The Nosy Gamer And AI

I have a bad habit of missing notable dates. One of those dates was the 17th anniversary of the launching of The Nosy Gamer which occurred on 16 February. I'm going to take the belated opportunity to feature not the content over the past year, but how AI has shaped the content over the last year or two.

My AI of choice turned out to be Copilot. I think I was trying to cut against the grain and at the time ChatGPT was all the rage. When I first tried AI programs I tried them out by looking up facts in the video games I play. The results were, to put it mildly, disappointing. Apparently MMORPGs are enough of a niche genre of game that the models really don't receive a lot of information. At this point Copilot isn't horrible, although still at times is a couple of years out of date.

But I've been assured, especially at work, that AI is the future. So, as I've posted in the past, I'm using my blogging to gain some experience with AI programs at the same time. The one I've mentioned in the past is using Copilot to help with the scripts I use to produce the global PLEX market graphs every week. I use Python, with which I need to practice for work as well.

I also use the AI to come up with ideas and research on topics as well. One topic I hope to expand on in the next month or two is the Samurai Daishō post I wrote back in January. The comparison of Final Fantasy XIV's Warrior of Light to a samurai daishō was spot on, but I really needed the links to know I wasn't dealing with an AI hallucination. With the links, any hallucination was mine, which as the author is the way the blame should fall.

Using AI to do research has led to an insight I'm not sure a lot of people in the business world will pick up on. Following the links leads to an expanded look at a topic. Combining the machine perspective with that of a source's author can lead to something that either makes me look really smart or really stupid. Hopefully the former happens a lot more than the latter. From what I've seen, a lot of people don't worry about looking dumb if they can shave a few hours of time off of a task.

One thing I've found is that Copilot can pretty accurately review a web page or a YouTube video if given the transcript. I've used AI for that purpose a couple of times in the past, although I made sure to add my own comments into the review. I may start doing that again for EVE Frontier. I want to keep track of development of the game but don't have time to play this development cycle. Letting Copilot give me updates would help. And if I have Copilot give me summaries of articles and videos turning those into blog posts doesn't take that much more effort.

One thing I'm wondering about is how much "smarter" Copilot has gotten about video games over the last few years. I'm planning on writing a few posts where Copilot tells me how to fit ships and fly them in EVE. The only caveat on the plan is I have to actually fly the ships in missions before publishing a post on the subject. At this point I'm having fun flying two different Ishkur fits with pilots with vastly different skills. I'm also playing with an Ishtar fit to blitz level 4 missions using sentry drones. That one I'm having some problems with so I have Copilot trying to teach me how to use sentries.

I also need to try applying Copilot's knowledge (or lack thereof) to Final Fantasy XIV. I'm not quite sure how to do that yet. But I do want to show how well, or poorly, AI knows video games. Honestly, except for losing millions of ISK in dead sentry drones, I don't really have a big interest in which direction to answer falls. I just want some entertaining content.

So yes, if anyone asks, I am using AI to create blog posts. But the plan is to make the use of Copilot obvious and hopefully get some chuckles, or at least smiles, from using the software in unusual ways.