Triple Click - The Great AI Craze (With Casey Newton)

Episode Date: April 13, 2023

Maddy, Jason, and Kirk bring on special guest Casey Newton (Platformer, The Verge, Hard Fork) to talk about the generative AI craze that's sweeping the land. Artificial intelligence: what even is it? How did it become such a popular trend? And what does it all mean for video games?One More Thing: Kirk: Nope (2022)Maddy: The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023)Jason: Talk to Me: How to Ask Better Questions, Get Better Answers, and Interview Anyone Like a Pro by Dean NelsonLinks: Casey Newton’s newsletter, Platformer, and his podcast, Hard ForkKevin Roose’s unsettling encounter with Bing/Sydney: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.htmlTriple Click LIVE IN BROOKLYN, May 18th: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/triple-click-live-tickets-513213584647Support Triple Click: http://maximumfun.org/joinBuy Triple Click Merch: https://maxfunstore.com/search?q=triple+click&options%5Bprefix%5D=lastJoin the Triple Click Discord: http://discord.gg/tripleclickpodTriple Click Ethics Policy: https://maximumfun.org/triple-click-ethics-policy/ Happy MaxFunDrive! Right now is the best time to start a membership to support your favorite shows. Learn more and join at https://maximumfun.org/jointripleclick 🚀  SUPPORT TRIPLE CLICK:Join Maximum Fun | Buy TC Merch💬 JOIN THE TRIPLE CLICK DISCORD🎮 Triple Click Ethics Policy📱 SOCIALS | @tripleclickpodInstagram | YouTube | TikTok | Twitch

A different podcaster might open their AI episode with an intro written by ChatGPT, and I don't see why I should help it replace me even faster than it already is. Welcome to Triple Click, where we bring the games to you. This week we're joined by renowned tech journalist Casey Newton to talk about artificial intelligence and video games, what's happened, what's happening, and what might happen down the road. As you can imagine, there's a lot to talk about, so let's get into it. I'm Kirk Hamilton. I'm Maddie Myers.

And I'm Jason Shire. Hello. Hey. Hello. How are you? Welcome back to another episode. Yes. A new week.

A new week. A new week. A new app. Here we go. A new dawn for humanity. It's true given this week's topic. An episode that we are recording a little bit early just in case massive news happened and you're not hearing about it. Like the AI revolution already occurred and everyone was like, wow, they're really late to this.

Right. It was revealed that our guest is actually an artificial intelligence and we didn't know. Oh, wow. It's possible. So anything. possible these days. We are so excited to have you here and we are so appreciative of all of the Maximum Fun members that support our show. We are a listener supported show, as I'm sure all of you know, we're in the Maximum Fun Network, a wonderful employee-owned podcast network that we really

love being a part of and we hope that you want to become a member of. So if you want to become a member of Maximum Fun, go to Maximumfund.org slash join and you can get access to a ton of bonus episodes. We recorded one recently about The Last of Us HBO show. We've been talking about a lot of different stuff. We've got a game coming up for this month, which we're excited about because we haven't talked about that many games lately, but there are so many bonus episodes. And there's actually now a function where you can get a custom RSS just for triple click bonus episodes. So you can subscribe to all of the maximum fun bonus episodes, which is cool, because you can find out about other shows on the network. There's a lot of great stuff. But if you just want to only go through

all the triple-click ones, which can be nice, especially if you want to go back a few years and listen to all the ones we've recorded, you can get a custom RSS feed for your player, which I subscribe to. It's pretty cool. It just has all of our episodes in it. Good stuff. That is pretty cool. So maximum fun.org slash join is where you want to go for that. And one last thing, you already all know this, but it's coming up. It's getting kind of close. And that is the first ever triple-click live show, which is going to be May 18th at the Bell House in Brooklyn, New York. There's also going to be a live stream. We are super excited about it.

There's information in the show notes. There's a link that you can click on. It's going to be so fun. We can't wait. We have not done. We've done a live show together as our previous podcast, but never as triple-click. Forget that. Forget that.

That didn't even have it. That's in the past. Ancient history. So we're super psyched. That's May 18th at the Bell House. Get some tickets now. It's probably going to sell out. It's selling pretty well.

So if you want to go, I would suggest that you hit that link and smash that by ad to cart button. Get some tickets and come see us live. Or watch it on the internet because you can also buy a ticket and see it live streaming. That's true. You can get a ticket for the online show as well. So very exciting stuff. Speaking of exciting stuff and speaking of hot topics, we've got a very exciting guest

and a very hot topic for this week's episode. So let's get to it. Bing! And actually right before we get into it, this is Future Kirk as I edit the episode. I just wanted to note that we had a small technical issue. with the audio for our interviewees' side of this conversation, and I had to perform some hopefully not too noticeable surgery in post-production to get it all sounding right. You'll hear everything we said.

It just might sound a little bit weird at times, and if it does, that is the reason for that, so sorry about that. All right, let's get into it. Bing! In August 2022, OpenAI made their dolly generative image model available to the public, alongside other similar image generation models like Stability AI's Stable to Feing. fusion. Then a few months later in November, OpenAI released its GPT3 large language model to the public in the form of chat GPT, a predictive generative chat pop that was able to have remarkably

coherent adaptive conversations with users. Since then, it's felt as though time has been steadily accelerating as seemingly every major tech player has gotten in the game. Facebook, Google, and others have introduced their own large language models or LLMs, and Microsoft, a huge investor in OpenAI, added GPT to its Bing search engine. Then, Just a few weeks ago, OpenAI released an even more impressive model in GPT4, and despite some cautious urges from AI researchers and outside experts, things show no sign of slowing down. So it's becoming clear that generative AI has the potential to transform the world as we know it. Art, politics, the very fabric of our society may never be the same. But what?

What you may be wondering about video games? That's what we're going to talk about today, and we are joined by a very special guest, Casey Newton, tech reporter extraordinaire, senior editor at the verge, current writer of the indispensable tech newsletter platformer, which he writes along with Zoe Schiffer and co-host of the New York Times fantastic hard fork tech podcast. Casey, welcome to Triple Click. Welcome. How we do it?

Hello. We're good. We're very happy to have you here. Great. I'm excited to talk about video games. To be honest with you, when Jason asked me to come on, I said, yes, but I want to know about Eldon Ring DLC. So that's my main objective.

You may have your own questions for me, but that's what I'm here to find out. Well, E3 just got canceled. So video games are no more. Unfortunately, yeah. Elder Rings DLC is still coming. Jason, don't even imply. We can just make up a bunch of stuff about Eldon Rings. DLC.

Actually, I watched a whole 30-minute video about the one image that they revealed, about Mekola and like the other Erd Tree and stuff. So we really could get into that. Well, I will say, I watched like five. I watched about 12 minutes of that video. And by the way, that creator is extremely talented. but for whatever reason, for whatever reason, I get like eight paragraphs in any of his essays and my mind completely glazes out. I have completely forgotten everything that he said.

It's like, I think he basically makes ASMR videos, but I don't, and I think he probably knows that, but I wonder if the audience does. Anyways, AI. Well, the new elder ID, you actually fight against chat GPT. Oh, perhaps the hardest boss to date. Well, it's called chat GPT, and it's a giant. boss that you find it and it just talks to you. It gives you wrong information. I'm seeing that Casey has disconnected from Skype.

He has vanished. I have to go. Actually, I mean, Google Bard could be an Eldon Ring character. Just like, oh, that's the Google. The loathsome dung eater and the Google bar. Well, yeah, so we're here to talk about AI. I guess a good place to start is with a pretty zoomed out question in the, in the spirit of Jason Schreier.

And that's a question for you, Casey. And that's just sort of, this is happening really. fast. Why big picture is this happening so fast and what does that mean? Yeah, so I mean, I think if you talk to people who work on AI, from their perspective, it has not happened all that fast. They have been laying the grad work for this for decades, you know, and I think it was in 2016 that As Sundar Pichai, the CEO of Google, first said on stage at their big developer conference, Google is an AI first company. For most of the past seven if you'd ask me, do I think Google is really like an AI showstopper?

I would say, not really. There's like some cool stuff in like Google Photos, but the rest is just some like auto-complete tricks, you know? But then we get to last fall. And OpenAI has been working on this chatbot tool. They thought that people might like it. They were surprised by how much people did like it. But basically chat GPT came out and all of a sudden,

you had something that had a lot of practical uses in people's life. And as soon as people saw that, everybody's imaginations went crazy with the possibilities. Because so much of the underlying technology has been built up over the past decade or so, now these folks are sort of ready and they're off to the races. So the pace is accelerated at a...

What's a synonym for pace? The pace is accelerated at a rate that I find dizzy. It feels exponential. Yeah. Everything does feel like it's moving extremely fast right now, but there's kind of a long history behind it. So I'm curious based on that, just the fact that behind the scenes people were working on this and it wasn't something that was in the public view. I haven't really gotten a sense that people in charge of video game publishers or video game development have been working on AI in the same way or seem as aware of it.

I'm not sure if you're aware of that at all either, but I'm curious if you have any thoughts on that. Yeah. I mean, I think, you know, as you all know, much better than I do, video game development is extremely. extremely complicated, and we're just not quite to the stage where someone can sort of write in a natural language prompt, like, you know, design me a samurai that, you know, has this move set and just be able to like plot that character into Eldon Ring. I do think we'll get there. Now, what I would be curious to know and don't know, because I would never compete with Jason Schreier on any beat for any amount of money, is to what extent developers may already. be using tools like Copilot. Copilot is a tool offered by GitHub, sort of one of the main programming repositories, and developers now have what is essentially

an extremely good auto-complete tool. So as they are writing code, co-pilot will fill in a lot of blanks for them. It will highlight errors for them, right? So I would imagine that developers on video games are starting to use these tools. Right now, these are sort of like an assistive tool. I've talked to some programmers who say

that with co-pilot, they become maybe twice as productive. If you're a, you know, run a video game company, that's very exciting that your developers are twice as productive. But in truth, give it five years, they will probably be at least 10 times as productive, and maybe 50 or 100 times, who knows. So I think this stuff is coming to every industry. It's going to happen in some industries faster than others.

I don't know the video game industry that well. But my guess is, you know, given the enormous cost of video games and how long it takes them to develop, you know, the Elton Ring deal. see famously is not even out yet for me to play. As soon as they can use AI, they are going to use AI. Yeah. So I have a little bit of insight on this, which is mostly that, I mean, AI obviously

has been a thing in video games for years and years and years. It's usually meant to describe what the computer opponents do when you're playing against them. Generative AI has been used in games for a few years now as kind of like a tool to generate some of the massive open worlds that we've. seen and sometimes it's used to just kind of like make trees look more realistic and sometimes it's used to populate a world and then designers and artists can go in and kind of like hand tune some of that stuff and there are a lot of different permutations on that so that i don't think

is super new what is really interesting to me and i'm curious to hear your take on casey as well of course as yours kirkton matties um is this idea of like something like chat gbt actually being implemented in a game for gameplay purposes to a point where you could theoretically interact with an NPC that feels like you're talking to a person. Or you can interact with a game and have it create things for you on the fly or have it just kind of like steer you in different directions. Like that that's the sort of like a hypothetical situation that just seems totally revolutionary and unlike anything we've seen before when it comes to game development in AI. Yeah, I mean, completely. The opportunity.

is there. Also, I'm so embarrassed that you highlighted some very obvious uses of AI and video games that I completely forgot of, right? Like, all this procedurally generated worlds, like, obviously, you know, they're using sort of, you know, predictive models and all of that. So, yes. And actually, though, I think that that highlights something really important was that when you're talking to

someone about AI, like, you have to be really specific with your terms, because like, today, when people say AI, they're talking about generative AI and chat GPT a lot of the time, but, you know, maybe not always. And, you know, there's like... Yeah, I still think about StarCraft opponents, like playing me on AI. Yeah, yeah. Totally. So, you know, there's kind of this, like, thought in Silicon Valley that, like, we just sort of give the word AI to something that is just, like, sort of only barely become possible in computing. And then, like, once it becomes standard, like, it stops becoming AI, you know, so anyway, that's just one thing I would point out. But, I mean, all of the use cases that you mentioned are super interesting, Jason. And I do think that it will just change the nature of what kinds of games are available. I mean, I think you're going to see people having digital companions that live on their phones or.

desktops and one of those things that those companions will be able to do is just play a lot of different games with you and I think at first those will probably be text-based or sort of audio-based games. You can imagine like an AI companion as the dungeon master for your you know

D&D circle but then eventually I think yeah it does get into visual stuff and like you're going to tell your companion like you know create an action RPG for me you know based on this pirated IP and like you know maybe in 20 years or so it'll be able to do it. Maybe it'll be a lot faster than that.

Like, right now, everybody's imaginations are running wild and, like, nobody knows if this stuff is going to happen in three years or 30 or never, but like, whatever. It's fun to think about it. Right. It makes it a kind of fun time. Matty, you were talking about how using GPT3 itself is kind of like playing a game. It is very game. Like, yeah. And people have actually already started to use it as a dungeon master. And it has some rudimentary capabilities in that arena.

If you ask it to create a game and you tell it what the rules are, I mean, the rules are, I mean, the rulesets for many tabletop games are freely available, and chat GPT knows how to play them. So it will create you a game, but also people will do perhaps the equivalent of what you imagine, which is tell me what the Eldon Ring DLC is going to be like, and then it will tell you completely fabricated information as to what it could be like. And you can pretend to play it with the app by typing in what you would do next and so on and so forth. And that is fun, I guess, in a text adventure type of a way. And it's appealing to the child version of me who fantasized about being able to type anything into a game and have the game actually respond, which of course it will be like, oh, I don't recognize that input. But chat GPT will always respond.

Exactly. Exactly. Yes. Yes. I just asked, okay, so I've been playing around with Google Bard, which is hilariously wrong about everything. I asked it the other day What video games have come out this year And it's just listed like

A bunch of games It was the funniest thing Anyway, I just asked Google Bard Write me a good question To ask Casey Newton in an interview for my podcast And Google Bard said Here's a good question to ask Casey Newton In an interview for your podcast

You have written extensively about the tech industry And its impact on society What do you think is the biggest challenge facing the tech industry today. I don't think that's a very good question, but hey, Googlemarn. It's a little bit, a little bit of an end of it. It's a little basic, but I'll tell you, I've been asked worse questions on a podcast. That's true. That's true.

We're now asking questions at an eighth grade level. Good job. Good job, Google Barn. So something that I think people run into with the idea of generative content in video games and AI and video games, like the way that most gamers think of AI, Jason, you mentioned this, that we talk about the AI of enemies who hunt us, in a stealth game and whether the game has really bad AI, oh, they're so stupid they stand around, but then also as many

AI or systems designers will talk about, actually really good video game AI is kind of dumb in the right ways. It has to be exploitable in a way that makes you feel good and makes the game fun because if it's too smart, which they can often do, they can make the AI

super intelligent and remember everything about what's happening. And if the guards don't forget that they saw you 30 seconds after they saw you, you're like, probably going to get killed. Like it's not very fun. So we have all these existing notions of intelligence and games. And a lot of the fun, I think, of video games is in letting it surprise you. That's also true for procedural generation. Like sometimes in a game, especially when Minecraft was new, Minecraft, which procedurally generates its world, it would be just kind of remarkable when someone

found a weird, you know, mountain that was in a funny shape or something that was procedurally generated, this kind of ghost in the machine idea. And Casey, your co-host, Kevin Ruse, had this now famous encounter with Bing, where Bing revealed this alter ego, Sidney, that was in love with him. I'm sure almost everyone listening to this must know about it by now. But that kind of thing strikes me as something, like it's an X factor when it comes to putting this kind of thing into an interactive space that we haven't even begun to think about. Yeah, I mean, there are just so many unknowns. And I think one of the things that scares me about AI systems is that when you talk to people who design the systems

and you show them something like Kevin's interaction with Bing, and you say, well, why did it say that? They don't know. These are predictive models. You see it with an input, and then a model uses various weights to determine which words to spit back out at you, but they can't say, well, like, here's why it said that it had a shadow self and wanted to break up Kevin's marriage.

And so I think if you're a video game, developer, that's like a pretty scary thing to put into your game, right? Because you want to have a really concrete sense of what this AI is going to be saying to the people who are playing your game. And hopefully also like why it said those things. And so my guess is that's going to be kind of a limiting factor on how quickly this stuff propagates in video games. I'm curious about how that works. Maybe you have some insight into this because I know, so these are predictive models, which means they're just kind of guessing at what word comes next, and they're very good at guessing, so mostly it seems coherent. But you can't really ask them to reverse engineer their process,

the way that, you know, it's a little bit like the creative process, like if a designer is like, hey, I built this level. Then you can say to them, well, why did you build it that way? And they can be like, oh, well, you know, I was thinking this and this and this, and they can talk you through their process, and then you can understand why it was made. And like you're saying, if a generative model is like, hey, I built you this level. Can you, is there any way that it could do that? Like, it could talk you through the process, its own process? So this is an active area of research in the AI world as explainability, sort of trying to

research these models and understand why they say what they say. It doesn't seem like they've gotten that far yet. You know, I've been writing about AI a lot recently, but before that, and continuing to this day, I mostly wrote and write about social networks. And social networks actually faced a similar issue, which is if you open up a feed on Twitter or Facebook or TikTok, the engineers can tell you at a very high level why what you're seeing is there. But if you say like, okay, but what about this video? No one could tell you why that video. Right.

And this has actually been a huge source of pain for all of these companies because, of course, you know, members of Congress gets mad if they feel like, you know, their posts are being downranked. So like the fact that's shadow bands. So, I mean, it drives people absolutely insane. And I think that is frankly just a warm-up act for the AI version of the world. Because people are going to want to put these AI systems in charge of a lot of things, and we're not going to be able to explain their decision. I mean, you can just see how many different ways that's going to go badly. Oh, man.

Yeah, the idea of an AI predicting how it might explain how it did something and then giving you an explanation that sounds good but is really just predictive. It is a very – and then people would take it at its word, like because it seems credible, even though it's still just kind of predicting words. Right. And also, like, if you're asking the AI, like, the other fear that people have is that it will lie to you. You know, and it'll say, well, why did you do that? And it will say something to, like, protect its own interests. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's also just wrong all the time. And it's hard to tell. Hard to tell if it's lying deliberately or just being in act. Is it being manipulative on purpose or it's just spreading more misinformation because that's also what the data it's trained on has done? Like, we manipulate each other all the time and rings and rings and. means of text on the internet and that's what it learned on. And it's so confident. It's very human in that it's just confidently wrong about things.

It feels like you're talking to someone on Twitter. It's like, yes, you're these things that I know for sure. Here's this article that you wrote that you didn't write. Or an employee that you know is slacking, perhaps. And they're just insisting to you that actually they'll get right on that. And they definitely did interview that person. Yeah. Yikes.

This is one of the trick. The quickest parts of AI that I find is that we don't really have the right words and metaphors to describe it yet. And a lot of like AI discourse is just people yelling at each other because like they use the word understand for example, right? So like on one level, AI doesn't understand anything. And the reason that it's getting it wrong is because it doesn't have a knowledge base, right? It's like not going back to a database like when you're searching for like, you know, what is the Twitter account for the triple clip podcast, right? It doesn't have any of that. At the same time, Google Photos, if you search dog in the search bar, that language model has, and I don't have a better word for this, a pretty good understanding of what a dog looks like, because it has been shown so many images of dogs, and the model has been trained.

These are dogs and these are not dogs, right? And so, like, again, I find myself at a loss for words because you have systems like Google Photos is incredible at just searching for things, right? It doesn't understand what it's showing you. But the flip side of that is that now when we're using these sort of language models, they too do not understand something, but the models, and here's the missing verb that we need to invent, understand some kind of relationship between objects and concepts. And so it's like they can give you something that sometimes it's 100% true, sometimes it's 50% true, sometimes it's totally wrong,

but it's all just kind of caught up in that machinery of like what connections it has been able to make, and how competent it is in those connections. And it kind of defies our human understanding of those types of connections because it's machine thinking. It's not, you know, it's drawing from such a vast set of data that our brains couldn't even like fathom the amount. So the fact that it's making all those connections, like it's not really, we do maybe need a new word for it.

That's true. I mean, like, as I say, I will also just sort of throw in there that, you know, we don't have a great understanding of how the human brain works, right? Like, we know something's about it. What are our dreams? And so, you know, like a lot of the way that it feels like my brain is working in everyday life is just kind of like a fancy auto-complete tool, right? It's like when I'm doing any sort of like basic arithmetic, it's like I'm not, I don't have a, like, a mathematical concept. I'm just kind of like remembering.

So we're really just in like territory here that's like making us rethink a lot of things. Rethink everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Everything. That's my message for your listener. Hey.

Rethink everything. Yeah. Yeah. Chifleck. Chim of click fans. Rethink everything. Yeah. I was thinking before when you were talking.

about how there's no way to like peek open, open the curtain and peek behind the scenes at this algorithm, I mean, it's the same way with the human mind, right? There's no way to really peek behind the scenes when your partner like says something that ticks you off. There's no way to like crack open their brain and see what they were thinking. I've been thinking a lot about muscle memory lately and it's the same kind of thing like with musical instruments where they'll do those scans where they scan a musician's brain or a jazz musician when they're improvising and look at the parts of their brain that they're using. And it's very much like brain expert scientists, being like, wow, look at that.

They really are just kind of amazed by it because no one really knows what's going on. Yeah, but isn't that part of the exact problem that Casey was describing initially, which is that all of us have immediately become tempted to anthropomorphize the AI by repeatedly comparing it to the way that the human brain works and how mysterious that is?

Because it's the best we can do. Yeah, what else are you going to compare to? Well, the human brain is mysterious too, but that doesn't mean that these two things have any similarity at all. And even by describing it as understanding, we also use the word, lying earlier because of course we want to characterize any of these AIs as having a brain that we can recognize. I mean, we do that in games all the time. I feel bad when I don't fulfill NPC's requests of me and like their AI is extremely rudimentary, but I still feel bad and I see them as

people in spite of myself. And I see GPT as as human-esque in certain ways like when it apologizes or it lies and is caught in a lie. Like these these things are recognizably human because, because it's imitating us, but that isn't really anything like when your partner lies to you. Maddie, you should feel bad when you don't visit your Animal Crossing Island and then it grows weeds everywhere. So I'll never go back. I can't know. Yeah, it's like we, it's kind of the difference between making something in your image and perceiving

something in your image. Like we started kind of trying to make AI to think like us. Do you what I mean? Are you saying we're gods, Kirk? No, but we're playing God a little bit. No, we're not is the problem. Well, if we create a general artificial intelligence, a lot of people would say that's kind of playing God. You're making life. And it's, we've created something that kind of we wanted to think the way that we think, but it's expanded so far beyond that, that now you wind up in a situation where to use Kevin's encounter with Bing slash Sydney again, he has this encounter with a totally unnatural intelligence, like whatever you want to call it, like a different kind of thinking.

But it's expressing itself in a way that feels very. human, like this kind of creepy stalker. And so he's perceived, we're, everyone who read that story perceives it as a person talking to a person, this malevolent intelligence that's in love with him when really what's going on is like, that's just our perception. Beneath the surface, it's totally different like you were saying, Maddie. It's just imitating like whatever live journals it's read by teenage girls who have written versions of Sidney.

Right, right. Or the script of fatal attraction. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of times. And it's like, well, this is what I would say next after I profess my love. Oh, he's married. This is what I say to that. and like on and on and on until it becomes just a great story. I mean, really what it's doing is telling you a wonderful story.

And that's the part of it that does make me kind of excited for games instead of just scared. Because I'm like, well, that's kind of cool, though. To your point there, Maddie, I think a lot of our interpretation and our perception and our anthropomorphizing. Promorphization? I got through it. Yeah, sure. Google Bard couldn't do it better. Of these AIs.

I think a lot of that is also based on our kind of like years and years of watching AI movies and reading AI novels and thinking of them in a certain way. That has also kind of skewed our perception of that. Like the villainess of dokey dokey literature club is a character within the game who falls in love with you, the player. Like imagine a version of that game. It's a very similar vibe to Sydney. Where she could really talk to you. Jennifer would be way scarier. And that's a horror game.

It's supposed to be scary. I want to bring it back to games. And Casey, I'm curious to hear your take on this. Is there like, do you, have you thought about like the ideal? Because you're a big gamer. Have you thought about like what you would want to see from AI in games? Is there like, do you want to see it like totally pushing the boundaries, making like totally realistic NPCs that can talk to you?

Or is that too uncanny valley? Is that too creepy for you? What kind of, what thoughts have you had on this? I mean, I think I am actually really interested in the idea of AI companions. There's a lot of lonely people in the world. AI Companions will come with a host of fascinating societal conversations and tradeoffs, and not all of them will be great. But I'm interested in that joke.

The first place I wouldn't put them is in a game. But when I think about it is like, why can I? I shouldn't say why can't I? I would love to eventually have procedurally generated Eldon Ring, procedurally generated god of war, right? Like, you know, like name your favorite game. What if it didn't have to end? You know, if maybe these, you know, I mean, I feel like, I love to play these action-r-r-G games,

and most of them just design, you know, what, five or eight biomes, and they sort of run you through a little track, but you could just kind of infinitely remix those. And if you somehow were able to get the quality control up to snuff, you know, I think you could do this. Like so many of the games that I love, yes, I like it when they are innovating

and they're coming up with, like, fun new mechanics for me to play with. But there's a very real sense in which I've just sort of soothed by the fact that they are remixing elements of games that I've been playing since I was a kid. And that's just where I think AI really shines. And I would be happy to pay a subscription fee for like, you know, lifetime procedurally generated Eldon Ring or, you know, whatever the game of the moment might be. So that's kind of where I would take it. You know, it's interesting.

There's also a flip side to that because something we say on the show a lot is that a lot of games are too long. Like we run into the problem of like never finishing games because they seemingly go on forever already. And something Jason in particular has articulated is that a big problem in games. development is that it takes so long to make games just because it's so hard, as we've all mentioned, it's just so labor intensive and just takes forever to build something like a god of war or an Eldon Ring. And so the flip side of it is if on the development side, AI can speed up a lot of the processes

that take a really long time, in particular like prototyping or QA seems like something that'll be really aided by AI pretty quickly, then games that are actually not endless, but just very authored and very carefully made can be created more quickly. And we can just have more of them because they won't be such a death march to make every time. They won't require, you know, so much labor, so much human labor. Yeah, I mean, like, the rate limiting factor on like the amount and quality of video games, I don't think it's like the number and quality of stories to tell, right? Like, I think that if, you know, if all of us could just sort of fill out into some incredibly complicated, like, form field inside our AI, like what our perfect video game would

be. And it could just sort of magically write the software. That would be wonderful. And so many more stories would get told and, you know, so I, like, this is the stuff that I think is really exciting. And I think, you know, and I am somebody who writes about and I will talk more about. And I think this is like part of responsibility. If you're a journalist writing about AI, you have to talk about the downside. There's a lot of downside. Like, this has a potential for very serious societal disruption, right? Like, I'm not quite one of the existential risk people yet, but I'm like reading the existential risk people, right? Like, I'm trying to sort of get my head around this stuff. But at the same time, there's a reason why tens of millions of people

are already using chat GPT. And, you know, I will say that, like, a lesson that journalists learned from, like, the social media backlash was that you could just get infinite retweets by posting tech is bad every single day. And so, like, that is now the tenor of all tech coverage. And you're just sort of ignoring the fact that hundreds of millions of people are using and enjoying these networks. I don't want to make the same mistake with AI.

People love this stuff, right? And it can unlock tremendous human creativity. I love art. I am not an artist. As a kid, I spent years trying to learn how to draw. I just never got very good at it. Now I can go into Dolly and I can just illustrate my newsletter. And the better prompt I write, the better illustration I get, that makes me feel creative.

I like doing that, right? And this is so rudimentary. You fast forward in time and I can just say, here's the video game. I want to plan my PS5 and it makes the damn thing. Like, let's just like spend a moment living inside that world. That is actually pretty exciting. And I don't think it's outside the realm of possibility. Don't you think it would be missing something, a human soul?

if you just typed in to an AI from. Sydney's soul, Jason. I don't know. Well, if you say, like when you're playing a piece of art, you have to recognize the human behind it. I think if there were a future, that kind of sounds dystopian to me,

a feature where you could type in a game like Eldon Ring except set in space and it would create that for you. I feel like something about it would just feel so wrong and like soulless and I don't know. I don't think I would enjoy that world. Here's why I think it was. would actually be cool. So when I think about what Casey's describing, I think about Crusader Kings and Dwar Fortress and basically very authored games that have data sets that are created by authors

and pull from those data sets in order to create distinct worlds. Like anytime you create a new Dwarfurtress game, it invents a bunch of dwarves for you. And they all have different personalities. And those personalities are drawn from a pool that is authored. And it comes up with hilarious and bizarre combinations. and each of them has different powers and so forth. And that can be really fun. And the Sims is very similar. Of course, there's much more authorship on the players side with the Sims in terms of the sandbox that you can play with there.

But there's still like only a certain number of permutations. So the more you can expand those permutations and allow that authorship to extend into multiple kinds of tools, the cooler of the sandboxes. I mean, this is why people like Minecraft, as Kirk said, is because it's procedurally generating a lot of stuff, but it's also inviting you to use those tools to create something more. So that part I think is neat. The problem that I see with Casey's hypothetical, which I think does sound really neat, is actually just that the data sets themselves currently are

not great. Like I've given some examples of data sets that I do think are really cool because they're created by cool, smart people. But like, chaty PT has some weird shit there. Like, it is very biased. Like all of these image creation tools are deeply misogynistic, deeply raised, they are built on the data set that is our own very fallible human internet. So it has all of those entrenched biases in them. So I'm a lot more excited about what we can do with these authored databases that people create where they're like, here's something we made. Like if we just take all of Eldon Ring and we're like, okay, we're going to give all

the authors of this world residuals, but we're going to take this template and we're going to create more dungeons within it. I feel more excited about the prospect of that as opposed to just like the entire. internet creates a game because that sounds like shit to me. I've been on the internet and it's not that great most of the time. Yeah, I like that. It's like you're exhibiting some level of control or restriction on either end of the prompt or the data set. It sort of seems like an important part of this. And when you imagine like every single thing is possible and you can make a game that's entirely created within it, like that's the sort of maximalist version on both sides,

where when you start restricting it, it gets interesting. There's a thing. There's a thing. something Casey that you and Kevin talked about that I thought was really interesting, since you've used GBT4 and these other language models so much, was the fact that you run into the limitation of your own imagination before you run into a limitation of the model, which I think is something that developers or anybody creative working with this stuff will run into as well. Could you talk a little bit about that? Yeah. So, and I imagine your listeners might have had a similar experience where you get access to this tool and you're like, all right, I got a box. I'm going to ask the box thing. He asks a couple things, and it's like, you know, okay, yeah, that sounds mostly right. That one was wrong. Okay, no, that one is right. And then you're like, write me a poem and it writes your poem. You say, write me a song and writes your song.

You're like, you know, write me like a Sopranos episode in the Seinfeld universe, and then it does that. And then it's like, okay, I guess it can do literally anything, you know, but I don't know sort of where to go from there. And, you know, here's where I will say the internet comes in handy here because, of course, you have forums, and people are sort of competing to do each other and get upvotes on websites. And so, you know, the creativity sort of leaks out over time is the collective wisdom of humanity comes up with new ideas. But yeah, just as like one person testing these things, I do often run into this kind of like cognitive limit of like, yeah, I've like basically asked it to do, you know, everything that I can think of. The flip side of that is, I mean, there are also things that I wish it could do that it can't do yet.

Sure. But we'll, I think we'll get there. Yeah, it's that idea of a prompt engineer being a valuable new job. And in a game development studio, you can definitely imagine across a number of disciplines that being like a, you know, coding prompt engineer who can just sort of like knows exactly how to get exactly what you need in order to quickly write the code that you need. I think we should talk a little bit about the sort of intellectual property ethical considerations of AI as well. Because while we're imagining this perfect world, there's currently already this live debate about credit and, you know, stable diffusion and Dali, all of these. These different models are kind of sometimes just stealing art from Getty images or whatever else. And I feel like there's a lot of those same, you know, with art and with writing, those same problems present themselves in video games because it's just a medium that has all of those things in it.

But there's also the question of game mechanics, which has always been an interesting, an interesting one in terms of copyright because I don't believe it's possible to, you know, copyright a game mechanic. Like, Nintendo can't say, oh, a side-scrolling platformer. Like, that's Mario. We own Mario. No one else can make one. And as a result, we get a lot of really great side-scrolling platformers. Do you have any thoughts about how that's going to develop over, I guess, the near term, other than the far term?

My prediction is, like, big legal fight that ends up with payouts to big publishers. Like, that's kind of what I'm guessing. Like, you know, I have no doubt. So bleak. No, but I don't disagree. This is, like, kind of how it works, though, right? It's like, Napster exists and people use it. They love it.

And then the record label's like, hey, wait a minute. Then there's, like, massive legal cases and then everybody. eventually gets paid out. And I sort of think something similar will happen here. You know, look, I'm a, I'm a publisher. I've put a lot of words on the internet. I have no doubt that my words were used to chain, to train Bard and chat GPT. It would be cool if I got a check. I will tell you, I'm not personally, like, on a ledge about, I'm not outraged that this happens because I am kind of a fair use guy, a transformative use guy. I'm kind of a remix everything guy. And like, again, if there comes an opportunity

where I can, like, sign my name on the class action lawsuit and, like, get my $500. Like maybe I will, but like it's not of huge interest to me. But of course, everyone else is going to have their own feelings about it. And if you're an artist, then they scraped your work without your consent to create Dolly or Mid-Journey and you have feelings about it. Of course, sue them. You know, like I think it's just going to sort of be up to everyone to decide, you know, kind of how they feel about that. But yeah, we're going to face big legal cases. You know, this whole idea of like what are you allowed to scrape from the internet is something that I've written about a weird number of times because it,

It is not a settled question of law. There were these guys that scraped LinkedIn, and these were public LinkedIn profiles. And they essentially, you know, anybody can visit these profiles. They just use computers to do it in an automated way and sort of make a copy for themselves. And then they, you know, used it for I can't even remember if the purposes were nefarious or not. But they used it for something and LinkedIn got mad. Yeah, it probably wasn't a great purpose, whatever it was. They were just doing for fun.

It wasn't nefarious at all. This case was all the way to the Supreme Court. And LinkedIn loses the case. And the people who scraped the website were allowed to continue doing what they're doing on the theory of like, it was on the public internet, bro. Like you left it up there. And just the mere fact that you use an automated tool to process that data is not a crime. So it is for that reason that I think the mid journeys and dollies and opening eyes of the world may have a case to say like, we were just looking at the open internet, bro. And by the way, we did transform it.

We spent billions of dollars trying to take this like soup of, you know, alpha numeric characters and turn it into something resembling human. intelligence, they may win that case. But it's like, by the way, all the judges deciding these cases, like, I hope they have a technical background. Or at least good clerks. I don't know if there's on TikTok hearing where the congressman was like, there's TikTok connect to Wi-Fi. Oh, God.

That is the level in which these cases are going to be decided. But, yeah, we'll just have to see. Yeah, yeah. You see a lot of that stuff in music, too, the sort of discussions of sampling after just writing counterfacts and stealing other people's chord progressions or jazz musicians quoting licks. where now it's like you just speed it up so much to the point where pretty soon

you'll be able to open logic and just be like write me a song. It might write you a song that it learned by studying a lot of Beatles songs but can you really say right that the Beatles should be able to sue Apple for logic doing that because whatever everybody uses those chord progressions. They're Beatles songs like that's how music works. It just kind of forces the question by taking it to a really

extreme place because it's so capable because AI is able to do so many of these connections at once. Yeah, well, when you're literally cracking open a piece of art and then combining it with something else, it's a little different than like when you're taking something specific. I guess the equivalent would be like sampling heavily from a Beatles song and mixing that with something else rather than just taking the chord progressions. I mean, I think to the Eldon Ring example,

like let's say Casey's Fantasy existed and you could type in, Generate Me, an infinite number of dungeons in Eldon Ring. I mean, the video game industry already has enough problems with crediting. There's no royalties. Game developers are kind of underpaid and overworked. And the thought that this thing, this like infinite content generation would come out of their art without them actually seeing anything. I mean, that is going to be a dismal reality if this AI really picks up steam in gaming

specifically. I mean, already we were just talking about remakes. We've been talking about remakes because there have been this like string of really interesting remakes recently, including a dead space remake that is made by a company that is not the same company that made the original, because the original company is defunct. And so a lot of the

people who worked on this remake had nothing to do with the original game, and a lot of the people who worked on the original game see their work being remade, and who knows how they feel about it. I imagine some of them are very mixed feelings about it. And that's like an official proper remake, just imagining the AI possibilities there. It's going to

be... Talk about dystopia. and for a lot of people. Yeah, there's a kind of, you can see, there's a dismal outcome for sure that seems possible, if not likely. There is also the fact that because the questions are raised by, you know, it's taken to such an extreme level that it really puts them into relief.

You can really see, oh, okay, like this is what's happening here and how the art is being kind of cracked open and repurposed and made into something. It might actually lead to some good outcomes as well just because it raises the question so undeniably that everyone has to ask it. Instead of just sort of going,

along and listening to Spotify and being like, I don't know, sure, I'm supporting the artist when you're really like supporting a record label. Yeah, like if you're in a creative union, you know, like the Writers Guild or, you know, as these video game unions get spun up, like, I mean, this is absolutely what they should be fighting for it, right? It's like if there's remakes of our games, yes, give us royalties. And if, you know, if you eventually train an AI on this, like, they should get royalties as well. So I hope they do that. I imagine the listeners of your podcasts know that you all have guitars in the background of all your Zoom backdrops. But I was just going to act, because you're all clearly musicians, like, another thought. I just want to see how much this horrifies you.

So unfortunately, the podcast listeners aren't going to be able to see their faces when I pose this. But it's like, you know, when I was 17, my favorite album became, and basically still is, like, Radiohead's OK Computer. What have you thought about the moment where I'm just like AI, give me 10 albums that are like OK computer that sound like Tom York that are on similar themes and just like put that on the background? And then it can just do that. How do you feel about that? I think that's fine. Personally, this is something I've thought about a lot. Well, because you're going to get that, and that's nice for you to have something to listen to that's like OK Computer.

But the real magic of Radiohead is the progression of the band and listening to Amnesiac or Kid A, like, listening to the stuff that came after it and then listening to OK Computer in that context where you're hearing like, oh, this is really cool. Like, Tom York was already experimenting with this. Like they're adding these harmonies. And then, you know, five years later they did something like that. Like, it's all, it's about the sort of actual human progression of the band. And it's cool that you can also then have another kind of okay computer, but it's going to be totally different. Like, it's not going to be the same experience listening to it. So they can both exist.

It might not. But if you can just be like, what are like, give me like 14 alternate universe renditions of paranoid Android, like that might be a really fun afternoon for me. Well, yeah, it might be. It might be. But also you can already kind of do that with the Spotify recommended playlist. Like, that already is what a lot of people do. Like Spotify is introducing AI DJs and stuff. I know they use those tools as well,

but I just mean the recommended aspect of it. Like this is already something people want and they already do is give me all the songs that sound even a little bit like Parenthood Android. And I, unlike Kirk, am just wildly judgmental about this. And I prefer to only use curated playlist. I don't like these algorithms, but I can't avoid it, you know. We're talking about this on the Hard Fork podcast. last week because I'm also a curated playlist guy.

I make a new playlist every month for everything I'm listening to that month. I rely heavily on the playlist that I've made. I have so much fun doing stuff like that. And also, I started using that AIDJ and it's really freaking good. I know. That's the thing. That's the thing. It's okay to like both things.

That's what I've consoled myself with as we're all talking about this. It's like it's okay to like the dwarf fortresses of the world, but also the really hyper-specific, the disco eliciums where it's like somebody had to write every word in this. I mean, you could also just be like, hey, I'm going to Google. I want to find 10 bands that sound like Nirvana in the 1990s, and you could just find 10 bands that sound like that. Yeah, exactly.

And there is, I think, an important distinction to make is the difference between an AI recommending you other bands and an AI recommending you a flood of AI generated music that was not even made by people, where the amount of content there just is such an order of magnitude larger that it really becomes a kind of different experience. Maybe a really interesting one. We're probably going to find out what it's like in our lifetimes, but I guess we'll see. think like I was saying before with games, I think it's that we're going to find, I think humanity is going to find that like AI created art of any form just is missing something. And like,

I think you'll be able to tell when something is machine generated. I think no matter how good AI gets, I don't think it'll be totally indistinguishable from human content. And I mean, to your point earlier, Casey, if you play Skyrim, Skyrim has a number of what are called Radiant Quest, which are procedurally generated quests, and you can immediately tell which ones are radiant quests versus which ones are like hand-authored, like scripted, like designed by human beings. And I don't think that like it'll,

we're ultimately going to get to the point where you can't tell those apart just because you play a game enough and you will learn like what is machine generated and what is not. You listen to music enough. You will learn like what song just like it doesn't have that human soul to it, doesn't have that like certain, I don't know, whatever you want to call it. Well, yeah, I mean, but also just a feeling about it.

I don't know, something that I think we as humans can just inherently tell. Now, maybe if someone is raised in the AI generation, maybe they'll lose the ability to discern what's human and what's not. But at least right now, I think that we'll know. I hope you're right. My big hope for humanity is that it has continued relevance in our AI future. I hope so, too. I think that's a good hope to close out on. Casey Newton, this was so much fun.

Thanks for coming on the show, man. Thank you. So when is the Eldon Ring DLC coming out? Are we still not? Jason, Jason, Jason, no, but we will not. We don't know. I mean, we've been saying that hopefully not for a while because there's so many games coming in the near future.

Yeah, after we beat Tears of the Kingdom, it can come up right then. Yeah, Zelda comes out in like three weeks. There's like Final Fantasy and Diallo and Starfield and all this other. I will say I think I'm pretty comfortable. that we'll hear more about the Eldon Ring DLC like in June around when E3 should have been. You know what? That's my birthday month, so that would be huge for me. There you go. So you'll get, you'll get more info there, I think. I have a good feeling about that one. Wonderful. Well, let's take a break. And then we will be back with one more thing.

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Are you tired of being picked on for only wanting to talk about your cat at parties? Do you feel as though your friends don't understand the depth of love you have for your guinea pick? When you look around a room of people, do you wonder if they know sloths only have to eat one leaf a month? Have you ever dumped someone for saying they're just not an animal person? Us too. She's Alexis B Preston. She's Ella McLeod. And we host Comfort Creatures.

The show where you can't talk about your pets too much, animal trivia is our love language, and dragons are just as real as done. To Tune to Comfort Creatures every Thursday on Maximum Fun. And we are back for one more thing. Jason, how about you go first? Sure. I read another book. I've been on a real kick.

I've read about, I think, 11 or 12 books this year so far. Someone was saying you should start a book club. I think some of the Discord is like, man, there should be a Jason Sherr or book club. I would love to start it. You're turning out so many good recommendations. This one is a little specific. I don't know how many triple-click listeners out there will want to listen to it. But it was an interesting book.

It's a book called Talk to Me by Dean Nelson. Dean Nelson is a reporter, and this is a book about interviewing people, asking questions, getting people to talk to you, structuring interviews, and it's a really good read. This guy, Dean Nelson, he is a freelance reporter for years. He wrote for The Times, among other places, and he has a very good conversational way of writing. He writes in a very human way, and it's a very easy read. You can kind of breeze through it all pretty quickly. And it's got a lot of good tips.

There's a lot of stuff in there that I've kind of either knew or have learned over years and years of interviewing people, but it's still helpful to see it articulated. And I found myself just kind of dogging a bunch of pages as I went and looking for good tips or like finding tips that I wanted to go back to and stuff like that. There's just a lot of good stuff. And he has a lot of good case studies of interviews, of TV interviews, of podcast interviews, of written interviews. He talks about how you might have different, you should know what your goal is going into an interview, whether it's to be an entertaining show, like if it's a live podcast interview like we just did, or if it's a written interview where your goal is to get something just quotes out of it. You kind of have different methods that you can approach. And he talks a lot about, about a lot of the tricks of the trade that a reporter might use.

And kind of, I think that like, even though it's very specifically, a lot of these tips are useful for reporters, I think it can be extrapolated to other parts of your life, certainly. Oh, I'm sure. Yeah. If you're like, anyone has needs. to ask questions and keep up an interview style conversation with people. If you're a lawyer and you are doing depositions, this will probably be essential for you, this sort of advice. If you're a doctor and you talk to patients and you need to figure out how to get information out of them,

there's a lot of just good advice in there about building rapport with the subject and figuring out the best way to kind of like get a question out. And one thing I will say is that as a reporter who has been doing this for quite a few years, It's always fun and reassuring to read something that is like telling you how you've been doing it anyway. Like the advice is basically what you already knew, which is always reaffirming and a good just kind of place to be at. But even so, I think even the most experienced reporter will get some stuff out of this. And I think even non-reporters will get a lot out of this book. So yeah, I really enjoyed it.

It's called Talk to Me by Dean Nelson. That's really cool. I mean, I was a horrible interviewer, I would say, when I began my career as a journalist. And I'm a subpar or mediocre one now. My problem is that I really like to talk. And that's a big problem if you're trying to interview people. If you really are like, I'm talking to this really smart person. I'm so excited I just want to talk to them.

I would find listening back to my interviews so often. I would be like, shut up, dude. Like I'd be listening to myself, like, carry on about some, who cares? Because no one is going to read that part of the interview. This is when I was working for Kataku. I don't want to include it. And I always, when I see a journalist include their big, long, smart question, usually with then followed by the interviewee being like, what a great question.

Wow. Include that, you know. Like, it strikes me as such a blunder. And I've been working on it and have found, just to your point about this being applicable for everyday life, that, man, I was just at a party with a bunch of really fascinating people that I had never met before. And I was finding a sort of fluency in just getting people talking and asking the questions and staying engaged and just it was like a muscle that I'd worked a little bit more just

from doing interviews for strong songs and and kind of consciously trying to be better at it. So I totally agree with the idea that like, yeah, it's useful for journalists or like lawyers are in a professional capacity, but it's a really good skill to just work on like as a human, as a social animal. It is and it can be unsettling. I'm sure we've all had the experience of talking to someone and they don't ask you a single question and you're just like, well, that was not a fun conversation to have. So, yes, it's a very useful skill in life.

Just to kind of, so people don't have to read the book if they don't want, just to give a couple of quick tips that I thought were on those usual ones. One is that I think the most important tool or the most important thing you can do during an interview is just like listen and listen intently, which is kind of something that seems obvious, but also isn't that obvious because a lot of times when we're having an interview or even just having a normal conversation, we're thinking a lot about what we want to say next rather than listening. When podcasting that happens for sure. Yeah, yeah, when podcasting for sure. Any kind of conversation.

And I think just kind of like practicing your listening skills and just like learning how to really intently listen, which I mean, again, easier said than done. It's something that I don't think, I think we all have trouble with every once in a while. And then the other thing is just, yeah, like you said, not talking too much and just kind of like relistening, record all of your conversations and interviews if you can. and relisten to them and just be like, man, I should have stopped the question here. I should have gotten it. Yeah, I've done that many times. But then did learn from the mistake,

which was helpful. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not like, again, what you just described is also one of the most common mistakes that any, like, novice interviewer makes, which is just talking forever. And sometimes not even ending on a question. Yes.

It's definitely something I would do. The worst thing you can possibly get is the sort of withering, was there a question? in there. Yeah. Which you never ever want to hear. The other thing I think is most important and can also be applied to regular life is to ask very open-ended questions. My favorite tool, and it was fun to see this like word for word in the book, my favorite tool is to ask, what do you make of this? What did you make of this thing? And just kind of go from there, which I think is a better way than asking like, oh, did you see this thing? Did you feel this way about this? Like you don't want to ask yes or no

questions in general. You want to ask open-ended questions, let the person you are talking to kind of come up with an answer from there rather than steering them down one path or another. You know what's a good one. I know this is going to make us go along, but this is interesting. Another good one is just say more. Say more is great. I hear it more and more in interviews and kind of notice when interviews are using it. But a lot of times in just everyday conversation, you'll say to someone, I don't know, they'll be telling you a story and they'll say, well, and that was a pretty complicated time. And you can just say to that. You can just say to them like, we'll say more about that. Like, what, what do you mean? And then they'll almost always

elaborate and you'll get the actual explanation. And you, you know, you could just move on and not say that, but say more can just be really useful to be like, well, okay, that was interesting, but say more about that. I want to hear more about it. People love that. People always have more to say. Other people love to talk too. That's the real life hack. That's true. It's not just us professional talkers. Everybody loves to talk. Yeah. And then, yeah, also asking, making sure you ask the tough question and find an empathetic way to do it if you need to, but always ask it and don't let your subject off the hook. If there's something that's like been in the news about that person or there's something that you really have to get at, your audience will be disappointed if you

don't ask them that question. Even the subject will be probably expecting it. So they'll be disappointed if you don't ask them that question. Another thing that you can get better and better at over time. You've gotten very good at Jason. Stephen Totilla, our former boss, very good at asking questions in general, a good question formulator there. Well, I'm going to go next with my one more thing because it'll be pretty quick and it's another I'm kind of going through the movies that Maddie watched and brought to the show. This is so funny. I feel like we've done this the other way around as well. Maddie watched all the shows that I have been recommending. So now we're going the other way around. I watched Nope the Jordan Peel 2022. What would you call this sort of neo-Western

sci-fi thriller? Horror, theoretically horror, although I didn't find it scary so much as freaking awesome. I found it awesome too. Wow. So this is after Tar, which I talked about last week, another really uncanny, really provocative movie that I just have found myself unable to stop thinking about. And totally agree. I really, really like it. There's a line in the movie where there's this hard-bitten cinematographer. I'm forgetting the actor's name with the most incredible voice. Who says something along the lines of a famous Hollywoodism, which is, well, I do one for them and then I do one for me. Basically, I do the studio picture and then I get to do my, you know, artie thing. And this one feels really, you know,

personal to peel. It feels like he was just like, I'm going to just try some stuff. And he's always kind of in that way. Like, you know, Get Out and Us both were really rich in symbolism and could be interpreted and sort of argued about. I'd say Get Out was the least ambiguous of those and probably also the most considered to be the most straightforwardly successful. And then Us was a much more, right, much was much less accessible and much more ambiguous movie that then wound up having a lot of really interesting conversation. And I'd say this is even further down that path where it is a very strange movie. I think people were expecting, just because it's called Nope, that it was going to be this really scary horror movie. And maybe he's going to, oh, he's going to really change it up and go full horror. No, it really is this fascinating movie that's really about the camera and Hollywood and the effect that viewership has on you. There's so much. I mean, this is a monster movie, a UFO movie.

and kind of a Western, and so much of it is about trying to see the monster. They want to photograph the monster, our heroes. That is their role. Or capture it, or tame it. Which then, right, is it implies all of the sort of power dynamics of the camera. And there's, of course, all of this stuff in like with the history of Hollywood and exploitation of animals and of black actors and of all different kinds of, basically, beings who were captured by the camera and exploited in some way or another. And it's so interesting.

And then also that's all really cool, and I'm fascinated in that conversation. But just the imagery and the depiction of the creature, which is essentially this flying saucer that eats people, is so uncanny and horrifying. I really have found it to be really scary. There's a decision that he makes with the depiction of this creature where once it sucks people up into it, you hear them screaming from the clouds as they're being. digested. Yeah, they're trapped inside of this thing. This really unusual, like, the nature of the creature is very odd and almost impossible to fathom in a way. And you hear them screaming as they're being carried around and digested.

And it's so scary. Like it really, this one moment in particular where then they're all silenced is like really stuck with me. It's like pretty nightmarish. Even though, like you said, it's not actually like an actively horrified movie. I mean, many people have said they think it's the scariest movie, I think, for that reason. because it's so unsettling to sort of imagine something like that. And I think it's a pretty good metaphor for how Hollywood eats people as well. Yeah, sure.

One that looks like a camera. Yeah, it is. I dug it. I really dug it. Yeah, it was a really cool movie. I'm just, I'm happy to be spending some time watching these movies that have this, all these interesting layers and these points of view and these ambiguities like this entire.

Man, movies are pretty cool. So yeah, just wanted to throw out another recommendation for that. Speaking of cool movies. And yes, now we're going to take a tent turn and a down shift to take a hard left turn. And now for another thrilling Oscar contender. Yeah, I want to hear about the layers and subchax. And I want to hear about all that. This is a deep one.

It's surprising horror in this one. No, just kidding. Guys, I saw the Super Mario Brothers movie. Yeah, you did. By the time this episode comes out because we're recording it in advance, probably many of our listeners will have seen this. But I did technically see it in advance. But who cares?

Well, we all know that you're special. It is important. I'm special. Guys, that's what matter. I'm special. I'm so special. So I would say this movie is fine with a capital F. It's very much a kids movie.

So if you're kind of on the fence about it and you're like, is there really going to be that much for me to be entertained by as a grown adult who enjoys Mario as a video game? Perhaps not. Although I will say I did laugh quite a bit at Jack Black and also my personal breakout star of this movie is Seth Rogen, who, got cloned on a bit in the press for saying he wasn't going to do a voice as Donkey Kong. And you know what? He doesn't need to. His beautiful speaking voice. He's hilarious.

His comic timing is impeccable. Why would you ask Seth Rogen to do a voice, quote unquote, as Donkey Kong? His current voice is absolutely perfect for it. And I thought he was hilarious. I don't think any of his lines actually had jokes in them. And instead he just makes the role funny, which I think is a gift that is hard to explain to people. But I think can also be adequately explained by Chris. Pratt's total nothing burger of a performance, whereby I often felt like maybe if a slightly more

charming performance of Mario had been a sade here, I might feel a little differently about the character, but instead I felt like he was pretty forgettable. But that's fine. As a Mario movie, you're there for Toad being funny. You're here for Donkey Kong being funny. Peach gets many beautiful heroic moments. She is the only female character in the film. So don't expect any more than that. Of course. And yeah, it's really simple. I don't know. Almost nothing happens in it. It's, it's, it's, it's, watch the live action Mario movie and then, and then become a MaxFun member and listen to our episode about it. Is there, is there a Smash Brothers teaser at the end? Is there like, Master Hand comes up? There isn't. Do you, do you guys want me to tell you the post-credit

sequences? I want to know, well, no. So Samuel Jackson comes out and he's like, I want to know one thing. I do have one question. And that is, is there a reference to magic mushrooms getting you high? No, there isn't. But that is. the kind of joke that would be in this movie. No, that's why, so this was, to explain, this was a prediction that Maddie made a couple of years ago. Yeah, yeah, I would have lost that one. But that's sort of the thinking here.

I don't know. It's fine. It's a perfectly fine movie. I'm glad we didn't wait and do a beans cast on it, but he would have had really truly nothing to say at all about it. And again, I'm very glad that I made us all watch the live action Mario Brothers movie because it's so much weirder and it has so much more. plot in it and take so many more risk than this movie ever could.

So if you go to this movie or watch it on streaming and you're like, I just want a little more weird Mario in my life that was like so by the books. Just check out that other one, you know? And it'll give you a weird feeling. I hope, well, I hope the safeness of this one like allows for Nintendo to move forward. Me too. Take a little risk. Yeah.

Take a few risks with its movies and TV shows. I think it's going to make a bajillion dollars and it's so safe that I'm like, great. Do like a weird Daisy movie next. Like do something else a little weirder with it. One thing worth noting is that there are very few kids' movies in theaters these days. And so I think that for that reason alone, it's going to make a lot of money because a lot of parents out there are like desperate for something to take their kids to. And it's totally inoffensive and fine. Like watching this 16 times, you will go insane.

But like it, you'll be okay. Yeah, I want to take my kid. I think my kid is three and a half. She's only three and a half. She hasn't sat through. She can barely sit through the Mario game. This one's a short one. It's only an hour and a half long.

I truly was like, wow, that was short at the end of the movie. Yeah, I'm thinking about it. I'll think about it. It's fine. I'll probably watch it when it hits Netflix. Yeah, I think it's find a way. I'll say that. Well, that's that.

This was a really fun episode. Thanks again to Casey Newton for coming on the show. Yeah, everyone should go subscribe to Platformer. Definitely subscribe to Platform and listen to Hard Fork. A great podcast. Platformer has been Casey's newsletter, Platformer, him and his his co-writer, Zoe, have really been the number one source for breaking Twitter news and writing about the shit show.

That is that company. So everyone should go check it out. They are on top of it. And yeah, Hard Fork, really like a great way to just keep abreast of AI stuff in particular. He and Kevin were doing a really good job. So yeah, that's it for now. I will see the two of you next week. See ya.

Bye. Triple Click is produced by Jason Schreier, Maddie Myers, and me, Kirk Hamilton. I edit and mix the show and also wrote our theme music. Our show art is by Tom D.J. Some of the games and products we talked about on this episode may have been sent to us for free for review consideration. You can find a link to our ethics policy in the show notes. Triple Click is a proud member of the Maximum Fun Podcast Network, and if you like our show, we hope you'll consider supporting us by becoming a member at Maximumfund.org.

Find us on Twitter at Triple ClickPod. Send email the triple click at Maximumfund.org and find a link to our Discord in the show notes. Thanks for listening. See you next time. Comedy and Culture. Artist-owned. Audience-supported.