AI is really having it rough these days. I dunno hardly any blogger that admits to it having any sort of use, except bad uses. I can see their point. Copyright infringement on a massive scale. Artists out of work. Quality writers being pushes aside for emotionless dreck. I’ve used AI for a couple of years now; I know all those things.
I don’t believe that AI should be used to replace human creativity. It’s pretty much the only thing we’re good at; why would we want to give our very best ability to a machine?
So those paragraphs probably turned everyone off this post by now. But. Some background.
I like to play games – no surprise there. I like to stream while I’m gaming, for bunches of reasons. I like to make YouTubes of the best bits. Sometimes people stop by who I love to talk to. Sometimes I can look back and see how things went so terribly wrong; or right. That’s where those best bits come in to play.
I would like to have more people watch my videos out of simple vanity. I think the games I play are pretty cool; I like to share. Problem is, I don’t really want to go the webcam route, or to provide narration. I’m pretty bad at staying in one place; I’m always getting up and moving around. I just want to play a game, and share it.
My current Twitch channel is just a game playing. That’s fine to an extent. But during the last few weeks when I was collecting Palworld skins, I had a chance to see what the other streamers were doing. Real streamers. Sure, their game info was heavily advertising that they had drops on; and most of the people watching were clearly there just for that. But, the stream was more than just a movie of the game running. There was stuff. Design. I could do this.
But wouldn’t it be more fun if I did it with AI?
So I asked ChatGPT to design one for me. You’re gonna love this.
I guess that rectangle upper off center is the game? I dunno. But in the accompanying text, it had some good suggestions that it did not follow in this rendering.
Game title. Character art. A place for subscriber info. Complementary background. Solid suggestions, right?
I played around with OBS and came up with this:
I pasted this into ChatGPT and asked for a critique. It thought the background was distracting. It didn’t like the font for the Plane of Torment. It thought the character art got lost and would look better if it were animated.
I used a filter to dim the background. I changed the font and made it more readable. I added a little bug in the corner for my blog’s logo. I later added my blog URL, Twitch channel and YouTube, but this screenshot doesn’t have that. ChatGPT thinks I should add a border around the game area, so I might do that. It also had some guidelines on readability for the URLs I added. It’s good advice.
If you don’t ask the AI for criticism, it will glow you up. Tell you you’re the best at everything – a genius. But if you ask for a critique, it can be startlingly insightful. I have no idea how it even comes up with these suggestions. I know the text is just statistically putting one word after another, but this goes way beyond a Markov Chain.
One of the best techniques for learning anything is to try and explain it to someone else. An AI didn’t come up with this. The other best thing is to have an expert sit next to you and guide you. Both those things come into play with AI. There’s nobody out there who knows what I want better than me. I just need some help getting there, that’s all.
So, AI. Try as I might, I just can’t hate it.
And if you want to watch me crawl through the PS2 EverQuest games, you can check out my streams at twitch.tv/tipa16384. But the best bits will be on YouTube, eventually. And maybe because I’ve started to care a little more for how it looks, it will be as fun to watch as it was to play.