Google's Genie for Video Games, Learning Chess with AI, Cartoons and Stickers
Even the simplest tools can be the most useful (or fun).
Morning y’all!
I slept in and I probably hit the snooze button a few more times than necessary! I was dropping off a friend at the airport at the butt-crack of dawn and nothing was going to get in the way of jumping back into bed, especially since it was cold to boot. Nothing quite like warm covers on a cool morning!
Today I’ve got a few tools and thought-pieces that should be of interest to my friendly readers! Have a great Tuesday!
※\(^o^)/※
— Summer
Google hasn’t had some very positive press recently but they did reveal something that was exciting: Video game generation via AI! Called “Genie” you can effectively create interactive games via prompt (or even an image). You don’t need to know anything more. The full paper on this here:
They trained over 200k hours of platform games, mostly 2D work and the new system would allow creators to build game characters and objects. It’s not released in anyway that’s super-usable at the moment and is mostly research but the promise is large. If you’re into this type of stuff then I’d bookmark this and keep tabs on the development.
A few more examples can be seen here.
This next GPT seems very useful! Using ChatGPT you can convert a .mp4 file to a .gif and then download it for your use. Chase gives a good overview of his process.
Apparently you can change the speed too. Not too shabby if you ask me. I imagine that ChatGPT will continue to add to their base layer of features over time, thus cannibalizing their GPT store, but, that’s nothing new because that’s what Apple has done for decades.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
FlowGPT allows you to create chatbots. That’s about it. I mean, check it out and give it a try. I suppose the unique thing is that it doesn’t use ChatGPT exclusively (and their inherent limitations) and that you can also get tips for contributions. The more obvious benefit is that you can have NSFW chatbots. Bingo.
Chesski (great URL btw) is a tool to help you learn chess. Brilliant and simple. I imagine more tools like this to pop-up that will help any user anywhere learn how to play (and master) any game on the planet.
If they want to, of course. I was never good at chess and I never really cared to become better but I can understand how quickly this could be adopted for those that like to be more self-taught, per se. Rock on.
If I ever needed to create a unique sticker using generative AI I might have to use StickerBaker, a very simple tool that worked perfectly. Above, I created one for a “calico cat” and voila. Done.
Want to “cartoonify” yourself? Try this tool. I added a few real photos of myself to give it a real test-drive:
It then batches, attempts to describe the inputs, and then you can generate:
And here are the results:
For starters its making me age 10-20 years and I should have edited the prompt a bit better than trusting the initial read. Next time I suppose. But, the outputs are quality.
Finally, a thought piece by Scott Belsky on the ideas of generative AI and abstraction. His high-level thoughts include:
Every source plagued (read: monetized) by bias will be under siege. Very true and we’ve seen this really clearly with Google and Gemini.
What happens when AI browses the web for us? This is an interesting thought as we may become more dependent on the AI doing the “searching” for us.
Abstraction Hacking becomes the new SEO. Do you trust the results and then verify or do you verify after you trust the system?
A worthy read to get the mind moving. Have a good one folks.
