Friday, January 27, 2023

Michael Crichton Predicted Our Response to ChatGPT

Dinosaur image via Pixabay

No, it wasn't in his explanation of Chaos Theory. 

It’s his description of Gell-Mann amnesia:

“You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well [….] You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. [….] you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

Most of the breathless hype about ChatGPT seems to come from people asserting that it will radically disrupt the work of someone else. When experts evaluate ChatGPT in their own disciplines, the same optimism is missing:

  • Musician Nick Cave has received “dozens” of ChatGPT-created songs that attempt to emulate his work. He is not impressed.

  • Stack Overflow, a website for programmers discussing code, found ChatGPT answers to be “substantially harmful” (emphasized in the original statement) for users who want correct information.

  • Journalists at Futurism looked at CNET's use of ChatGPT for creating news stories, and they found “a series of boneheaded errors.” 

  • In cybersecurity discussions, observers have pointed out that ChatGPT can’t do the actual work required for a successful attack. 

  • One app tried using ChatGPT responses in its online mental health services, and the experiment ended because “messages just felt better” when they were written by humans. 

When it comes to overblown predictions about ChatGPT’s effects, it’s odd to see credible sources change gears and forget what they know. At least Michael Crichton can explain what’s happening. 

TL;DR Just invoke Betteridge’s law when an article asks you “Can ChatGPT fill in mentorship gaps for Gen Z workers?

Friday, January 13, 2023

The Perils of Narrative Dissonance

I wrote a public review of Potion Permit — it’s up at Press SPACE to Jump — but the lack of narrative resonance in the game deserves a discussion of its own.

Tweet from @the_strix: "Boiled down, resonance is when a work connects to itself; thematically, archetypically, structurally. It has its own internal call and response, patterns, echoes, and other structural and rhythmic forms that *cohere into meaning*

Stardew Valley, the Rune Factory series, and Story of Seasons games all resonate with the idea of nurturing. They ask you to spend time and attention on short activities for long-term benefit, nurturing crops and relationships that yield rewards.

Potion Permit abandons the ideas of farming and growth. Instead, you run an infirmary to heal sick patients. You brew potions for healing, and your ingredients are gathered outside of town. 

The potions, and their constant demand for ingredients, turn every day into an extractive rampage. The only limits are your own endurance. The exact same objects will appear in the exact same places the following day, so take everything you can find!

Potion Permit screenshot showing tree stumps and crushed rocks.
Success is full of tree stumps, crushed rocks, and cut plants.

You can pretend to be a careful ecologist by taking only what you need, but the game mechanics completely ignore any suggestion of an ecological balance. There’s no penalty for stockpiling absurd amounts of raw materials, and you’ll probably need them later. 

This extractive idea of “harvesting” clashes with the story behind your mission to Moonbury: the player is supposed to heal a long-standing rift between the Medical Association and the local villagers. (The association was exiled after a series of mysterious accidents wiped out native plants that were unique to the area around town.)

Spoiler alert: the conflict turns out to be a big misunderstanding. Chemists didn’t cause these problems, but their knowledge can fix them. The ecological disaster sites end up being excuses to brew Potion X and apply it at Location Y. 

Once the native plants are restored, they're additional resources to extract for your potions. It doesn’t feel like a story about healing environmental damage when the gameplay has you unlocking new areas for exploitation.

All this activity is completely removed from the social dynamics of Moonbury and its inhabitants. In fact, they encourage you to extract additional resources to experience the next installment of their story. Getting to know villagers through daily interactions becomes the thing you do to find out what needs to be extracted next.  

Tweet from @the_strix: "So what are the tools of narrative design resonance? Theme is your strongest ally. Know your themes, know how they translate to mechanics. Thematic patterns echoing in parallel, or like nesting dolls. Characters illustrating themes or challenging them."

Potion Permit ends up feeling like a narrative of colonization and imperial expansion. The capital city, and its bureaucratic medical association, has sent the player to a backwards society that relies on a witch doctor. You are asked to improve that society by looting the surrounding landscape, saving the people from themselves.

I don’t think this colonization theme was intentional! But it’s an interpretation that fits into the spaces left by disjointed narrative design.