Wagner James Au / New World Notes
Author, strategist, virtual world reporter
recent posts
- Welcome to New World Notes’ 2006-2025 Archive!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
- Top Five Posts Including: Huge Rec Room Layoff & Meta Boots Neal Stephenson Off Facebook (Briefly)
- Four Glorious Second Life Sims to Explore — After Watching Sabina Valeska’s Machinima Tributes to Them!
- Virtual World Usage Stats from S&P Global Market Intelligence — Plus VRChat & Second Life Specifics!
about
Category: AI
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What you’re watching above looks like a podcast narrated by a chill Brit called Cliff Knotes, in an episode devoted to Second Life. But here’s the thing: The podcaster is AI generated, and the content that "Cliff" is discussing was pulled completely from Wikipedia. This is Wikéo, a new YouTube channel and site which converts Wikipedia…
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This lovely machinima montage of an SL sim called Still Water Village (click here to teleport) was shot with the Firestorm viewer on high graphics using the region's shared environment WindLight. But from the moment you press play, you'll also likely notice a unique and appealing fluidity to the shots. That's because this is not…
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What you’re watching above is a Second Life birthday / nightclub party for Emily Silkstone, but also one of the coolest combinations of gen AI and the virtual world I’ve seen so far. She converted her club, Basilica, into a kind of self-contained Second Life bubble that floats through the real world, to the shock…
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NewsArc is a free new iOS/Android app from SmartNews, a startup where Cory Ondrejka, Second Life's co-founder/ founding CTO, has been CTO for the last couple years. As he explains on his blog, the app is a kind of culmination of his career over the last twenty-something years, including at Linden Lab and Meta, and…
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So ChatGPT is highly problematic for many multiple reasons, the very least of which being it still can't summarize my book accurately, but as is often the case, the Second Life community has leveraged it for pretty amazing results. Specifically, turning their SL avatar into a RL social media selfie. (As above, by Stephy Renee.)…
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Since no post about virtual pro wrestling is complete without a follow-up about the AI-driven death of the Internet as we know it, here's a provocative new Philip Rosedale essay predicting just that, in what he dubs the Ultraviolet Catastrophe: AIs are now easily able to create accounts, establish IP addresses, and send plausibly important…
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MMO game designer guru Raph Koster just updated his venerable blog with a slew of screenshots from the closed beta version of Stars Reach, his upcoming sandbox MMO. (Which had a highly successful Kickstarter earlier this year.) The worlds themselves are created through procedural generation, and then the early player base is using the game's…
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Above: Most successful AI runs, character type (Wizard-Elf-Chaotic-Male, etc.) the level at which they died, and what killed them Back in 2021, Meta (still Facebook at the time), sponsored an innovative challenge in AI programming: Create a bot which could win NetHack on its own. If you know the classic roguelike RPG, first created in…
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While I'm still skeptical that Gen AI platforms have categorically* improved much of anything in our lives, LLMs sure seem to have improved the quality of my blog comment SPAM. At first I actually thought the above comment was from a genuine reader, genuinely excited about William Weaver's new Second Life viewer. But no, reading…
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In May 2024, I was boggled by how badly ChatGPT summarized my writing, especially my definition of the Metaverse — even when it's online right here — so last week, I checked back to see if ChatGPT had improved. Yes, this seems like a self-indulgent ego stroke, but I promise there's an important point here…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 