It’s September, which means it's time for the Interactive Fiction Competition. However, I didn’t expect IFcomp to be another battleground
on which the AI conflict is playing out. I thought it was a settled issue ("you'll get AI and like it"), but Bruno Dias wrote a blog post about
how “Slop
comes for everything you love,” and his sentiments were echoed by Michael
Klamerus on
his blog.
I'm not happy about AI being welcomed into the Interactive Fiction community, but I also don’t think it’d be productive to advocate for my preferences — as Dias puts it, “the IF community has a certain trauma around gatekeeping of what 'counts as IF'.” I played and reviewed two AI-driven IFcomp entries from previous years, and they were both lacking.
(I also remain viscerally offended by "You Will Thank Me as Fast as You Thank a Werewolf," a non-interactive, procedurally generated text that was dumped into IFcomp five years ago and ranked dead last.)
I've given up on writing reviews for IFcomp. This year I don’t even know whether I’m going to play any entries. I don’t want to deal with the extra work of sifting through titles to find ones that aren’t AI-enabled, and Dias lays out the problem with submitting ratings:
Theoretically, you could rate the AI entries at a 0; whether you bother to 'play' them at first […but] summarily nuking them is a pretty obvious violation of the judge rules. I don't want to participate in a way that will be read by comp organizers as bad faith.
Alternatively, you can play and rate only entries that don't use AI. This would seem to be 'fine' but it creates a dynamic where the only people willing to play and rate the AI entries are people who are not going to object to them on grounds that they are AI, and thus they're getting judged by a different standard than everyone else's work. This means that the final result of the competition is at risk of legitimizing AI use or worse, making someone who put out real work feel bad that they placed behind someone who put out slop.
So that’s what’s up with entertainment. In the news, Ryan
Walters has resigned as state superintendent of Oklahoma Schools, which is
notable for his impressive track record of generating horrifying news headlines
due to terrible judgment.
There was is drive to start teaching
the bible in schools. When the state Department of Education revealed
its requirements for the bibles it would use, it turned out that, “there
are very few Bibles on the market that would meet these criteria, and all of
them have been endorsed by former President Donald Trump.”
He announced that out-of-state teachers would need to take
an “America
First” test before they could teach in Oklahoma. (It turns out that the
test wasn’t much more than a way to deliver
marketing leads to PragerU.)
And he wanted to set up chapters of Turning Point USA (Charlie
Kirk’s conservative organization) at every Oklahoma high school, but it looks
like he
resigned before that happened.
His biography isn’t complete without discussing that time an
image of a naked woman was displayed on a TV in his office during a school
board meeting. It could have been a bizarre
accident! But we’ll never know, because Walters denied it happened, falsely
claimed to have been cleared before an investigation was complete, and
insisted that anyone who said it happened was lying.
Image credit: Mote Oo Education / Pixabay
