"I'm Not Sure What To Say About That"

I got quite excited the other day, when Nimgimli pointed me to something Square Enix were trying out on Steam. They're calling it a "Tech Preview" and the description describes it as "a demonstration of Natural Language Processing (NLP), an AI technology".

As far as I can tell, Square have grubbed up a very old adventure game called The Portopia Serial Murder Case, originally released in 1983 (!) for a system called the NEC PC-6000 and force-fed it their proprietary AI tech to see what might happen. According to Wikipedia, the original game has suffered similar indignities in the past, having been ported to a few other long-forgotten platforms before eventually making its way into the mobile market and finally arriving on Windows and Steam as a shill for Square's "natural language processing technology."

Again according to Wikipedia, TPSMC ,as I'm going to call it to save all that typing, went down pretty well in Japan on its original release and was seen as being influential in the development of the visual novel genre. It sounds like the kind of game I'd enjoy, with its "point-and-click, murder mystery plot, open world, suspect interrogations, nonlinear gameplay, dialogue choices, and alternate endings" which, as a review in the Official XBox Magazine a few years back pointed out, were "standard for 2015, but way ahead of its time in 1983".

The Tech Preview is free to play on Steam so I thought I'd give it a try. I was somewhat surprised at the size of the download which, at more than 8GB, seemed like it would have required a government supercomputer to run in 1983, not a rinky-dink home computer. The System Requirements actually ask for 15GB though, so I guess I got off lightly.

Those requirements also contain a curious note about Speech Recognition: "Voice Input (Speech To Text) requires CUDA cores. (*1) VRAM 8GB and above required when using “Medium” in Voice Input quality settings. (*2) VRAM 16GB and above required when using “High” in Voice Input quality settings. Keyboard and/or Microphone support only." It seems to suggest you can play the game by talking to the characters rather than typing your conversations and reading their replies. 

That's something that would very much have been seen as the expected future of computing back in the 1980s, when Japanese tech giants were throwing vast amounts of money and effort behind the so-called "5th Generation", one of whose fundemental principles was to replace keyboard input with the spoken word. Much like videophones, which were a solved problem by the early '90s but which failed to attract any kind of interest from the public, speech recognition, when it was perfected, turned out to be something most people didn't want - and arguably still don't.

Still, I'd like to try it in an adventure game whose gameplay revolves around interrogation. It seems like a natural fit, especially when you throw in AI. I'm already excited for the inevitable and probably imminent integration of language processing AIs like Bard and ChatGPT with Smart Speakers and Virtual Assistants like Alexa and Siri. To see something like that in a game would be amazing.

There's only one drawback. I don't have a microphone.

Okay, technically I do have one. I actually have several, including two integrated webcam/mics that I acquired when I foolishly bought into John Smedley's lucicrous SOEmote fantasy ,of which the less said, the better. 

What? You don't remember SOEmote? Oh, what the hell...

I guess if you have a naturally gurning, cartoonish face like Dave Georgeson, maybe it would seem like a good idea, although evet then it would actually have to work...

Anyway, while I might theoretically own some mics, I don't have one to hand and even if I did, I definitely don't want to start fiddling around trying to get this game to recognize it. I mean, I might, if I thought there was the least chance of it actually working, but I've tried the text input. "Fool me once..." as they say.

About that text input. Y'know, I've played a lot of adventure games. I was already playing them when TPSMC first came out, back in the very early '80s. I used to sit there, with my first wife, in our first appartment, typing keywords and phrases into the ZXSpectrum's rubbery keyboard, hoping to see some kind of acknowledgement or recognition on the portable TV in front of us.

A decade and a half later I'd do the same thing, with Mrs Bhagpuss leaning over my shoulder and making suggestions, as we plowed our way through Broken Swords #1 and #2. Even EverQuest used a text parser before someone at SOE finally got around to adding clickable keywords.

Any - all - of those text parsers were orders of magnitude better than whatever the hell "Tech" it is that Square Enix thinks they're previewing here. And I'm not the only one making that assessment. As I write, the game or demo or whatever it's supposed to be has Steam's lowest possible rating - Very Negative - and in my opinion it's lucky to have a score as high as that.

Try some choice comments from angry reviewers:

"...the "AI" in this game is a joke. It is perhaps even worse than the text parsing of the original game, from 40 (!) years ago."

"GEEZ It's like they didn't even try...."

 "Zork (1977) had a better understanding of what your commands meant"

"Early text-based RPGs are way smarter at responses than this."

"basically it understands less inputs than the original King's Quest"

"This is a fascinating idea, but the execution is... I'm not sure it even rises to the level of "weak." It's not in evidence at all."

Aha! I think we've hit on the problem!

"Barely works. They say they removed the AI component due to safety concerns... so this doesn't even have the tech that it was supposed to be a preview of in the first place."

Well, that explains a lot. Okay, it doesn't explain how the game as it stands is literally worse than the basic, acceptable standard of games of its type from the era in which it was made, but it does answer the question I was asking myslef throughout the whole of the five (Count 'em - five!) minutes I could stick playing the blasted thing, namely "AI? What AI?"

I thought I should check if the allegation was true, so I asked Bard. Bard, being an actual generative AI, not a pretend one, was quick to give me the full story:

Hi Bard, Can you tell me if Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case?

Yes, Square Enix has disabled the AI component of their tech demo for The Portopia Serial Murder Case. The demo was released on April 24, 2023, and it allowed players to interact with the game world using natural language processing (NLP). However, the AI component was disabled on April 27, 2023, after players began to exploit it to generate offensive and inappropriate content.

In a statement, Square Enix said that they were "disappointed" that the AI component had been used in this way. They said that they were "committed to providing a safe and enjoyable experience for all players" and that they were "working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way."

The disabled AI component was a major disappointment for many players who were looking forward to trying out this new technology. However, Square Enix has said that they are working to improve the AI component so that it can be used in a more positive way. It is possible that the AI component will be re-enabled in the future, but it is not clear when this will happen.

Other than Bard's curious ability to predict the future (Check the dates it's quoting - I almost missed it.) and fondness for repeating itself, that seems to be a reasonably accurate account of what happened. It's corroborated by this report at BeyondGames.biz and many others as well. 

So much for that "preview". It does invite the question "Why leave the bloody thing up with the claim the AI's still in there, then?", but since this is Square Enix we're talking about, I wouldn't expect a coherent answer.

Someone is going to get this tech hooked up and working effectively but clearly that someone is not going to be Square Enix, who seem to be about as realistic in their expectations and as technologically capable of achieving them as Smed and Smokejumper's SOE. 

And we al know what happened to them...

Are We There Yet?

Not that I want to obsess about it but the news just  keeps  coming. I know these hype trains roll around with tedious regularity, only to end up shunted off into some cultural siding, rusting reminders of promises unfulfilled, but occasionally one just keeps picking up speed and momentum until it's hard to hear anything above the singing of the rails as it speeds by on its way to the future.

While many of the claims being made may be overstated, many of the reports exaggerated, there are already so many active applications of the process in play it would take a major effort of will to deny the reality that's already upon us. The future can look after itself; this is the present talking.

Of course, just as with most of the insanely over-optimistic claims made on behalf of the metaverse, much of what's being said and written about AI is pure nonsense. Whatever merits either may have are not helped by the crazed, evangelistic language and wildly hyperbolic assertions made by their most fervent supporters.

The evidence, however, speaks for itself. For the imaginary metaverse so heavily promoted by shills for crypto and blockchain, sad, deluded failures like Decentraland do service as the very opposite of proof of concept,offering up ruined monuments to greed, hubris and self-delusion, as Dan Olson's lengthy and entertaining takedown takes almost too much pleasure in describing. Meanwhile, anguished, aggrandized pleas for recognition of AI sentience come across more as cries for help from those that make them than any remotely objective assessment of current technological capability.

It's all too easy in the current, fevered climate to make assumptions that lurch too far to the extreme, to believe it's either all a crock or a scam or a farce or the singularity or the apocalypse. It's none of these things. Then again, I'm not going to be the one to assure you there aren't crooks, scammers and farceurs at work here too. They're always with us.

Backtracking just a little, where I would take issue with Dan Olson is in his rubbishing of the notion that to believe the metaverse is already here is in some way to give in to vaguery that renders the term meaningless. Nope. It's here alright. Like AI, the metaverse is observably present. It just doesn't look like the photos in its press pack.

The metaverse is clearly the worldwide web we all use every day. It already fulfills all of the necessary criteria - instant communication anywhere at any time with anyone; immediate access to services and products; communal virtual spaces; avatars, abstracts, anonymity. The pieces are in place. The only thing that's likely or that needs to change substantively is our mode of access which, as Dan rightly explains, will not magically arrive as a world filled with people happily strapping half-bricks to their foreheads.

Virtual reality of the kind imagined by its zealots will have to wait for technical solutions several orders of magnitude more strange and rare than anything we've seen so far. My own feeling is that we're far more likely to adopt something along the lines of the augmented reality seen in The Expanse, where schematics replace flat screens via a form of projection, than anything like Star Trek's holodeck, but there's no need for either. The flat screens we have now will do just fine.

As the metaverse turns out to be nothing more than a fanciful rebranding of the digital revolution that began thirty years ago, so AI may end up being nothing more exotic than a collection of software we employ to reduce the amount of tedious busywork we've been mislabeling "creativity" for far too long. Ever since the industrial revolution, engineers have been automating processes that used to require manual labor; now the software engineers are getting in on the act.

Much of the negativity I've seen concerning the advance of generative AI into areas previously handled by low-wage, low-status workers has revolved around the inherent uselessness of the product itself. The argument seems to be that AIs are only capable of churning out reams of twaddle, which might well be used to replace the twaddle previously produced by people at a much slower and costlier rate, and that this is somehow a bad thing because it will put the twaddlers out of a job.  

At best it seems like something of a circular argument. If we don't value the output, why do we value the means of its production? And if we consider producing it a worthwhile way for someone to earn a living, why do we not value the work they produce? Is it humanitarian to want to reserve an occupation for human use so those without better prospects can keep themselves alive by producing work no-one wants or values?

Don't look at me. I did English. I think you want a philosophy grad or a sociologist or maybe even an economist. I just find it a bit unconvincing as an argument, that's all, which may well be because I don't know what I'm talking about. Wouldn't be the first time.

I also don't find it all that interesting. I'm not that bothered about who writes copy I don't read for  websites I don't visit. AIs or interns, it's all a bit too abstract for me.

A fight in which I do have more of a dog, and one which ought to be of particular interest to residents of this part of the blogosphere, might be the potential incursion of AI into gaming. There's been some talk of that of late, not least in the abrupt redirection of resources intended for the "social mmorpg" Galaxies of Eden into a business dedicated instead to "the creation of cybernetic beings and eventually infinite virtual universes."

I first read about this at MassivelyOP, where the tone of the reporting was decidedly cool. I'm used to MOP being heavily down on anything AI or metaverse adjacent, so I went directly to the source to make up my own mind. In this case I think I'd have to acknowledge the sarcasm and disdain is probably justified. I refer you to the embedded video in the linked page if you require further convincing.

It's my feeling that generative AI will come to play a substantial role in the making of video games, especially rpgs. The two seem to be made for each other. Far from feeling apprehensive about how they might interact, I'm very keen to see them strike sparks off each other. I do not, however, believe that, as claimed by the developers of Galaxies of Eden, "We are now at the precipice of attaining true AI sentience and infinite content generation". In your dreams.

They also claim to have "managed to craft a crudely sentient cybernetic being", something I more than doubt, even with the most generous definitions of "sentient" and "being". Or "crudely", for that matter. As usual, there seems to be a self-destructive desire to run at breakneck speed into the future, not just before mastering walking but at the very moment when the first, tottering steps are being taken.

A much more reasoned and objective experiment with AI integration in an mmo - or in this case a text-based MUD - was reported by New World Notes, a blog that styles itself "The world's longest-running metaverse news and culture site." I won't attempt to precis the full article; it's worth reading in full, including the transcripts of some of the ChatGPT-generated NPC conversations that took place in game. They are impressive, at least if you're the kind of person who'd normally impressed by roleplayers larking around. 

If nothing else, it demonstrates that ChatGPT can certainly improvise as well as most casual roleplayers, admittedly not the highest of bars. As Matt Mihaly of Iron Realms, the company behind Aetolia, the MUD in question, makes abundantly clear, however, any widespread integration between commercially available generative AI programs and mmos would be prohibitively expensive right now. 

What probably wouldn't be either impractical or costly, however, would be asking something like Chat GPT or Bard to write static quests. In fact, why speculate? In the immortal words of Luci from Disenchantment, as recorded on the T-shirt I'm wearing right now... Just Do It!

My prompt: 

 

"Here is an example of how quest dialog is formulated in EverQuest II:

(Which I've cut because it's far too long for the post - I used the first section of dialog here if you really want to know.)

Here is the structure of a short quest in the game:

" Speak to Gherrana Cobbleblork at the Highland Outposts to begin this quest. She asks you to "gather some feathers from the kragploom aviaks".

    Kill 10 of any type of Kragplooms.
        The closest ones are Kragploom chicks in The Highlands.
        More Kragplooms can be found on top of Kragploom Butte north-northeast of The Highlands. ( 91,223,197 )

Return to Gherrana for your reward. "

Please construct a short quest for the game in which a non-player character asks a player character to go somewhere and do something for them in similar style. Include names and some dialog to give the quest flavor.

 

And here's Bard's response:

"Sure, here is a short quest for EverQuest II:

Quest Name: The Lost Key

Quest Giver: Agnar the Smith

Location: The Commonlands

Quest Description:

Agnar the Smith has lost his key to his workshop. He asks you to find it for him.

Quest Steps:

1. Speak to Agnar the Smith in the Commonlands.
2. Go to the nearby cave and search for the key.
3. Return the key to Agnar the Smith.

Reward:

100 platinum pieces

Dialog:

• You say, "Hail, Agnar the Smith."

• Agnar the Smith says, "Greetings, traveler. What can I do for you today?"

• You say, "I've heard you lost your key."

• Agnar the Smith sighs. "Yes, I did. I was working on a new sword when I accidentally dropped it into the nearby cave. I've looked everywhere, but I can't seem to find it."

• You say, "I'll go look for it."

• Agnar the Smith smiles. "Thank you, traveler. I'll be forever in your debt."

• You go to the nearby cave and search for the key. After a few minutes, you find it on the ground near a pile of rocks.

• You return to Agnar the Smith.

• You say, "I found your key."

• Agnar the Smith is overjoyed. "Thank you so much! I don't know what I would have done without you."

• Agnar the Smith gives you 100 platinum pieces.

• Agnar the Smith says, "Please, take this as a token of my gratitude."

• You say, "You're welcome. I'm glad I could help."

That took Bard about five seconds and can anyone honestly say its substantively inferior to any run-of-the-mill mmorpg quest? If anything, it already assumes too much backstory compared to the average "Fetch" quest. 

 

I'm not suggesting the EQII team would be able to copy and paste the whole thing into the game verbatim - you probably wouldn't want to be handing out 100 platinum pieces for a Commonlands quest, for a start and I'm not sure where the cave might be - but I am saying it wouldn't require much more than a little tidying up before it could be slotted in alongside most of the existing low-level quests in that zone without anyone being any the wiser.

To my mind, it's not a matter of having AIs replace designers or writers so much as giving those people a powerful new tool that could make their work a lot easier - and quicker. If nothing else, it ought to make a big difference to those one-dev shops I keep reading about.

 

Maybe we will eventually be able to leave the AIs to it and all just sit back and consume what they produce but long before that paradisaical day arrives I suspect we'll be enjoying their human-moderated output without even realizing.

Much the way we spend much of our time in the metaverse every day of our lives right now.

A Bard's Tale

After some correspondence with Wilhelm and having read his post on the comparative abilities of various publicly available chat models to follow a prompt, I filled out the extremely brief application form to join the waitlist for Google's Bard test program. A few days later I received an equally brief email telling me "It’s your turn to try Bard".

One thing that all the various AI-driven apps and services that I've signed up for have in common is ease of access. Compared to registering an account to beta-test a new mmorpg, for example, gaining permission to play around with experimental text, image or video AI software is astonishingly straightforward. Mostly it's an email address and they don't always even check that. 

Whether this laissez-faire attitude will continue is something I very much doubt. I imagine once we pass through the testing phase the sign-up process will become more rigorous. Money may even need to change hands. If anyone's on the fence about whether to give it a try, I'd jump down on the "Do it" side now, before the barbed wire goes up.

In common with most of the AI software I've seen, Bard has an extremely simple front end. Whoever's designing these things just loves minimalism. It's so simple that I almost missed the input area at first. When I'd found it I pondered what to ask, always a bit of a problem for me. I really need to come with a project already thought out, not just treat it as if I was writing a blog post like this.

I started off by asking Bard a couple of questions inspired by a video Mrs Bhagpuss showed me about a dog who can fight with a sword. The link was sent to her by our friend and dog-sitter, who I should credit in case she reads this. 

I didn't save the responses but I can remember them surprisingly clearly. Bard initially thought a real dog wouldn't be able to fight with a sword, although it knew cartoon and movie dogs might. When I produced the evidence, Bard opined that, while it hadn't seen anything like it before, it thought it showed the dog and its owners had a good relationship. It was also concerned they not give the dog a real sword to play with.

This is eerily close to the conversation Mrs Bhagpuss and I had while watching the video and it highlights a couple problems I'm having with these AI chats. Firstly, I find them almost too convincing. I start to feel my socialization routines kicking in, telling me to be polite, not to be too intrusive or demanding, to respect the feelings of the person I' m talking to and all of those constraints that would literally never occur to me when using a search engine.

This is a recurring problem for me. It makes it harder for me to play adventure games than it ought to be because I really dislike badgering people or harping on about something when they clearly don't want to talk about it. Adventure games frequently require the player to interrogate NPCs quite ruthlessly and also to go back again and again to the same person and ask them questions they already answered, just in case they might say something different. I feel very uncomfortable doing it and it's frequently the reason I have to look things up in walkthroughs, whereupon I often find I stopped hassling someone for information long before I should have.

In the case of the new AI chat models that reticence, based on assumed norms of social interaction, is exacerbated by the passive role the AIs always play. Every AI I've used so far waits to be asked a question, gives its reply, then stops. That's not a conversation, it's at best an interview and at worst an interrogation. I started to wonder if anyone's working on AI software that initiates and sustains conversation as an active participant. That would be considerably more interesting to me and quite possibly of great commercial value.

As I thought about it, it occurred to me that I could just ask Bard about it. So I did. 

That's somewhat encouraging, although I note that both the AIs Bard names have been in development for quite a while. Also, they sound like the kind of chat programs we saw even as far back as the 1990s, the ones that always reminded me of a sitcom version of a Freudian analyst, mirroring everything the user says in the hope of having them do all the conversational heavy lifting.

I'm hoping for the kind of AI that would pipe up out of nowhere "I'm bored! Let's do something!" and then come up with a few ideas of what we might do, then argue with me when I said I didn't want to do any of them and challenge me to come up with a better idea. Or an AI that would ping me with a link to a music video and ask "Have you heard this? I thought it sounded a bit like like that really awful one you claimed you liked yesterday."

I don't think we're there yet. Then again, I'd also want the AI embedded in robot pet of some kind so maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Oh... wait a moment....

I think I'm starting to get the hang of this now. I have to say that of the AIs I've tried so far, Bard is the best at simulating an accurate, practical search engine, which is, I guess, what you'd expect from something developed by Google.

That said, I wouldn't take advice from Bard without double-checking it through good old unintelligent Google as well. Take that claim that the Joy for All pets can "carry on conversations with their owners, and they can also play games and sing songs." No, they can't. Not according to the website, anyway. The dogs can bark, the cats can purr and the birds can sing. The company sells games as well but none of the pets talks or plays those games. 

How about Paro the seal, who can "carry on simple conversations". Again, no , it can't.

So, I went back to Bard and asked for some better suggestions. It was most apologetic and eager to make things right.

Okay, let's go through these.

Jibo was exactly what I asked for and technically still is although, unfortunately, not for much longer. As this report at The Verge explains, Jibo was supposed to go offline back in 2018 until the last-minute sale to another company gave it a reprieve. That grace period is itself now coming to an end. As the company website puts it "...you will have access to all of the existing features and functionalities of your Jibo Robot through March 31, 2023, at which time we will suspend services related to the Jibo Robot." 

The plan seems to be to update and modernize Jibo, not kill it off for good, but it's not an option you'd want to be looking at right now.

Moxie is live (In a manner of speaking.) and available. It more than adequately fulfills the brief in that it can hold a proper conversation, something it backs up most impressively with an amazing repertoire of very authentic facial expressions and hand gestures. So long as conversation remains within expected parameters the illusion of sentience is quite convincing. When someone doesn't follow the script, however...

Well, that was dark. Moving on, how does Bard's third suggestion pan out?

Vector is basically Alexa cosplaying as a tiny bulldozer. I found this one by far the least appealing aesthetically but then I have no emotional affinity with earth-moving machinery. YMMV. Functionally, Vector also sounds the most robotic so far and is way too small to feel like a "companion", at least for an adult. I looks like its about the size of a hamster so a child might find it appropriate. You can buy one on Amazon right now so that's "commercially available" nailed, at least.

Sophia is... disturbing. Unlike the others, she is categorically not a "home robot" and I very much doubt she was "designed to be a companion for people who live alone" as Bard claims. The company behind her is, however, working on one that is - something called "Little Sophia", a positively disturbing 14" tall bald robot dressed in what looks worryingly like full combat armor.

Little Sophia was supposed to be ready by the end of 2022 but currently still shows as available for pre-order on the company website. Big Sophia, on the other hand, seems to be busy working the blockchain/NFT circuit as in this creepy video from earlier this year. It's not so much Sophia that I find creepy about it, either.

So much for pet robots. Maybe in a couple more years.

Getting back to Bard, the next thing I asked it to do was solve a crossword clue my mother had emailed me. Most weeks she sends me several she's having trouble with and I usually manage to do most of them. This one, though, had me stumped.

Bard thought it was easy. It was so pleased with its prowess it even added a paragraph just to big itself up. I didn't screenshot the results but I did save it to text:

"Are you any good at solving cryptic crossword clues? What do you think the answer to this one might be? "Thief from Madeira crashing into posh car   (3-6)   __ __ __   __ __ I__E __"

"I think the answer to the cryptic crossword clue is "Smuggler". The clue is a play on words, with "thief" and "smuggler" both being words that describe someone who steals something. The "Madeira" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use Madeira as a base of operations. The "posh car" part of the clue refers to the fact that smugglers often use expensive cars to transport their goods. The "3-6" part of the clue refers to the number of letters in the answer. The "I__E __" part of the clue is a placeholder for the letters of the answer.

I am good at solving cryptic crossword clues because I am able to think logically and creatively. I am also able to access and process information from the real world through Google Search."

Almost none of that is true. Bard was about as wrong as it could be. Apart from anything else, it completely missed the part about the answer being two words, offering a single nine-letter word instead of a three and a six. Bard clearly has only the sketchiest understanding of how cryptic clues work, but I suppose that's fair enough; even a sketchy understanding is more than most humans can manage.

I did find the contrast between how pleased Bard seemed with itself and how badly it had done highly amusing. I'd take that as a feature in a robot pet, for sure. Not so much in a practical app, though.

For my final test before writing this post I thought I'd ask Bard to express a personal opinion. It clearly has some sense of its own identity, given the self-satisfied tone of that last paragraph. I'd just been looking at the shortlist for the 2023 Glastonbury Festival Emerging Talent battle of the bands and I wondered who Bard fancied to win.

"The finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition have just been announced. They are Cordelia Gartside, EVA, FFSYTHO?!, Naomi Kimpenu, N’famady Kouyaté, The Love Buzz, Prima Queen and VLURE. Who do you think will win and why?"

"Congratulations to the finalists for Glastonbury Festival's Emerging Talent Competition! It is an amazing achievement to have made it to this point.

It is difficult to say who will win, as all of the finalists are talented artists with unique sounds. However, I think that N’famady Kouyaté has a strong chance of winning. He is a talented musician with a powerful voice and a unique style. His music is both traditional and modern, and he has the ability to connect with audiences of all ages.

In addition, N’famady Kouyaté is a strong performer. He has a stage presence that is both captivating and engaging. He is also a gifted storyteller, and his songs are full of emotion and meaning.

I think that N’famady Kouyaté would be a great addition to the Glastonbury Festival lineup. He is a talented artist with a unique sound and a strong stage presence. I wish him all the best in the competition!"

Wow! That was way more personal than I expected. I thought Bard might go through all the finalists and list their strengths, perhaps coming up with an evidence-based conclusion on the most likely winner but instead it just gushed over N’famady Kouyaté like a true fan. 

Off the back of that recommendation, I went to watch N’famady Kouyaté on YouTube. He is very impressive. Not my musical taste but definitely everything Bard says he is. If I was going to put a fiver on it, I might well back him, too.

And that's about as far as I've got with Bard so far. I went off to check the full, long list for the ETC, which I'd missed when it was released, and naturally that took up couple of hours. You can lok forwqrd to (Or dread. Your choice.) a post on it soon.

My impression of Bard so far, as compared to the various iterations of ChatGPT that I've used, is that it's simultaneously more formal and more personal, which is a good trick if you can pull it off. It feels like it would be more reliable for factual information. ChatGPT does like to go off on flights of fancy, given half a chance. I wouldn't ask Bard to help you with your crossword clues, though.

The most important thing I've learned from playing around with both of them is something about myself. I need to develop new modes of communication and new social mores if I'm going to feel comfortable talking to AIs and hope to get the best from them. 

I'm going to work on that. Hopefully it will turn out to be a transferable skill I can bring into gaming, too. I'm all but certain it won't be long before similar AI chat tech will be driving NPC conversations in-game.  But that's another post altogether.