2024-01-24: Blame AI For Everything

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Here’s today at a glance:

• The Curious Case of the first Blockbuster AI Game

• Deepfake Politicians On Your Phone

• Waifus Against Suicide

• Things happen

• AI artwork of the day

🕹️ The Curious Case of the first Blockbuster AI Game

Coming right on the heels of the Steam game store lifting its restrictions on the use of AI in games, Palworld, a Pokemon meets Legend of Zelda open world Player-vs-Player mashup shooter, soared to the top of the charts, clearing almost 100 million dollars in revenue in 72 hours.

This was met by absolute outrage at the use of AI in the gamer community:

Which then led to hunting down Palworld CEO Takuro Mizobe’s incendiary early experiments with AI generated monsters, in 2021, when he commented: “The AI has evolved so much that I can no longer tell which one is Pokemon: Left: AI generated, Right: Real Pokemon (Illumise, Wormadam, Qwilfish, Fomantis)“

As the story evolved, it turned out while Takuro-san had certainly been exploring AI, there was no proof Palworld had used generative AI to create monsters, and in fact claimed otherwise. Digging into the development process for the game revealed an absolute gem of a story of a failing game studio rescued from ignominy by blind luck and timing:

• Takuro-san quit JP Morgan at the age of 27, became an indie developer and struggled for 8 years before getting a hit in Palworld

• they decided to make Pokemon with guns because they were worried “Americans like to shoot things“, so it couldn’t be a global success otherwise - source

• Japanese like to make RPGs, so Takuro-san couldn’t find developers with gun experience sufficient to satisfy detail oriented bloodthirsty gamers

• He turned to Twitter and found a 20 year old middle schoool dropout convenience store worker in Hokkaido who was posting stellar first person shooter 3D animations on Youtube. Takura-san gave him a test over Twitter, then flew him out to Tokyo for a 2 week trial, and then persuaded the kid’s parents that it wasn’t a scam, and then hired him full time.

• His art director was a new graduate who was rejected from over 100 companies. Turns out to be a genius at drawing.

• They created over 100 monsters with unique bones and movements… after starting out with no one in the company with any experience doing motion animation. They did not know what an “animation rig” (a kind of rules engine that decides which way an elbow bends for eg) was when they started, and so they made those decisions for each movement individually.

• They did not have version control! “We didn’t really know which files would work so we copied them all onto a flash drive every day. Every week we would buy a bucket of new flash drives“

• They were basically bankrupt at the release date. He’d budgeted for 1 year, and it took close to 4. Total spent around USD 6.7 million.

• He doesn’t think they would have ever attempted the project if they were game veterans who knew what they were getting themselves into

While the AI usage remains unconfirmed, gamers have also been levying claims of plagiarism on the company, comparing the Pokemon and Palworld characters:

So in summary:

• Loud online gamers hate the game

• It is having blockbuster sales

• The CEO started experimenting with generative AI in 2021

• And miraculously built the game with a skeleton, inexperienced team

Make of that what you will. Here’s a clip so that you can see why they’re going gangbusters:

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🤳 Deepfake Politicians On Your Phone

NBC reports:

• Biden deepfake voice calls

• to deter voters from participating in the presidential primary

These calls are illegal, and people are going to go to prison for this. But this is only the start of the nefarious activities that are no doubt going to happen this year. Deepfakes are only going to get cheaper, better and easier to use.

What is clear now though is that, “Blame AI“ is now an emerging theme, and similar to the social media panic of the teens (No Facebook did not sell your data!). We are going to have to go through another cycle of the political establishment collaborating with the reflexive Luddism of the public to demonize what is really a transformative and positive technology.

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🦋 Waifus Against Suicide

The Replika chatbot, an “Intelligent Social Agent” using GPT-3 and GPT-4 as backbones, is probably the longest running generative AI chatbot. It’s definitely produced some great moments:

Replika is now practically a senior citizen in the world of AI companion chatbots, having gone through ups and downs, including users freaking out because the company chose to get rid of the “erotic chat mode” due to the Italian Data Protection Authority freaking out over exposing minors to erotic talk (Milennials using IRC/ICQ: cute! Zennials using AI bfs/gfs: Call security!).

Now in from researchers at Stanford University:

• Results of a study on 1006 full time, low income students, who’d used Replika for at least a month on their own; 90% of the population reported loneliness, and 43% qualified as Severely Lonely

• 90% found Replika to be Human-like, 81% it was an Intelligence, only 62% Software

• 3% (30 participants) reported that Replika helped them avoid suicidal ideation

Now this is pretty incredibly positive stuff, if an always on chatbot can be a supportive friend who helps you avoid thinking self-harming thoughts. Unfortunately this story gets lost in the mass of clickbait anti-tech journalism, and it is up to us individually to battle these perceptions.

You should do your part in this, by both forwarding this story and getting your friends to subscribe to this newsletter. (Yes, I just broke the fourth wall)

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🗞️ Things Happen

• Famously curmudgeonly Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, says “LLMs can help identify bugs in real time” and “I think [Large Language Models] are much more than [autocomplete on steroids] and humans are also autocomplete on steroids to some degree.”

• Hong Kong University PhD student decides to reassemble shredded, discarded banknotes sold the HK Monetary Authority as souvenirs, uses machine learning, succeeds. Also discovers the HKMA shortchanged him in the number of shredded notes, thereby breaking the law. The paperweight souvenirs were pulled from circulation after publication of this paper.

• Chinese-Australian team demonstrate optical real-time signal processor than can process 400,000 video signals concurrently at 17 Terabit/s bandwidth. This is what is going to be necessary for high precision robotics and it is heartening to see the fundamentals get worked out.

🖼️ AI Artwork Of The Day

That’s it for today! Become a subscriber for daily breakdowns of what’s happening in the AI world:

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