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: Chatting with a ChatGPT-powered NPC in a metaverse platform The producer of a major financial news program recently asked me a mind-boggling question: Meta and others ditching the metaverse for AI, is that the real future? Which is, wow. Asking if AI and not the Metaverse is the future is a bit like asking,…
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Much interesting conversation on whether we'll pay for entertainment content created by AI — including, ironically but inevitably, a couple comments from Spam bots — with longtime reader Nadeja pointing to a coming glut of AI content: I think buying content that is mostly made by AI will eventually have no point. The smarter the…
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So according to my super unscientific survey, nearly 75% of respondents say we will soon pay for premium entertainment created by generative AI — "soon" being within the next 10 years. And this is no longer a theoretical question. Shortly after I launched my casual poll, the Writers Guild of America went on strike, with…
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Beverly Millson, an emerging tech consultant and cyberculture enthusiast, was recently playing around with ChatGPT 3.5 and she decided to ask the AI about her Second Life avatar, Bettina Tizzy. Through that avatar name, she edited Not Possible in Real Life, which up until 2009 was a must-read site covering the works of an emerging…
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Spinning off from MMO developers' thoughts around using AI for virtual world creation, Sinespace lead developer Adam Frisby shared his own recent experiences: [I] asked GPT-4 to design a quest for World of Warcraft; the results are no worse than the human output actually in the game; and certainly better than the 'radiant quests' in…
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At long last, the world’s most talked-about artificial intelligence has made its way into the world’s longest-running metaverse platform. Yes: In recent weeks, ChatGPT has become embodied by an avatar in Second Life. Second Life being Second Life, ChatGPT’s incarnation there is a giant humanoid rabbit. With what looks like a dancing tampon in its…
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Intriguing reader comment by veteran MMO game designer Damion Schubert (BioWare's Star Wars: The Old Republic, among many other titles), discussing the potential uses of ChatGPT and other generative AI for designing games: AI is really good at generating ideas but none will be better than 80% of the way there. That being said, that's…
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Screencap of generative agent simulation — playable here Last week I wrote about the game developer who incorporated ChatGPT into his NPC-to-player conversations in his virtual world; now comes an experiment with "generative agents" — AI-powered NPCs, who talk with each other: In the experiment, the researchers placed 25 generative agents within a virtual world…
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Steven, a graduate in technology studies and longtime New World Notes reader, has been working with a non-profit org to help develop a system for tracking infectious disease, and his higher-ups have been encouraging the team to use ChatGPT to build out the data base. The trouble is, when Steven asked ChatGPT for knowledge of…
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I've talked about ChatGPT being used to make NPCs in MMOs and virtual worlds more intelligent, but far as I know, veteran developer Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms Entertainment is the first to do so with an active MMORPG called Aetolia. As he explained on social media recently: We just wrapped up an experiment in…
Wagner James Au / New World Notes 