Today, I'd like to share an Interesting Thing with you. Click here to see what it is. I promise it is neither goatse nor a RickRoll (although I would say that if it was either of those things, wouldn't I?)
No, it's a test to see if you can distinguish between two quite-similar-to-extremely-similar colours. All you have to do is click on the screen where you think the (vertical) dividing line between the two differently coloured halves of the screen is.
Sounds easy, right? To begin with, you probably will find it quite easy. But as it progresses, it becomes really quite challenging — although you'll probably notice some peculiarities as you continue.
For starters, you'll likely notice the dividing line more easily if you move your head or even just your eyes. There's probably a scientific reason behind this, and this makes me feel like I should have probably read the companion blog post to this little test before starting to type here, but oh well. No time like the present, is there?
Okay, I've read it, and it's complicated (but quite interesting). Basically there's a value called the "Just Noticeable Difference" (or "JND") and this determines whether or not we can distinguish two very similar colours as actually being different from one another.
A commonly agreed JND measured on one popular scale (used in the test linked above) is 0.02; colours that exhibit this "distance" between one another are different from each other, but to most people who are just glancing at them, they will look the same. The test introduces slightly artificial conditions by making you actively look for the differences — plus it also depends a bit on how well your display is calibrated — but it's still an interesting way to see quite how solid your perception of colour is — and whether or not that varies between different colour types.
For me, my weakness was bright pinks. I found it quite difficult to distinguish between those, but had much less difficulty with darker, less saturated or overall duller colours. I still scored considerably better than the "average", though — my score was 0.0056.
Give it a go! It's much more interesting than doomscrolling… and definitely a better use of your time and the planet's resources than using Google Gemini if you're bored.
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The website "Android Police" posted an incredibly stupid article today, headlined "I use Gemini when I'm bored — and it's better than doomscrolling". I'm sure I don't have to tell you that the premise of this article is spectacularly dumb and the author, Anu Joy, should feel bad for having written it… if indeed they are actually a real person. You never can be sure of that with engagement-bait articles these days, and the author's complete lack of online presence beyond LinkedIn doesn't fill me with confidence that they actually exist. But never mind.
I'm not going to link to the article because it doesn't deserve it, but I am going to systematically destroy it for today's post, which features a lot of swearing. Hope you don't mind, about either part of that statement. If you do, well, tough titties.
Cock!
Turning boredom into a 5-minute adventure
The first lake-boiling, environmentally ruinous use of the lying plagiarism machine that Anu Joy cites as an antidote to boredom is "turning it into a mini choose-your-own-adventure generator", with her argument being that "rather than passively consuming content, I now engage with short, interactive stories that unfold in real time, making them ideal for five-minute boredom gaps."
In response to this, I would like to introduce any Gemini-brained fuckwits to the long, rich and deep history of the interactive fiction genre, all of which has been written by actual humans, and designed to occupy you for anything between a few minutes and multiple hours — possibly even days or weeks if you get stuck and have the willpower to not look at a walkthrough.
It's easy to get involved with interactive fiction, too! There are plenty of great standalone games that fall into this category, such as Inkle's excellent titles 80 Days, Overboard!, Expelled!and more, plus their adaptations of actual choose-your-own-adventure-style gamebooks such as Sorcery! The indie marketplace itch.io has a whole tag for titles developed in Twine, which are essentially hypertext-based choose-your-own-adventure games. And if you want to get into the history of the medium and its rich diversity developed over the course of the last 40+ years, the Interactive Fiction Database (IFDB) has more interactive fiction than you can probably get through in a lifetime, much of which can be played online right there in your web browser.
Or you could, I don't know, actually read a Choose Your Own Adventure book. They still exist, you know! And, as an adult, a single "run" through one will probably only take you about five minutes!
"Oh, but Gemini can make me something that's never been done before!" No it fucking can't! That's sort of the problem with LLMs! They will never, ever have an original thought because their entire fucking functionality is built on plagiarising other people's work. So why not actually go and enjoy a human being's work rather than burning down a forest to get the obsequious chatbot to "tell you a story?"
FUCK.
Quizzes, riddles and brain-teasers on demand
Do I really have to dignify this with a response? Okay, here are some places you can take quizzes online that don't involve getting a lying robot to make shit up:
The Encyclopaedia Britannica, the place where we used to go to look things up before the Internet, has a whole page full of quizzes.
Fucking Buzzfeed, the website where clickbait goes to die, has tons of quizzes. They're sort of famous for them! (EDIT: I had forgotten that Buzzfeed "pivoted to AI" a couple of years back. Maybe forget about this one.)
The best news of all is that these quizzes are put together by actual humans, so the answers should be right, which is not something you can guarantee with the garbage LLMs like Gemini spew out!
FUUUUUCK.
Curiosity on demand, without the time sink
"Oooh, but Gemini is so good at research and telling me fun little facts!"
Heard of Wikipedia? They feature a different article on their front page every day. And those articles are written by humans. (They're specifically trying to fend off the lying chatbots right now.) Not only that, if you want to dive deeper, they are sourced, so you can actually follow up on the things they say.
If you really want to surprise yourself, bookmark https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random — that will take you to a completely random page, where you can start a whole new knowledge journey that doesn't involve polluting the drinking water of any communities. (Fun fact: you can use /wiki/Special:Random on any sites that run on the MediaWiki software, not just Wikipedia!)
FUUUUUUUUUUUCK!
Gemini as a creative partner
"Some days, I'll argue whether pineapple on pizza is a culinary crime or a stroke of genius," Joy writes. If that's the level of your creativity, I suggest throwing a dart at Reddit and posting about how cool and random?! you think bacon is, you t3hPeNgU1NoFd00m, you.
If you just want someone to talk to, that is literally what social media is for. I know there are lots of things one can criticise about social media (particularly the Nazi bar that is Twitter in 2026), but if you just want to start a conversation with someone, there are few things easier than typing "@random hello, I disagree with your opinion on the Star Wars prequels, let's have a fight" or some other such bollocks.
If you want to talk to someone you don't know, there are services for that, too! Join a random Discord — or even better, one for something you're interested in! Play an MMO! Go on IRC! Brave Chatroulette! (Omegle apparently doesn't exist any more after some nasty shit went down there, so maybe don't go there.)
Just don't waste your fucking life talking to the cunting chatbot. It doesn't love you. It never will. And you're making the worst people in the world richer just by looking at it.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCCCCCCCKKKKKKKKKKKKK!!!
Boredom doesn't stand a chance
If you are bored in the world as it exists today and can't think of anything better to do than open up Google fucking Gemini, you are a lost fucking cause. There is more entertainment, more media, more games, more reading material, more opportunities for socialising online than there have ever been. Not only that, there are unprecedented opportunities for you to get creative and express yourself in all manner of different ways, regardless of your past experience. You could even start your very own blog where you yell at people who might not exist!
There is no fucking excuse for turning to the chatbot "because you're bored". Even if the absolute limit of your creativity is "debating the merits of pineapple pizza", which Joy mentions twice in that dogshit article.
I realise that I have given the article in question far more attention than it ever deserved. But hey! It was the inspiration for something actually creative. And who knows? Someone might actually find some of the links I've provided useful.
Friends don't let friends use chatbots. So if I ever hear that you, dear reader, have turned to Google Gemini "because you're bored", I will hunt you down, wherever you are, and I will slap you repeatedly about the face with a wet trout.
Here endeth the lesson.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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Every so often, I get kind of a hunger to learn something new, but a little gremlin in my mind almost always stops me from pursuing that thought with a simple phrase: "there's no point".
His thinking is that learning how to do something new absolutely must be something useful that you can use in your day-to-day life, and preferably make money from. And the reason I listen to him is because I understand where he's coming from; we live in a mercenary world with a cost of living that continues to escalate, and thus it would seem eminently sensible to learn something that would, at the very least, have some value in the job market.
But at the same time, there are things I want to learn about that, while arguably "pointless", I think would just be fun and interesting. One that I keep coming back to is the concept of programming — but specifically programming on the Atari 8-bit home computers.
I used to dabble quite a bit in programming in BASIC when I was a kid. I had several floppy disks' worth of BASIC listings that represented a combination of things I had typed in from magazines, things I had adapted from things I had typed in, and completely original creations. I never got particularly good at programming in Atari BASIC, but I did enjoy doing it. And for the longest time I've found myself wondering "what if I actually applied myself and tried to rediscover and expand on those skills?"
That's about where the gremlin enters the picture, you see. There is no rational reason why I should spend time learning how to program a long-defunct computer that you can't buy any more and which, in the grand scheme of Home Computers People Have Heard Of, ranks far behind the Commodore 64 and Spectrum, despite having capabilities at the very least on a par with, and often superior to, both of them.
"It's a waste of time," he says. "There's no point. You won't make any money from it. No-one will want to hire you based on that."
Well, frankly, who gives a shit? I'm not getting any younger, and I feel like learning new things is a good way to keep the brain active. So I think what I might actually do is put some serious time into this. Maybe devote an evening or two a week to it and see what happens.
It might not go anywhere. But at least I'll have been trying something new. And that's quite an exciting thing.
Another thing that has been holding me back is not really knowing where to start, but a blog I stumbled across by chance earlier today gave me some good recommendations of books to take a look at. And if people back in the '80s could learn how to program using just these books and no Internet to look things up on, I'm sure I can do something similar.
Maybe. We'll see.
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I am tired and frustrated. This is nothing new, of course, but I am feeling it particularly keenly today. I can't go into the specifics for reasons that are probably obvious, but as an attempt to vent at least a little bit of the fury festering inside my spleen, I am going to vaguepost my way through this.
I learned today that something I had been looking forward to happening — which would be a good thing for me, and particularly for my mental health — might not be happening, through no fault of my own, and through no fault of the person who was organising this Thing. Instead, the blame can be placed squarely (albeit slightly indirectly, removed by a degree of, like, one or two) at the feet of the perpetual garbage fire that is the tech industry in the mid 2020s — specifically, the chip shortages caused by all the AI crap.
Every so often I see an AI booster wanking on about how much more "productive" AI has made them, and I do stop to question if I've got things right. And the answer is inevitably "yes"; every time I ask this question I find myself feeling more and more resolute in my absolute, complete and utter distaste for AI and what it is doing to the tech industry — and, more broadly, what it is doing to anyone who wants to do anything that isn't AI-related in the tech space.
It's just the latest in a long line of examples of people and organisations with a lot of money and influence taking everything that other people might need, and making (supposed) use of it for something that no-one actually wants — and which causes knock-on effects on multiple steps down the "ladder". The really galling thing about this all is that it's arguably not even organisations with a lot of real money; the seemingly daily billion-dollar deals that are being bandied around are all being done with money that doesn't actually exist, that has no intention of existing, and which will never exist as anything other than a means of making the worldwide economy collapse completely.
I can go to the shop these days and get a few snacky bits and it'll be £50 or more. I shudder to think what the current Happenings are doing to petrol prices. And, of course, it's getting near-impossible to buy anything even vaguely related to computer memory or storage for what one might call a "reasonable" price. Not all of these are directly and specifically related to AI, of course, but they do all relate to how the economy is utterly fucked as a result of everything that has been happening for the last few years.
And of course it's selfish for me to speak up about this stuff because it's something in my life that is being specifically affected by it — but regular readers will know that I have been pretty staunchly opposed to All This Bullshit long before the still-vagueposted news that I had today.
I'm just so tired. When I was young, I thought there was a point you'd get to in your adult life where everything was just sort of sorted and you could get on with living and enjoying your life. I feel like my parents had that. (They might disagree. But it's the impression I got.) But no-one living through this horrible, horrible time in existence is getting any degree of peace, because everyone is being affected by the absolute worst pieces of shit in the world to varying degrees.
I'm tired of it. So very tired. And I wish there was an easy way to make it go away.
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I finally bit the bullet and upgraded my smartphone recently. The USB-C port in my trusty Samsung Galaxy S-something was being rather unreliable, and I was getting fed up with it. I wasn't particularly enthusiastic about upgrading, though, because every single phone on offer appeared to be festooned with unwanted "AI" features.
I plumped for the Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra, because my provider had a good offer on it, and I thought I might as well take advantage of it. It's an absolute beast of a phone size and weight-wise, which I rather like — but one thing I didn't know about it before I got hold of it was the fact it comes with an "S-pen" stylus.
This makes me quite happy, because I have fond memories of using Palm personal organisers with a stylus and resistive touchscreen, and I've always felt using your sweaty, greasy fingers is suboptimal compared to the precision one can get from a stylus.
One mild annoyance I have discovered with the stylus is that MagSafe accessories interfere with it, so if you have something like a magnetic PopSocket on the back, it fucks with the stylus. This is irritating, but not an insurmountable obstacle; the thing with a MagSafe PopSocket is that it's a lot easier to remove and put back on again compared to an adhesive one, so it's relatively little hassle to just remove the PopSocket when I want to use the pen, then stick it back on afterwards. But I digress.
I thought today I'd experiment with using the pen to draw something using the mobile version of Clip Studio Paint. And the results are… well, a bit cack-handed, as you can see above, but I can definitely see potential there. I've learned something from this brief little doodle, which is that if you're sketching on a phone, for heaven's sake zoom in and do a little bit at a time rather than trying to do the whole thing at once.
Imprecisions aside, though, I was actually quite pleased with the S-pen's performance for doodling, and the mobile version of Clip Studio Paint seems quite good. It's an annoying subscription-based app, because of course it is, but you can use it for up to 30 hours a month for free without ads. I strongly suspect I won't hit that limit, but I guess we'll see! I will continue to experiment with both the S-pen and the tablet I got for Christmas, and see where things go from there.
The phone in general seems pretty good for the most part. The screen is lovely, the speakers are surprisingly good and the cameras are excellent. I just wish it didn't bug you to "do more with AI!" when attempting to do something simple like make a note. No, black rectangle of doom, I do not need you to "summarise" my notes. The very point of making notes is already a summary of what to think about later. Nor do I need you to turn a doodle into something that is not a doodle. Fuck off and leave me alone and we'll get along just fine.
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I spent a goodly portion of this evening cleaning up my Google Photos library, because, frankly, it's been a right mess for years. It still is a right mess, but at least I have got all most of the hentai out of it now.
How did it get into this state, I hear you ask? Well, it's partly my fault, partly the fault of software. It's my fault because I didn't think to change the settings on various pieces of software, including the Google Drive and Photos apps for PC and my various phones' operating systems, and it's the software's fault for, by default, backing up images from every folder on my devices instead of just ones that make sense — like, you know, the camera roll. Lesson learned. Always check if your phone is "syncing" things you don't want it to!
In other words, what had happened is that, on numerous occasions, I had downloaded a dirty picture or ten that I found invigorating, and Google Photos had dutifully backed this up, despite me not actually wanting it to do that. So every so often, when scrolling back through the archives, I would inadvertently stumble across some absolute filth that probably shouldn't be in there. Nothing illegal, I should probably point out, but still not the sort of thing you want to accidentally appear on your screen when you're looking for a picture of your dearly departed cat or what your living room used to look like and attempting to show someone.
The most egregious offender actually wasn't explicitly offensive at all, but it was still taking up a lot of my library. Evidently at some point I had downloaded an archive of all the card art from the Senran Kagura mobile game — I wasn't going to play it, but I liked the art — and, again, Google Photos had dutifully backed this up despite me not actually wanting it to.
Unfortunately, the images from the Senran Kagura mobile game had all sorts of timestamps on them, so I would find them scattered randomly throughout actual photos I wanted to keep over the course of several years in my library's timeline. Towards the earlier years, there was a big lump of them all together though — it felt good to sweep all those into the trash.
I'm not doing this out of any sort of prudishness or anything — I still love some fine anime tiddies, after all — but more out of a desire to make Google Photos a bit more useful as an image archive, since there are myriad other options for getting one's hands on grotty pictures. It's already got a lot of screenshots in there as well as actual photographs, though I'm fine with that — it means that if I want to grab a screenshot of a game I played 10 years ago, I probably can — I just didn't want it full of images that I'd just downloaded for the sake of it. That includes silly memes and screengrabs of Twitter posts, also; any arguments those screenshots were intended to "win" are inevitably long gone, and life is too short to give a shit about what people I used to think were assholes are up to today. There's enough assholes in the present, thank you very much.
Anyway, I think I got most of the filth. I'm sure I will continue to find random little bits and pieces here and there, but at least now it will be more like a little treat and a surprise rather than "good Lord, most of 2016 appears to consist of anime women in provocative poses and Kirino from Oreimo with a massive cock".
That's it. That's the post for today. I'm off to play some Wolfenstein.
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I, as I may have made clear on a few separate occasions on these hallowed pages, fucking hate generative AI. I do not use it. I do not need to use it. I do not want to use it. And I cannot wait for the whole bubble to pop and this whole shitshow to go the way of the NFT and the Metaverse.
In the last few weeks in particular, I've found that there are a lot more people seemingly trying to push AI as "sort of all right, really". You know the sort of thing, people just casually, jokingly drop into a Discord chat that "out of curiosity, [they] threw it into Gemini to see what would happen" and before you know it, all meaningful human conversation has been replaced with copy-pasted obsequious fawning over the prompter, bold-type section headers and bullet-pointed lists.
Not only that, but the press are at it, too; just today, Undark Magazine (which I've never heard of prior to today) posted a piece called "Abstinence from AI is Not the Answer", in which the authors, C. Brandon Ogbunu and Cristopher Moore, make the baffling assertion that refusing to engage with AI "puts vulnerable people at risk".
"Like many new technologies," they write, "AI can either amplify inequality or ameliorate it, depending on how it is deployed. And fears about the likelihood of it amplifying stratification and segregation are valid. But advocating for abstinence will deny communities access to the tools the privileged are already using to help them write college essays, do their homework problems and learn a second language. Puritanical stances leave people ill-equipped to use this technology responsibly and unable to benefit from it."
Okay, but… hear me out… generative AI is terrible at all of those things. AI writing can be spotted a mile off. It gets answers to basic problems wrong, making it useless for homework. Due to its propensity to hallucinate and fawn over the user, you can't necessarily guarantee that its use of a non-English language is correct, nor that it will correct you if you get something wrong. And, more importantly than all of those things, relying on generative AI to do any of those things strips you of the ability to do them yourself. Not only that, it kills your curiosity to learn and discover new things for yourself, because it's much easier to just ask the chatbot to do it for you rather than to put in the work to learn a new skill yourself.
It's this latter part that really concerns me about generative AI. I've seen so many people willingly hand off to a chatbot during normal discussions and arguments and think that's a shortcut to "winning". When our legal and medical professionals are caught using these unflinchingly awful tools, their own skills and knowledge atrophy because they have no need to retain them — the chatbot will do all the hard work for them.
And what happens when, as looks increasingly likely, the money runs out and all these monumentally wasteful services are no longer able to operate? We're going to need humans who can actually do stuff again. And I'm concerned we're going to struggle to find them, because just over the course of the last couple of years I've seen a frightening amount of people completely give up on seeking out reliable information, knowledge and training for themselves because they can just ask the chatbot.
To address Ogbunu and Moore's main point — that abstinence from generative AI puts vulnerable people at risk — I say, full-throatedly, bollocks. The Internet has been a constant presence in all our lives — whether we're privileged or vulnerable — for decades at this point, to such a degree that it is considered one of the basic utilities these days. It is rammed full of helpful, thoughtful, weird and wonderful information, and the only skill one needs to cultivate in order to take advantage of this is how to determine whether or not something is a reputable source. That is something that we learn to do in school — or we should learn how to do, anyway.
If you hand that job over to a chatbot which is demonstrably wrong a statistically significant amount of times you ask it a question, you are not making use of that skill. That is not democratising the delivery of information; it is filtering all that information through a technology that, at its core, has been designed only with the interests of its billionaire owners in mind. And not only that, to get the supposed "best" out of these chatbots, you're expected to pony up $200 or more a month for a subscription. That doesn't sound very inclusive to the most vulnerable of society.
"Choices we make now will determine whether AI will be a tool for the powerful, dazzling the rest of us with its hype and subjecting us to its harms, or whether it will be a tool — imperfect but useful — in everyone's hands," conclude Ogbunu and Moore.
If it's an imperfect tool, it's not useful. I repeat: I do not use it; I do not need to use it; I do not want to use it. My choice is made; if I see anyone "powerful" using generative AI, I will laugh at them, because they are depriving themselves of the joy of thinking, of learning, of discovering, of creating. And then I will pity them.
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The wife and I made the silly error of deciding to go into town today. We thought we'd go get a Currywurst from the German market, plus she wanted to enquire at a music shop about some various bits and pieces.
We were having second thoughts when we got up, because it was dark, miserable and raining outside, but we thought "ah, no, we should go out, it'll do us good to get out of the house".
Reader, it was not good. Apart from the Currywurst, that was good. Although £9 for it was absolute daylight robbery, but I guess that is Just What Things Cost Now. And my wife did at least get the information she wanted from the music shop.
The rest of the trip was a miserable, rain-soaked experience, but probably the most irritating thing about the whole experience was what they've done to WestQuay parking. Instead of taking the tried-and-true approach of giving you a ticket, then you popping said ticket into a machine and paying for how long you spent in the car park, they have decided to make it all "technological", now requiring you to have your number plate scanned by ANPR when you enter, then before you leave, you have to remember to scan a QR code from a poster and pay on a website. Because that is somehow much better.
I will grant you that during busy periods, it could be frustrating to have to queue up for a ticket machine when you wanted to leave. It was frustrating when the ticket machine broke, too, or it ate your ticket, or any other shenanigans that might have occurred. But that's why they had the little man on the end of the "help" button to help you out.
The main issue with the "pay by phone" option they have chosen to go with is that there is no fucking phone signal inside the car park. Nor is there any Wi-Fi. So if you forget to scan one of the posters that is outside on the way back to the car park — or, indeed, if you took a route back to the car park that did not pass by one of these posters — it's an incredible pain in the arse to do something as simple as paying for parking, something which we have all been begrudgingly doing for many years at this point.
Of course, the whole thing has almost certainly been done in the name of collecting data on people who use the car park — they take your number plate when you enter and your name when you pay, so that's fun. They will probably try and spin this as somehow being "more convenient" when in fact it's several orders of magnitude more annoying than the old way of doing things.
But hey. We've made everything else worse with technology. Why should parking be left out of the party?
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Just recently, Eurogamer published a review of Arc Raiders, the latest multiplayer craze, and ruffled more than a few feathers when the reviewer, Rick Lane, dinged the game with a 2/5 star rating, primarily due to the game's apparent use of generative AI to create many of its voice lines. The developer, Embark Studios, has form in this area, with its previous title, The Finals, also featuring AI-generated voice lines.
The reviewer's justification for giving the game such a low score was not simply "AI bad" — it was because, from an artistic perspective, getting a soulless robot to voice the human characters in your game that is about robots who have taken over the world and forced humanity underground feels just a little too incongruous to be able to pass without comment.
And I agree. I also firmly, strongly and resolutely believe that the use of generative AI in video game development is an obnoxious, odious, wasteful, exploitative and ethically reprehensible practice — and I have a firm policy that I will absolutely not engage with a game that appears to have been tainted with generative AI garbage. It's why I didn't play The Alters, it's why I haven't played the latest Everybody's Golf, and it's why I won't touch Arc Raiders. (In the latter case, it's also because I suspect I won't like Arc Raiders, but that's beside the point right now.)
I've been disappointed at quite how many people I've seen handwaving away this aspect of Arc Raiders in particular. Indeed, the Eurogamer review has a comments section that is at least as much of a trash fire as you would expect, because Video Game Good, and you're not allowed to take a firm ethical stance about something in a review because then the Gamers™, the good little consumer piggies that they are, will get mad that you said their Favourite Forever Game This Week was perhaps not to your taste for a perfectly valid reason.
The unfortunate thing with Arc Raiders is that its use of AI and machine learning (which are different things) is a bit shrouded in uncertainty right now. Some folks say that its generated voice lines are fine because it's actually just a fancy text-to-speech system; some folks are taking this argument further in order to weaponise disabled people and accessibility features; some are saying that it's fine because the actors the voices were trained on were aware of what they were signing up for.
But regardless of whether or not Arc Raiders' voices were generated by supposedly consenting voice actors, or if they were the product of the more environmentally disastrous end of generative AI, the entire thing rubs me the wrong way. The really stupid thing is that the generated voices in Arc Raiders are for things that voice actors could have very reasonably just recorded — things like vendors, NPCs and suchlike — and Embark's justification for using generated voices is that it's "quicker". On top of that, the results are markedly, obviously inferior to using an actual voice actor recording the complete lines, so one has to question if cutting corners in this way is really worth it.
Embark's not a small, frugal indie company, either. They have the resources to be able to afford voice actors to do a proper job. They're just refusing to. And regardless of the tech that produces the not-very-good end result, it sets a poor precedent to do that.
The arguments in favour of generated voices aren't very convincing, either. The most common one that comes up is that "one day we'll have games where every NPC conversation will be AI-generated, and you'll be able to talk to them about anything!" And to that I say: I absolutely do not want that.
When I'm playing a game that has characters in it, a narrative, a setting, all that stuff — I want to experience the vision of the creators. I want to enjoy something that someone else has created, with a clear vision and purpose behind it. I want to be able to reflect on the way a writer composed a piece of dialogue; how a character's mannerisms tell us more about them; how the tone of the whole piece gives a feeling of coherence to the game as a complete creative work.
I refuse to accept the "genie is out of the bottle" argument. We've been making video games for 50+ years at this point, and the reason the medium has continued to endure is because of human creativity. We have seen incredible advancements in storytelling, mechanics and the overall craft of making all manner of different games over the years — and the AI glazers seem to want nothing more than to just throw all that experience away in favour of some "vibe coded" garbage with AI-generated dialogue and synthesised speech.
Couple that with the fact that AI is insanely wasteful, growing increasingly likely to make the worldwide economy crash, disastrous for the environment and taking valuable resources away from doing things that might actually make life better for people who really need it to be better? Nah. Don't need it. Don't want it. And will not support anything made with it, no matter how much you argue "no no no, but this is a good use of it, actually."
I say bravo to Rick Lane of Eurogamer for having the balls to stand up and say "no" to this garbage with a thoughtful and well-considered critique. If only we could see a bit more of that kind of thing, and less of this sort of rubbish.
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There's a lot of absolute garbage on YouTube, but there are a few folks out there who do some truly special work. One of those people is Eddy Burback, who makes maybe two or three videos a year, but they're always very high quality, both in technical terms and in terms of the amount of research that goes into them. You may recall a while back I was rather taken by his video about giving up the smartphone life.
Today, he put out a new video called "ChatGPT made me delusional", and I sincerely recommend you set aside an hour or so of your life to watch it through in its entirety. Not skip through it at 1.5x speed, not "have it on in the background". Watch it. Because I think it is important.
Here it is:
Burback's aim for the video was to understand the phenomenon of "chatbot-induced psychosis" or "AI psychosis". This is where vulnerable people, already struggling with matters of mental health, would turn to large language model chatbots such as ChatGPT and use them as a form of "therapy" or as a substitute for actual human contact. There have already been some incredibly tragic results, as anyone who has ever read any science fiction would have been able to predict a mile off.
To explore how this might happen, Burback presented ChatGPT with an obviously ridiculous hypothesis based on complete fabrications: that he was the smartest under-1 baby of 1997, capable of producing great works of art, having in-depth philosophical discussions and demonstrating a deep understanding of complex mathematics. It took him two statements to convince the chatbot that this was the undeniable truth, and things just escalated from there.
Burback presented the chatbot with suggestions that his friends and family might not understand his brilliance, and it recommended he flee into the middle of nowhere and break all contact with them, including stopping sharing his location data with the person he trusts most in the world: his twin brother. He continued feeding the chatbot with increasingly ridiculous, obviously delusional statements and deliberate, complete and utter nonsense, and at no point did it attempt to deter him from the path it had set him on.
It was only at one point — the day when OpenAI controversially swapped its "4o" model for GPT-5 — that the chatbot had a momentary blip in feeding into his "delusions" (and, to its credit, suggested some psychological help facilities in the neighbourhood), but Burback pointed out that it was very easy for someone who was paying for the service to just switch it back to the old model, which seemingly finds it impossible to say "no" to the user.
What was particularly eerie about the whole situation is that Burback was using the premium voice feature on ChatGPT, which has clearly been designed to sound as "human" as possible, even going so far as to add realistic inflections and non-fluency features to the things it is saying. (It also pronounces emojis as completely unrelated sound effects, which somewhat detracts from the "humanity" of it all, but still.) In other words, it wasn't hard to see how someone suffering from real, genuine mental health problems might feel like they really did have a person in their phone who was willing to listen to them, tell them they were always right, and repeatedly give them some really, really bad advice.
It was actually kind of horrifying. The way the bot continually escalated into increasingly outlandish behaviour — culminating in him chanting mantras under an electricity pylon, wrapping his entire apartment in tin foil and tattooing a symbol into his thigh — was genuinely frightening.
I know we can all have a good laugh about how the chatbots get things wrong sometimes, but Burback's research here demonstrates that it doesn't just get things wrong (and I apologise for using this sentence construction, given its indelible association with AI writing, but it's an established turn of phrase for a reason) — it offers genuinely dangerous advice with minimal guardrails in place. And it does so without thinking about it or understanding why it might be dangerous — because it's not actually thinking or understanding anything at all. It's constructing sentences that, based on the data it has Hoovered up from across the Internet, it thinks are the correct responses to the things the user has been typing. It is, in essence, an extremely advanced version of the old ELIZA program on classic computers.
And it can go fuck itself.
Want to read my thoughts on various video games, visual novels and other popular culture things? Stop by MoeGamer.net, my site for all things fun where I am generally a lot more cheerful. And if you fancy watching some vids on classic games, drop by my YouTube channel.
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