Thursday, April 24, 2025

This is the twenty-ninth installment of West Wind, your daily drop of thoughts, ideas, and info for this Season.

So I recently came across this thing. It’s called the Figment, and it’s a handheld game console that uses an e-ink screen, the kind you see in Kindles or other ebook readers. Which means it won’t be used for standard games that require the screen to be refreshed constantly, it’s made for what they call “text adventures” but are really more like console-style visual novels where you use the D-pad to select a choice in the narrative and the action buttons to confirm it. This sounds fine, and I’m sure some people will enjoy it, though I’m still holding out for a device that looks like the original Kindle with a thumb keyboard in the lower portion so I can actually play real interactive fiction.

But that isn’t what makes this thing really interesting. It’s the claim by the developer that there will be AI-based software that will extend the content of a game beyond what the author originally wrote, including generating images and other choices that weren’t originally included. This raises the important question of why would someone write an interactive game if an AI model is just going to take it over and add on to it, and why someone would want to play a game like that. I judge we’re not far off from the novel-writing machines now.

The other thing to point out is that the AI has to take what is already there and build on it. This is why the current state of AI is basically safe and will never be able to progress to the singularity-Skynet that everyone is afraid of it becoming. It has to take existing material and build with it, unable to make its own. We are like that as creators too, since God created everything perfectly, and we use that perfectly created material to build with. But AI can be seen as a creation of the creation, so it’s a generation lower in terms of creative capacity. It’s building with imperfectly made materials, made from other imperfect materials. It’s like making a photocopy of a photocopy, the quality of each successive copy gets worse and worse. If AI models succeed somehow in creating new AI models themselves, they’ll be even worse than the ones we have now and able to do less with even less.