Linden Lab unveiled the latest version of its AI Character Designer late yesterday (website here, login required), created in partnership with Convai AI — watch the demo on YouTube above. To judge by social media, the SL community reaction has been, well, contentious.
Here's a sample of YouTube comments:
So this looks like a nice feature, and just what I need for my land.
This is a game changer! We can't even imagine how it will influence the experience we'll soon have in Second Life! 🤓 Awesome work!
… and here's a sample from /SecondLife in a post with the somewhat negative title:
Eat your SLop™" – LL releases a new "How to make AI Bots" video on their official channel… a video that is itself written and voiced by AI.
wow i hate this
f*** this, give us better ways to socialise
Might as well play The Sims at that point.
That last comment is quite trenchant actually, speaking to a sharp divide between the Second Life community who see the virtual world as primarily a human-to-human socialization platform — and others who interact with it more as a kind of spicier version of a life simulator game. (And roughly generalized, oldbie SLers tend to fall in the former category, while new-ish users who discovered SL on YouTube and other social media fall into the latter.)
I touched on this topic in my recent interview with Philip Rosedale and Brad Oberwager:
Philip Rosedale: Because, the question of, “Under what conditions do you want to talk to an AI as an avatar in Second Life?” I mean, I don't know, this is a very interesting conversation. In some ways, more avatars are good, and it costs us more… in some ways, more avatars, to the extent that they're boring to interact with, or take you away from real people, they’re bad.
Wagner James Au: That's been a problem from the design aspect, that Second Life is not presented as a traditional MMO. Because traditional MMOs have NPCs, and they are quest givers, or they'll give you rewards, and so you interact with them with that in mind.
But within Second Life, you're expected to meet other people. I mean, in SL, there's been all kinds of bots forever, but that's a constant complaint from users. You know: “I saw all these green dots [on the map], and thought it was a party, but it's just bots.” So I think the problem is getting worse.
And I think on a larger level, in Silicon Valley, they don't realize that adding AI to a virtual world, it doesn't really add any value. There's not any proven value beyond how we already know it, as either NPCs or, you know, for procedural generation. So I'm really afraid that this is going down the wrong path.
PR: Yeah, but like you said, like Brad said, the AI horse is out of the barn, in the sense that people already have, like you said, in MMOs historically, people have basically really bad AI, which is just a quest giver. And that's how you interact with NPCs. Which, which we all, as gamers, know. And so, I think the trick is, the bar is pretty low, we just need to kind of climb up the hill from there, right?
Much more here. As with AI and content creation, the emergence of LLM-powered NPC technology is very much a horse that's not just wandered out of the barn, but is now running loose in a hospital.
I plan on discussing these topics further with Linden Lab soon, so if you have questions I should be sure to ask, please post in Comments!
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Wagner James Au / New World Notes 
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