AI is really having it rough these days. I dunno hardly any blogger that admits to it having any sort of use, except bad uses. I can see their point. Copyright infringement on a massive scale. Artists out of work. Quality writers being pushes aside for emotionless dreck. I’ve used AI for a couple of years now; I know all those things.
I don’t believe that AI should be used to replace human creativity. It’s pretty much the only thing we’re good at; why would we want to give our very best ability to a machine?
So those paragraphs probably turned everyone off this post by now. But. Some background.
I like to play games — no surprise there. I like to stream while I’m gaming, for bunches of reasons. I like to make YouTubes of the best bits. Sometimes people stop by who I love to talk to. Sometimes I can look back and see how things went so terribly wrong; or right. That’s where those best bits come in to play.
I would like to have more people watch my videos out of simple vanity. I think the games I play are pretty cool; I like to share. Problem is, I don’t really want to go the webcam route, or to provide narration. I’m pretty bad at staying in one place; I’m always getting up and moving around. I just want to play a game, and share it.
My current Twitch channel is just a game playing. That’s fine to an extent. But during the last few weeks when I was collecting Palworld skins, I had a chance to see what the other streamers were doing. Real streamers. Sure, their game info was heavily advertising that they had drops on; and most of the people watching were clearly there just for that. But, the stream was more than just a movie of the game running. There was stuff. Design. I could do this.
But wouldn’t it be more fun if I did it with AI?
So I asked ChatGPT to design one for me. You’re gonna love this.
I guess that rectangle upper off center is the game? I dunno. But in the accompanying text, it had some good suggestions that it did not follow in this rendering.
Game title. Character art. A place for subscriber info. Complementary background. Solid suggestions, right?
I played around with OBS and came up with this:
I pasted this into ChatGPT and asked for a critique. It thought the background was distracting. It didn’t like the font for the Plane of Torment. It thought the character art got lost and would look better if it were animated.
I used a filter to dim the background. I changed the font and made it more readable. I added a little bug in the corner for my blog’s logo. I later added my blog URL, Twitch channel and YouTube, but this screenshot doesn’t have that. ChatGPT thinks I should add a border around the game area, so I might do that. It also had some guidelines on readability for the URLs I added. It’s good advice.
If you don’t ask the AI for criticism, it will glow you up. Tell you you’re the best at everything — a genius. But if you ask for a critique, it can be startlingly insightful. I have no idea how it even comes up with these suggestions. I know the text is just statistically putting one word after another, but this goes way beyond a Markov Chain.
One of the best techniques for learning anything is to try and explain it to someone else. An AI didn’t come up with this. The other best thing is to have an expert sit next to you and guide you. Both those things come into play with AI. There’s nobody out there who knows what I want better than me. I just need some help getting there, that’s all.
So, AI. Try as I might, I just can’t hate it.
And if you want to watch me crawl through the PS2 EverQuest games, you can check out my streams at twitch.tv/tipa16384. But the best bits will be on YouTube, eventually. And maybe because I’ve started to care a little more for how it looks, it will be as fun to watch as it was to play.
I don’t hate AI, but I just keep quiet about it because it’s starting to feel like saying anything positive about AI is like saying something positive about Nazis and I don’t want to be chased by an angry mob with torches and pitchforks!
I think about your streaming habits a lot when I’m playing my own games, just because of how you use your streams (if I’m understanding correctly) to go back and grab screenshots and clips of events. I rarely remember to take screenshots when I’m playing and then regret that later.
Like you I probably wouldn’t narrate and wouldn’t want a camera. Do you just have your stream playing on a 2nd monitor to watch chat or something? I wouldn’t want after-the-fact-captured screenshots or clips to have the twitch stuff showing.
Anytime I play a game, I am thinking about a blog post I might write. I like pictures and videos to go along with it, and yeah, when I think about it, I stream it so I can scrub through the playback and capture the cool bits while clipping out all the boring stuff.
People like to rag on AI. But if AI can do your job better than you can, that’s a problem, because AI sucks. Managers who believe that are the real problem. They’re wrong, but that’s cold comfort when you’re in the unemployment line.
Oh yeah — the monitor setup. For the PS2 games, the emulator only takes up a little of my screen so I can easily see any chat; usually spammers, unfortunately. For full screen games, either I just assume that nobody will show up, or I put it up on my other computer.
I posted something positive about AI today. We’ll see if anyone says anything about it. I did get some negative comments a while back but the couple of people who left them also stopped reading my blog or said they were going to and haven’t commented again so I kind of take it that everyone else just sees it as a quirk that I still find AI interesting.
My current take on it is that it’s a tool to be used. I bought a sampler in the ’90s and played around with it. I connected it to a VCR, sampled some lines from Twin peaks that I’d taped, turned them into a “song” of sorts. It was a lot of work and the only person who enjoyed the result was me. Sampling at the time was a huge issue – it caused massive problems with copyright and it was widely seen as not just theft but people with no ability using technology to put actual musicians out of a job. I certainly was making something out of nothing but bits of other peoples’ work.
AI to me seems rmarkably like that sampler-and-vcr combo only vastly more sophisticated. It’s still a machine taking art made by humans and feeding it back to different humans to make more art. The difference is one of scale not of concept. Either everyone has to do everything themselves from scratch or we’re all just arguing about which lines we’re willing to cross.
The issues over how much AI costs and the environmental damage it may be causing seem to have a lot more substance than the moral panic. I’d be a lot more sanguine about it all if the megacorps weren’t trying to pretend it’s all going to be free.
The environmental damage is probably overblown. Not to say it doesn’t exist, but people like to go apocalyptic whenever anything is discussed because in this day and age, the only person who gets listened to is the one with the most rage-inducing story. So they compete. They send these moral high ground messages from their expensive laptops and high-speed internet connections in their warm, dry and safe homes. Virtue signaling.
“When I use a computer, it’s good. When you use it, though, it’s bad, and you should stop.”
And of course the megacorps are not your friend. They want to own you, make life without them unbearable, make you dependent upon them.
Yeah, I remember the sampling thing. I remember Napster. Death of the music industry. No more music. All gone now. Yeah, none of that happen. Hey, Pirate Bay is still around but there are still movies and TV shows. HOW? I was assured the entire industry would be out of work. And D&D is teaching our kids to be blood drinking Satanists! Rock and roll will destroy America!
Panic sells. It makes it hard to find the real things worth being concerned about. Signal to noise ratio.