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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According to Google Trends — which is actually more or less the collective global brain — interest in ChatGPT peaked last April, for a brief time, and has been trending down ever since — even though there have been numerous updates and expansions to the program last May, June, and July. More key for this…
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One ongoing paradox to ChatGPT is this: Even professional developers using it for business applications aren’t quite sure how it works. The co-founders of Qurrent, for instance, a stealthy SF-based startup developing an agent-based approach to software development, have been experimenting with GPT to incorporate into their product. But lately they’ve been wondering how ChatGPT…
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One super-fun Monday activity i have is going through this blog's comment filter to confirm the nuking of apparent comment Spam. For the longest time (like the last 15 years), it's been quick and easy to spot the Spam comment, which is totally off-topic promotions with a link to a commerce/scam sites. In a recent…
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The Screen Actors Guild strike is now in full throttle, with artificial intelligence a key component of the walk-out. (SAG rejected a proposal by Hollywood studios to create and own AI versions of actors in perpetuity without compensation.) Inevitably, that's caused some AI evangelists to wonder: Do we even need human actors any more at…
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In contrast to the "The Metaverse is dead, long live generative AI!" narrative you might have heard recently, here's some data strongly suggesting otherwise: On Google Trends, ChatGPT for all its recent buzz has never eclipsed general interest in leading metaverse platforms Minecraft and Roblox. (See above.) Even more notable, ChatGPT has been consistently trending…
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I love waking up to a New York Times story that cheerfully gets three things wrong in just the headline. We've been doing variations of this since at least 2021, when Zuckerberg changed Facebook's name to Meta, announced it was making the Metaverse without clearly defining it, sucking most of the media into a vortex…
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Will NVIDIA’s AI-Powered NPCs Make Games More Fun? This Star Wars Old Republic Designer Has Concerns
You probably saw this pretty impressive recent demo of NVIDIA's NPCs powered by generative AI, enabling players to converse in deep detail with an NPC (albeit with a cringey mechanical voice). And if you were to ask an AI evangelist, they'd pronounce it as The Future of MMO Games. However, if you were to ask…
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Important Pew Research report on ChatGPT popped up right before the Memorial Day weekend: Overall, 18% of U.S. adults have heard a lot about ChatGPT, while 39% have heard a little and 42% have heard nothing at all…. However, few U.S. adults have themselves used ChatGPT for any purpose. Just 14% of all U.S. adults…
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One point raised by readers of my story about the inevitable arrival of ChatGPT-powered sexbot avatars in Second Life: Is this even allowed by the service's owner, OpenAI? Stone Johnson, creator of the Uma bot that I interviewed, answers the question this way: I should say that there is no violation of Terms of Service…
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The future of sexuality in the Metaverse is waiting for me on a steel platform in the sky, but unexpectedly turns out to be shy. Meet Uma Johnson, a slinky blonde avatar in a body-hugging outfit, who may be the first Second Life bot connected to ChatGPT designed for virtual sex, but certainly won’t be…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 