Playful or Cool – Theoreti.ca

The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game

Released in 1978, a socialist alternative to Monopoly sold over 200,000 copies and was translated into multiple languages.

Mental Floss has a nice piece of floss with The Story of Class Struggle, America’s Most Popular Marxist Board Game. Class Struggle, the board game, was developed by a political science professor, Bertell Ollman, who wanted an alternative to Monopoly, which ironically was based on the Landlord Game which had been originally designed to show the evils of property. Class Struggle was sold to Avalon Hill who eventually discontinued it. It looks like you can find copies on eBay.

Google’s new AI turns text into music – The Verge

You can hear examples, but can’t try it out.

With the success of OpenAI’s ChatGPT the other big AI companies are teasing us with their AIs. For example, Verge tells us that Google’s new AI turns text into music. Alas Google doesn’t seem to want to let us play with the AI, just admire the results.

All the (open) world’s a stage: how the video game Fallout became a backdrop for live Shakespeare shows

Free to roam through the post-apocalyptic game, one intrepid group has taken to performing the Bard. They have found an intent new audience, as well as the odd mutant scorpion

The Guardian has a nice story today about a Shakespeare troupe who are staging plays in Fallout 76, All the (open) world’s a stage: how the video game Fallout became a backdrop for live Shakespeare shows.

It seems to me that this is related to the various activities that were staged in Second Life and other environments. It also has connections to the Machinima phenomenon where people use 3D environments like games to stage acts that are filmed.

Of course the problem with Fallout 76 is the performers can get attacked during a performance.

The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record – The New York Times

For 4,600 years, a mysterious game slept in the dust of southern Iraq, largely forgotten. The passion of a museum curator and the hunger of young Iraqis for their cultural history may bring it back.

The New York Times has a story on The Royal Game of Ur: Play the Oldest Board Game on Record. A curator at the British Museum, Irving Finkel, connected the translation of a tablet with the rules with an ancient board game of which there were copies in museums (see picture above). More recently the game has been reintroduced into Iraq so that people can rediscover their ludic heritage.

The nice thing about the NYTimes article, beside the video of Finkel who has an amazing beard, is that they include a PDF that you can download and print to learn to play the game.

The article and Finkel’s video talk highlight how influential a game can be – how a set of rules can be a meme that helps rediscover a game.

‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40 | Games | The Guardian

The developer of the text-adventure game on how, at 20, she overcame 1980s misogyny to turn a Tolkien book into one of the most groundbreaking titles in the gaming canon

The Guardian has a story on Veronika Megler who developed the innovative text (and image) adventure game The Hobbit (1982), ‘I saw the possibility of what could be done – so I did it’: revolutionary video game The Hobbit turns 40. She went on to get a PhD and now is principal data scientist at Amazon Web Services!

You can now play The Hobbit on the Internet Archive.

Issues around AI text to art generators

A new art-generating AI system called Stable Diffusion can create convincing deepfakes, including of celebrities.

TechCrunch has a nice discussion of Deepfakes for all: Uncensored AI art model prompts ethics questions. The relatively sudden availability of AI text to art generators has provoked discussion on the ethics of creation and of large machine learning models. Here are some interesting links:

Ars Technica has a article on how Artists begin selling AI-generated artwork on stock photography websites. I note that MidJourney generated images all seem to have a similar style. We may find it becomes more and more identifiable like some smell in the background.
Ars Technica has another article on various projects to be able to see what original images might have been used in training AIs like MidJourney. Have AI image generators assimilated your art? New tool lets you check. The provenance of some of the training sets is documented here. It remains to be seen what you can do if your images have been used.
And of course there are art groups that are banning AI generated art, Flooded with AI-generated images, some art communities ban them completely. This raises the question of whether one can tell?

It is worth identifying some of the potential issues:

These art generating AIs may have violated copyright in scraping millions of images. Could artists whose work has been exploited sue for compensation?
The AIs are black boxes that are hard to query. You can’t tell if copyrighted images were used.
These AIs could change the economics of illustration. People who used to commission and pay for custom art for things like magazines, book covers, and posters, could start just using these AIs to save money. Just as Flickr changed the economics of photography, MidJourney could put commercial illustrators out of work.
We could see a lot more “original” art in situations where before people could not afford it. Perhaps poster stores could offer to generate a custom image for you and print it. Get your portrait done as a cyberpunk astronaut.
The AIs could reinforce visual bias in our visual literacy. Systems that always see Philosophers as old white guys with beards could limit our imagination of what could be.
These could be used to create pornographic deepfakes with people’s faces on them or other toxic imagery.

GPT-3 on Searle’s Chinese room argument

AI: I am an AI created by OpenAI. How can I help you today?Human: What do you think about the use of the Chinese room argument to defend the claim that a chatbot can never really understand what it is saying?AI: The Chinese room argument is a thought experiment that was first proposed by John Searle.

Blake Myers has posted a number of conversations they have had with Open AI’s GPT-3, including one titled, GPT-3 on Searle’s Chinese room argument. What is intriguing is that Myers has had discussions about specific philosophical issues around AI including the Chinese room argument and GPT-3 appears to have answered coherently. The transcripts or short dialogues are made available and in some cases are not edited.

I can’t help imagining how this could be used by a smart student to write a paper dialogically. One could ask questions, edit the responses, concatenate them, and write some bridging text to get a decent paper. Of course, it might be less work to just write the paper yourself.

Ask Delphi

Ask Delphi is an intriguing AI that you can use to ponder ethical questions. You type in a situation and it will tell you if it is morally acceptable or not. It is apparently built not on Reddit data, but on crowdsourced data, so it shouldn’t be as easy to provoke into giving toxic answers.

In their paper, Delphi: Towards Machine Ethics and Norms they say that they have created a Commonsense Norm Bank, “a collection of 1.7M ethical judgments on diverse real-life situations.” This contributes to Delphi’s sound pronouncements, but it doesn’t seem available for others yet.

AI Weirdness has a nice story on how she fooled Delphi.

Diggin’ in the Carts: Japanese video game music history

Meet the men and women responsible for creating the most iconic tunes in video game history.

We finished up the Replaying Japan 2021 conference today. The conference was online using Zoom and Gather Town where there was a hidden easter egg with a link to Diggin’ in the Carts: Japanese video game music history, a 5 part documentary from Red Bull that is quite good. The 5 15 minute episodes are part of the first season. Not sure if there will be other seasons, but there is a related radio show with multiple seasons. The documentary episodes nicely feature the composers and experts talking about the Japanese history along with other musicians commenting on the influence of the early music which would have been heard over and over in houses with Japanese consoles.

The creator of the show is Nick Dwyer who is interviewed here about the documentary and associated radio show..

InspiroBot

I am an artificial intelligence dedicated to generating unlimited amounts of unique inspirational quotes for endless enrichment of pointless human existence.

InspiroBot is a web site with an AI bot that produces inspiring quotes and puts them on images, sometimes with hilarious results. You can generate new quotes over and over and the system, while generating them also interacts with you saying things like “You’re my favorite user!” (I wonder if I’m the only one to get this or if the InspiroBot flatters all its users.)

It also has a Mindfulness mode where is just keeps on putting up pretty pictures and playing meditative music while reading out “insprirations.” Very funny as in “Take in how your bodily orifices are part of heaven…”

While the InspiroBot may seem like toy, there is a serious side to this. First, it is powered by an AI that generates plausible inspirations (most of the time.) Second, it shows how a model of how we might use AI as a form of prompt – generating media that provokes us. Third, it shows the deep humour of current AI. Who can take it seriously.

Thanks to Chelsea for this.