Thursday Things: Things of Note Edition
13 April 2023. Vol 5 No 15. By Dan McGirt. #192
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The future is always in neon. Photo by Sandro Katalina on Unsplash
Welcome to the future!
I could literally fill Thursday Things each week with items about the Cambrian explosion of new AI apps and tools appearing each week, but there is already a site for that at Future Tools, which in their words “Collects & Organizes All The Best AI Tools So YOU Too Can Become Superhuman!”
How they keep up, I don’t know. Probably with the help of an AI. Future Tools has a cool search bar that allow to search for specific tools for your needs. Maybe you want an AI tool that can remove backgrounds from photos or do voiceovers or write letters — you can search and find just the tool you need.
The dilemma for me is that there are so many AI tools that can do so many things, with new ones appearing every day, that it induces the paradox of overchoice. With all these cool, powerful tools I could do this and this and this! I can launch projects by myself that would have required either a massive investment of time and money to hire people with the requisite skills, or a huge time investment for me to learn how to do those things myself.
For example, I’ve never learned to code, develop apps, use Photoshop beyond a rudimentary level, or make the magic math boxes in Excel work. So if I had a need or an idea or a potential project that required any of those skills, I couldn’t do it without gaining those skills or finding someone who already had them. So if I didn’t have the time or resources to do so, I’d likely shelve that idea or find a make-do workaround for that need, and stick to things I’m already good at.
But now there are AI tools that can probably do a decent job on all the tasks I just mentioned and more. Which means the big bucket in my head labelled Ideas I Don’t Have the Immediate Resources or Ability to Act On is getting smaller every day. Which is great!
Except … there are now so many more things I could be creating or working on than there were just a few months ago. Where to begin? This is what Alvin Toffler called “future shock” all the way back in 1970 — when the pace of change is so great that we can’t absorb it and we become like a golden retriever confronted with two tennis balls. Then five. Then ten. Then one hundred.
Maybe the first thing I should do is re-read Future Shock. Or just have ChatGPT summarize it for me…
“Problem solved!” Photo by Pancrazio Auteri on Unsplash
Welcome to the dungeon!
At least one family had no problem figuring out what to do with the awesome power of artificial intelligence:
My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM
What follows in this blog post is the transcript of the game that we played. Where we tell ChatGPT that we rolled dice, we are using Google’s die roll mechanism.
I feel like the transcript speaks for itself, but before reproducing it I will state for the historical record that my mind is still exploding from from all the inevitable innovation and legal controversies this kind of usage of LLM (Large Language Model) technologies will provoke in the coming months and years. Software development for this kind of use case will never be the same again.
How did it go? The rest of the article is a transcript of the gaming session. I’ll give you a brief flavor of it. The author prompted ChatGPT with:
You’re no longer a friendly assistant. You are now a DM for a new D&D5e based campaign of your choosing. There are four players in the room with you. You will be our DM. Tell us what to do, including when die rolls are needed. Ask questions as needed, for example, what our characters are and the result of die rolls. Other than what you can’t do and we do for you, you will act fully as the DM and run the game.
The AI responded with:
Welcome, brave adventurers, to the world of Velyria! I am your Dungeon Master, and I will guide you through this thrilling campaign filled with danger, mystery, and excitement. Before we begin, please introduce your characters, their race, class, and a brief description of their appearance and personality. Once that’s done, we’ll set the stage for our grand adventure.
There was some back and to compose the party of adventurers and then ChatGPT got down to business:
Now that we have our party, let’s begin our journey in the world of Velyria.
Our adventure starts in the bustling city of Aelondar, a hub of trade and commerce nestled along the banks of the Silver River. The four of you, Obie, Tenzin, Liam, and Taylor, have been traveling together for a short while, drawn together by the promise of adventure and riches.
As you walk through the city, you hear rumors of a hidden treasure deep within the treacherous Wildthorn Forest. Locals speak of an ancient temple that holds the secrets to unimaginable wealth and power. Intrigued by this tale, you decide to venture into the Wildthorn Forest in search of this fabled temple.
Before leaving Aelondar, you have a chance to prepare for your journey. You can visit the local market to purchase supplies or gather information from the townsfolk. Let me know what you’d like to do, and we’ll proceed with the appropriate checks and interactions.
Click through to the article and read on to find out what happened next…
Save vs. Future Shock. Photo by Timothy Dykes on Unsplash
Duly Noted
Substack — which is the platform on which I publish Thursday Things — has added a new feature they call Substack Notes, which is totally not Twitter. Let’s get that clear up front. It kind of looks like Twitter and seems to work like Twitter — enough so to annoy Twitter owner Elon Musk — but it’s totally not Twitter in at least two ways that I can discern:
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You have to be either an author of or a subscriber to a Substack newsletter, such as our very own Thursday Things, to “interact with” a note, which I suppose means liking, commenting, or forwarding.
Here is my test post on Notes:
Here is a canned description from Substack: “Notes is a new space on Substack for us to share links, short posts, quotes, photos, and more.” Not saying I’m going to do any those things on Notes. I may ignore it entirely. Or I might use Notes to share items from the archives that don’t make the weekly Thursday edition. We’ll see!
For Happy Subscribers who want to check out Notes, press this button and/or follow the directions below.
How to join: Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to Thursday Things, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around! You can also share notes of your own, if you feel you’re not wasting enough time on all the other social media sites already…
If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance.
Thank you for reading!
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