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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Above: Meeting BunnyGPT, one of the first NPCs hooked up to OpenAI's LLM Read Part 1, Will Artificial Intelligence Totally Transform Culture & Intellectual Work? After discussing how AI might change movies and music, Adam Frisby and I debated how it could alter the future of the Metaverse. It's topic both of us have long…
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Pictured: Barbenheimer meme created through generative AI programs Midjourney and Gen-2 In the near future, will we keep wanting to watch Hollywood movies like Oppenheimer and Barbie, works of visionary highly personal art by beloved human artists — or will much of their work be replaced by generative AI programs? In recent months I've been…
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There's quite a lot of excitement about the potential to quickly create art through generative AI programs like Midjourney, but there's one small problem for starters: Most of these "artificial intelligence" programs are churning out images that are really just copies of art work by actual human artists without their consent or compensation. Is it…
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Appreciate this post from Jess Weatherbed at The Verge: Meta is investigating reports of tracking issues blighting its Quest 3 VR headset following user complaints that controller tracking performance is “much worse than the Quest 2” in some games… One comment from a game developer (known as carrotstien) for Eleven Table Tennis claims the issues stem from the…
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Here's what Meta's CTO Andrew Bosworth bragged about in June, regarding AI improving the soon-to-be-released Quest 3: Our decades-long work in AI is driving progress everywhere even in places you wouldn’t expect like Quest 3’s Touch Plus controllers. No tracking rings—AI models for estimating their position got so good we don’t need them anymore. Result…
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Charity Majors, who once helped keep the utterly tangled spaghetti of Second Life's servers operational back in the day, and now puts that wisdom to practice as co-founder/CTO of observability service HoneyComb, has a pretty thought-provoking post on how large language models are changing the nature of programming: You can make a surprising amount of…
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Hey remember reading about how AI will destroy Hollywood as we know it and change Hollywood forever? Of course you do, people have been making bold assertions like that since, well, yesterday. And then those darn pesky humans at the Writers Guild of America organized, went on strike, and in a few months, got the…
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Chart via Consciousness in Artificial Intelligence: Insights from the Science of Consciousness [pdf] Here's a free gift link to a fascinating New York Times article about a group of philosophers, neuroscientists and computer scientists who published a comprehensive study on consciousness and AI: The fuzziness of consciousness, its imprecision, has made its study anathema in…
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Portrait of rapper Kendrick Lamar by Nettrice Gaskins from 2018 Creative Commons recently published an open letter to Congress, calling for artists who use generative AI in their creative works to be part of conversation on the future of the medium, and how it will be regulated: We see a unique opportunity in this moment…
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PANEL 1 Richard Bartle, MMO/virtual world pioneer, has been playing around with Midjourney lately, and was curious how the AI image generator would visually interpret MMO avatars across the decades: "I went to Midjourney and gave it the following prompt: 'character from [name] MMORPG //photorealistic –ar 2:4", where [name] is the name of a past…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 