e478 — Doomed, I Say!

Games At Work dot Biz

https://c.eev.ee/doom-text-generator/">

Published 26 August 2024

Co-hosts Michael, Michael and Andy start things off on a fun note – a website that creates text in Doom, Minecraft and other fonts.

Next up, the team turns to Ian Hughes for two intriguing posts over the Feeding Edge. First up is Ian’s blog and video showing the power of midjourney.com, runway.ml and luma.ai . The second post deals with Ian feeding his two novels Reconfigure and Cont3xt into a local copy of Nomic.ai on his MacBook and conversing with his protagonist. The Games at Work cohosts are all hoping that this jumpstarts the writing of third book. Ian himself imagines how a generated metaverse could be created following the ingestion of the novels.

Sticking with the theme, the team then turns to the symbolism used by many firms to signify the application of AI. According to the Wall Street Journal, sparkles ✨ are used by Google, Slack and more. This sparks (heh!) a discussion on the power of such symbolism, and Andy shares a recent blog post he wrote on the subject, with a specific focus on a symbol for the Fediverse, specifically the asterism ⁂ unicode2042. This reminds Michael M of the symbol for therefore ∴ unicode2234.

Then, the co-hosts discuss the SAG-AFTRA agreement to partner with Narrativ for the use of audio voice replicas, and the arrangement allowing the people whose voices are being used to have a significant amount of control over how and when their voices are ethically used. Michael R points out that this may have some market limiting impacts for new voices.

Once the team completes the AI review, they spend a few moments on the world of games and gaming. A Guinness world record of 444 consoles hooked into a single television is a marvel. Tramsterfam is reminiscent of Townscaper. Other games include the Smithsonian’s partnership with Crayola, the newest Sid Meyer’s CivVII and an upcoming television series called Secret Level.

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Selected Links

Doom Font Generator for Games at Work

Metaverse and AI

Ian Hughes’ The Feeding Edge blog post: A short video about Metaverse

Ian Hughes’ The Feeding Edge blog post: Talking with an AI of Roisin from my novels

Reconfigure Book

The Wall Street Journal article: How the Sparkles Emoji Became the Symbol of Our AI Future

Andy Piper’s The Lost Outpost blog post: On Symbols & Symbolism

⁂ Asterism

∴ Therefore

Procreate

Variety article: SAG-AFTRA Strikes Groundbreaking AI Digital Voice Replica Pact With Startup Firm Narrativ

The Animaniacs: Variety Speak song

Narrativ.ai

Games

Guinness Book of World Records post: Gaming is serious business for man with 444 consoles hooked up to one TV

Tramsterdam

Townscaper

Andy Piper’s The Lost Outpost blog post: The Collage Atlas

Ars Technica article: Civilization VII hands-on: This strategy sequel rethinks the long game

The Verge article: Civilization 7 launches in February