Wagner James Au / New World Notes

Cajsa’s Choices: Fun, AI-Free SL Photos by Lake Solee-VII

March 4, 2025

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Lake Solee-VII. shows the power of “less is more” in “Reviviscere.” I imagine more than one person could be brought back to life by this pic, metaphorically of course. Imagine for a moment how she could have framed this, standing against a post or a wall, a full body or three-quarter. Would it be half as interesting? Would it catch your eye or would you page down, just one more fashion pic in a stream of hundreds of new fashion pics every day. But this, this is arresting. It requires a closer look. Pictures of a woman wearing a pair of jeans are a dime a dozen, but this is sui generis. I had to stop. .

For more of Lake’s uniquely fresh vision, click here:

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SL Creators Debate Using Gen AI in the Face of Community Controversy (Comment of the Week)

March 3, 2025

Above: From my 2024 State of the Virtual World Economy report

Last week's guest post by Maxwell Graf on why we need to decide now how to regulate content that uses AI being sold in the SL Marketplace (and beyond) generated some pretty passionate conversation. It came with this additional comment by Max that's also worth highlighting. In it, he talks about the ethical debate his fellow content creators are having among themselves, on whether to use gen AI in their commercial offerings:

My main worry is that people react to my comments as being "Pro AI in SL marketplace" because I'm not. A lot of people f***ing hate AI and I've spoken out on a lot of platforms the reasons I don't intend to sell with it.

A lot of designers I've spoken with over the last few years are going to continue on doing what they do without AI, which is awesome and shows character and principle. As someone once said, "You can't eat principles," which is right; if you own a business you have to compete and SL is very competitive and its going to get harder as people adopt AI as a way to speed up the revenue stream.

Somebody else said, "You can't eat principles, but you can live by them," which better highlights the choice in front of us. If you are in this to compete and make a living or your brand is caught up in the event grind, principles may not continue to supply what you need to survive, but if, like me, you are really only making a few items here and there to satisfy your artistic cravings going forward, then maybe you can live without AI and without sales being a primary goal of what you do.

Other creators however, do have sales as a primary goal, and many have already turned to gen AI to help them expedite their production.

Indeed, in my June 2024 report on the State of the Virtual World Economy On Its 21st Anniversary, I surveyed SL creators, and 1 in 4 reported that they do use generative AI platforms — with 15% saying that they use it in the direct creation of their SL content, or in both the creation and promotion of it.

And I took that survey almost 12 months ago. If I were to ask the same question now, what do you suppose the breakdown will be?

Speaking of f***ing hating AI, there's now a SL community petition, "A reversal of standing company policy and doctrine on generative Artificial Intelligence", demanding:

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Second Life’s Strange Connection to Trump’s Cryptocurrency Programs

March 3, 2025
Well, I wish this snarky meme I made last year, explaining Second Life's strange connection to the 2024 presidential election, was quaintly out of date, but that was sadly not to be. In the news from just the last few days, we have:
- Donald Trump Names XRP, SOL, ADA, BTC and ETH as Part of U.S. Crypto Reserve
- Donald Trump-Linked Firm May be Looking to Start NFT and Metaverse Platform
Without the early success of Second Life, it's very likely that these programs — let alone Trump's re-election in 2024 — would have never come into being.

As I explained last year when it still seemed like a fun, James Burke-ian, Connections-esque thought experiment:

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Top 6 Stories Including: Why Second Life Was (Briefly) Advertised With Gen AI Images & Using VR to Help Induce Inception-esque Lucid Dreams

March 3, 2025
What to Watch & Read This Weekend: inZOI Early Review, Philip Rosedale on Community Building & PlayerUnknown Makes a Metaverse Platform

February 28, 2025

This long inZOI playthrough by Rudi Rennkamel (watch above) is from a few months ago, but it's the most thorough I've seen so far. The avatar creation and 3D building system is quite impressive, with some caveats. Unless I missed it, sadly no mention of inZOI's cat god though.

Brendan "PLAYERUNKNOWN" Greene is making a metaverse platform (something he hinted with a Steam demo last December), and now Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of Rock Paper Shotgun has an in-depth look at his plans.

Such as:

There is certainly a grand design here, but it's more about the role Go Wayback will play in the aforesaid "3D internet" stuff, which I find pretty draining to describe. To recap, Go Wayback is the first of three games that are sort of one big rolling exercise in cultivating the technology for a bunch of "interoperable" gameworlds. As Brendan Greene explained to me after my hands-on, it paves the way for Artemis, which will run on the studio's own Melba engine, with the promise of much larger generated maps and "millions" of players per session. As for the eventual "Game Three" – this, seemingly, will be the capstone for an open-ended network of holodecky fantasies in which people can generate, modify, share and monetise worlds or bits of worlds via means yet to be fully described.

I can't believe people are still saying "3D internet" which is a term from when Nirvana was still touring. But then again, I can't believe people are still talking about web3, which Greene does. Still, the breadth of ambition is impressive.

Finally, there's Philip Rosedale's latest think piece, which also reads like a design document to a new social app (that he's maybe building?):

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Brad Oberwager Explains Why Linden Lab Promoted Second Life With Stock / AI Images — And Why They’ve Now Stopped.

February 28, 2025

Originally posted on my Patreon here

UPDATE, March 4: This story continues here.

If you've visited Facebook recently, you may have noticed new official ads for Second Life which incorporate video and images that are AI-generated. (And at least in one case, uses an Adobe Stock image.)

After seeing complaints about this from SL creators on social media on Wednesday night (see some samples below), I reached out to Linden Lab head Brad Oberwager, who spoke with me while standing in the rain outside his Boston hotel during a family trip.

As we spoke, it quickly became clear to me that this was probably an honest mistake — and clear to Oberwager how upsetting this ad campaign might be to many in the SL community.

These are not official ads for Second Life, he explained, but only A/B tests using mock-up ads, created in preparation for the eventual, actual, official Second Life advertising campaign — which will, he confirmed with me, only use SL-based content by Second Life creators.

"I'm preparing to spend millions of dollars [promoting Second Life]," as he put it to me. "Until I know what works, every dollar is wasted."

He was actually surprised community members had even seen these A/B tests, because Linden Lab has only spent a very modest amount (i.e. three figures a day) on them.

"We can't guess [on an ad campaign] and hope for the best," he explained. "We're going to run test ads and once we find out what works we'll talk with all the creators", on creating SL-based ads.

"Is it dragons? Is it relationships? We have no idea what works [with SL ads]." He really means it: The ad campaigns they've launched up to now have done nothing to grow the active user base.

But why not just use existing Second Life screenshots and video created by the community for these ads? There's even a promotional clause in Second Life's Terms of Service, granting the company the right to use any user-made content "to advertise, market, and promote [SL]."

On that point, my impression is Linden Lab didn't want to use SLer's content without their permission for an ad. But seeking permission takes quite a lot of time, especially since you technically need to get permission from every single content creator whose work is featured in an image/video, including any creator of the literal sky. (This very dilemma was raised by HarperCollins' lawyers with the cover of my first book!)

"I couldn't test fast enough creating these [ads] in SL", as Oberwager puts it. "I've got to get the best 8-10 messages, then you get the creative."

In other words, he adds: "100% of the actual ads will be Second Life-based. "

So ironically, while apparently trying to be highly respectful of creators' content, Linden Lab went with an approach that's inadvertently made many of them even angrier (see sample below).

In any case, now that the Second Life community has complained about these mock-ups, this A/B test has been halted:

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Cajsa’s Choices: The SL-Based Imagery By “Awesome Fallen” Are Awesome Indeed

February 27, 2025

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Awesome Fallen has one of the most powerful photostreams you will find in Second Life Flickr, heavily post-processing SL screenshots into something transcendent. “On Social Media……” captures the effects social media can have on a person, tightly wound, sharp but internally vacant, with detritus flying too fast to comprehend and understand, leaving us stunned, but also hostile. It’s amazing and immediately, I knew I had to feature her work.

For more from Awesome Fallen, click here:

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Expert Explains How Using VR Can Help You to Have Lucid Dreams IRL

February 26, 2025
Flying in VR can help induce lucid dreams, says researcher

With Quest headset sales slumping last holiday season, and their overall active usage dipping down to 1 in 3 active owners, there's a good chance your VR rig is gathering dust. Or maybe you're still enjoying it for games and virtual worlds like VRChat and Rec Room. In either case, here's a VR application you might want to try out:

Train yourself to have lucid dreams in real life.

You know those: The seriously cool kind of dreams where you experience yourself as being aware that you’re in a dream — and are even able consciously change what’s happening within the dream.

This post brought to you by the generous support of the Virtual Worlds Museum, now crowdfunding an expansion to build the largest resource and online community devoted to virtual worlds! Go here for all the details on Kickstarter.

Yes, you can train yourself to lucid dream over time without VR. One common technique is to get in the habit of keeping a notebook near your bed, and writing down your dreams the moment you wake up from one. (Which I’ve never tried, because frankly that seems like a pretty sure way to ruin a good night’s sleep.)

So if you have a VR headset, you might be able to take a shortcut to all that.

These tips come from Dr. Jarrod Gott, who led an experiment testing that very thing a few years ago. I’ll get into the science down the way, but since it’s the holidays, here’s the fun part first. As with anything in VR, be careful, and don’t do this near furniture or someone you can trip on.

How to Train Yourself to Lucid Dream With VR:
- Play highly immersive content. Flying games are very good for this. IE, "Velocity". Enough to produce a mild dissociative experience following play.
- Then conduct reality intention checks within this 1-2 [second] dissociative window.
Here’s what Dr. Gott means by dissociative experience:

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Extraordinary, Androgynous SL Style Photos by Winter Jefferson

February 26, 2025

Cajsa Lilliehook covers the best in virtual world screenshot art and digital painting

Winter Jefferson has been a fashion icon in Second Life since 2008, pushing boundaries of fashion and style. (Those are not the same thing.) Impatient with gendered fashion expectations, his style has been gender-bending since the beginning. Describing himself on his Flickr profile, he wrote “I've escaped from your nightmares, but I may turn up occasionally in your wet dreams. I'm made of violence, style, sex and magic and all of those impossible things before breakfast. I blog and model, I'm a marketing maestro and I always, always bite.”

For more Wintery style, click here:

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Second Life’s New AI Character Creator Creates Sharply Divided Community Reaction Related to the Very Nature of the Virtual World

February 25, 2025

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:

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