bottom of the article disclosing that fact) companies already setting up corporate emails to be dispensed through ChatGPT and as I've already mentioned, Bing's desire to replace it's search engines with ChatGPT.

But with this adoption has come it's own fair share of issues. For one, Bing's search engine helper has been discovered to be a little... unreliable. That is to say, if you ask the helper to read out information to you on a topic, there's a good chance it will make up stuff and lie- which shouldn't really be a surprise considering the machine is seeding it's information from an internet rife with half-truths and fabrications. Then there are searches that veer wildly from the path of simple conversation and turn oddly personal. We've seen examples of Bing's AI threatening people who challenge it, confessing love to people who chat with it for too long and just shutting down completely if it doesn't know exactly how to answer. Which should be good news for people in my shoes, I ain't completely out of a job yet. Oh wait, this isn't even my job! Why am I even invested?

Yet despite these very apparent and prevalent hang-ups, we already see people trying to take advantage of the tools as they appear. Just browse the news from the past few weeks and you'll pop across dozens of tales about students trying to get out of writing assignments by getting ChatGPT to put an essay together instead, or getting around sending a tough personal email commiserating rough times with ChatGPT's emotionless assistance. And as someone who studied English, I understand. Sometimes you come back to the same Essay everyday for a week and haven't added a single sentence. But if you don't reach that wall where you just break down and stream of conscious forth until the entire page is full of trite, then why have you even signed up for college? It's not there to beat, it's there to break you down and make you feel like insignificant crap on the way out. ChatGPT robs you of that humbling.  

Headway has been made with the democratisation of AI accessibility, even if the functionality of said AI has been rocky. This does mean that when the time comes that AI starts getting better, and adaptive learning starts becoming possible, that's going to be the sort of tools that hobbyists will be able to play around with their bedroom. From this light, I could see a future where nothing in the human imagination can possibly be constrained because of the limitless potential at their finger-tips. Of course, by that very same merit I can't help but think of the countless cliché warnings that Science Fiction has blasted us with over the years. Skynet. The Matrix. You know how it goes. Limitless power, limitless danger, Christian Bale going nuts at a stage hand- the dark future.

Curiosity bides my attention, as it always does; a yapping hound dog lapping at my cheek to watch what next feat of daring it performs. But I am a cautious observer. Dubious and careful. As much as I want to see what AI is capable of, I don't want to see it's improvement erase entire industries of creative talent, as it is already in the midst of doing for labour. The combination of machines into the work place is a matter of consternation to be chattered over for hours, and more important minds than mine have pondered it's intricacies. But even then I won't lie about being tempted for what AI might be capable of in a year, or two. What we see today already strains what I thought possible, tomorrow might break my mind all over again.