Weekly Geekly Rundown for May 5th, 2023

This Week We've Got Gaming Goodness, Westerns, and Film Reviews

AI Written Film Recommendation Lists?

One of the biggest threats of AI isn’t that they will replace human writers with a cheaper alternative, it’s that it will replace human writers with a less reliable alternative. As they exist today AIs are good at generating what Harry Frankfurter calls “bullshit.” There are many reasons for this and those reasons are what prompted Princeton Computer Science Professor Arvind Narayanan to call tools like ChatGPT “bullshit generators.”

This tendency of AIs to generate bullshit has Psychology Professor Jonathan Haidt worried about the future of Liberal Democracy. I think that Haidt’s recent forays into tech criticism sound a lot like traditional “what’s wrong with kids today” stories, but I’m not much into catastrophizing and imagining nightmare scenarios. Instead, I’m worried about how AIs will continue an already existing trend of not fact checking pop culture articles.

The lack of research and fact checking in a lot of the pop culture press is deeply upsetting to me, and I’m not talking about little errors like me misreading my notes and saying In a Lonely Place came out in 1954 when I meant 1950. People are capable of error, that’s why we have editors (or at least did) in journalism. I stated that wrong and I’ll be posting a comment in my comments section correcting that. What I am talking about is the almost systematic laziness of pop culture reporting/commentary that misinforms people as it asserts expertise. I’ve seen this a lot with discussion of the fall of the old game company TSR, or discussions of Trademark vs. Copyright, but those are only small examples. These kinds of things are everywhere and they will be even more widespread with AI written articles.

My film critic friend Luke Y Thompson recently shared this AI written list of the “Best John Cassavetes Film” as an example. I was reticent to share it because directing traffic to the site might lead to more crap articles like this one. Instead, I’ll give you a rundown he shared on Facebook of the things the article got wrong.

Shared by a friend of a friend, and it's unreal: "AI has reached the world of film history! Herewith an amazing article that has bland write-ups of 10 Cassavetes films -- keep in mind there are only eight truly personal and independent films by JC. The opening "biography" of John was clearly written by a robot of some kind, as none of the "facts" are true:

"John Cassavetes was an American film director, producer and actor. He is best known for his films “Emile Hirsch: A Life” (2008), “Faces Places” (2017) and “John Cassavetes’s 9” (2018).

Cassavetes was born on February 6th, 1928 in Atherton, CA. He studied at the University of Southern California and worked as a freelance cameraman before he started making his own films in New York City during the late 1950’s.

He won an Academy Award for Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium for his screenplay of “Shadows” (1959).

Cassavetes directed more than fifty feature films over his lifetime; many of these were low-budget independent films made with nonprofessional actors. His first major hit was Graffiti (1973),

which starred Peter Falk as a fast-talking detective tracking down a thief who has stolen his wife’s jewelry. Other hits include The Killing of a Chinese Bookie (1976), West Side Story (1961), The Killing of a Snapping Turtle (1971) and Shadows (1959)."

Thanks to Eric Malitz for this stunning bit of robot prose."

How the Normal Distribution Can Make Your D&D Games Better

Bob World Builder has a fun video on how to use the bell curve to make your game better by using it as the foundation for your random encounter tables. It’s a way of preferencing some outcomes over others while still allowing for random variation. It’s an interesting discussion and reminds me that I need to write up my “Charisma was never a dump stat” article soon. Heck, maybe I’ll even do a video for it.

New Savage Worlds Super Hero Campaign Coming Out

In some of the most exciting news I’ve read in some time, Pinnacle Entertainment Group is releasing an updated version of their Necessary Evil super hero campaign setting for the Savage Worlds Roleplaying Game. In Necessary Evil, supervillains must take up the mantle of defending the Earth from an alien invasion after all the Earths heroes have been destroyed. It’s a fun premise and is a mashup of V, Independence Day, Marvel’s Kree/Skrull War, and DC’s Invasion.

You can read about the campaign over at Rob Wieland’s Forbes column. He’s got a good rundown of the project.

Classic Film Recommendation

This week’s classic film recommendation is the Anthony Mann directed 1952 Western Bend of the River starring Jimmy Stewart. I’ll be giving a full review of the film early next week on my YouTube channel, but for now I’ll just tell you to go see it.

I’ve got more to say about a lot of things, but time is short and I’ve got grading to do.

What are you excited about?