Ron Edgecomb

The care VRChat is putting into this discussion is encouraging, especially its respect for creators who use AI and those who don't. Not everyone will agree, but this feels like a step in the right direction toward an open, productive community.

DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is genuinely a blast to work with. It surprisingly excels at the vast majority of tasks I've been giving it, not to mention it's super duper fast. 🐳

Huh? Take a look at the charts, lol.

Can’t wait to see Kimi K3.1 Pro on KeyGen Bench. @JustMicrock keygen.micr.dev/

Travis Knight's recent comments about AI got me thinking about its place in creative work. I wrote about how these tools can expand what artists can accomplish, and why human judgment, craft, and control continue to be just as important. 🛠️

That's a notable shift from June, when he told TechRadar that "artificial intelligence can be a tool, or it could be a crutch," and that it isn't a technology to fear. I respect Travis as a director, and the craftsmanship behind Laika's films, but I think his earlier take was the right one. I find the categorical rejection of AI as a tool disheartening, especially considering Laika itself collaborated with Intel to develop machine-learning tools that automate tedious rotoscoping and facial seam cleanup, freeing artists to focus on the creative aspects of their work. Now, that's not the same as modern generative AI, but it illustrates that the meaningful distinction isn't whether AI is involved, but how it's used and what role human creativity and judgment continue to play. There's an enormous difference between using AI to generate an entire film with minimal human involvement and using it to help an artist explore ideas, refine concepts, or accomplish something that might otherwise be prohibitively difficult. Look at what Zack London (@Gossip_Goblin) and his team are accomplishing. They're using generative AI to create visually ambitious, narratively rich science-fiction films that would ordinarily require vastly larger production budgets. According to London, their upcoming feature, Gods Don't Give Gifts, was self-financed and employed 30 people over nine months, including writers, voice actors, composers, and post-production artists. The score contains no AI music at all. These aren't people typing one simple prompt and letting ChatGPT make all the creative decisions. They're building original worlds, writing stories, directing performances, and exercising artistic judgment throughout production. AI provides the means to realize creative ambitions that might otherwise remain financially out of reach. And this extends well beyond filmmaking. AI has extraordinary potential to accelerate discoveries in science, medicine, and mathematics. Dismissing the technology as a whole because of particular applications ignores that potential. I also don't think autonomy disqualifies something from being a tool. A technology doesn't stop being a tool simply because it can execute increasingly complex tasks without constant human intervention. It only changes how we need to think about oversight and responsibility. There can be legitimate arguments to be made about consent, training data, intellectual property, job displacement, and artistic integrity, but I don't think the answer is to draw a sweeping line around an entire technological field and declare it illegitimate.

Woohoo! 🥳

Yes, it's not an LLM. But Embark's audio team has said the commentators are "AI text-to-speech" built from the actors' voices. That's neural voice cloning, which is generative AI. Obviously, nobody recorded Scotty saying your gamertag, and screen readers using generic synthetic voices is not the same as cloning a performer to generate lines they never recorded. pcgamesn.com/the-finals/ai-v…

Is every popular UEFN game just a reskinned version of something that was trending on another platform, like, a year ago?

Ten weeks down, only one more to go.

Nine weeks down, only two more to go! 😎

New SOTA just dropped.