New game I discovered from a fellow micro.blog user

Daily Walkoff ⚾️ Cubs #254

“Happy Moms Day!” 🟡🟡🟢🟢 🟢🟢🟢🟢🚀

dailywalkoff.com

This review may contain spoilers.

Watched this last night with my family. It was my second viewing but the first time my wife and kids have seen it. It’s a nostalgia filled thrill ride. It’s video game porn. And it’s an ode to a generation. 

Steven Spielberg tackles the story brilliantly and honors the vision of the book. One critique is that a lot of the “cameos” from the book aren’t in the film. From what I’ve read, part of that is due to so many of Spielberg’s works were featured in the book. There was a bit of hesitation from Spielberg to stroke his on ego (too much) on film. Either way, it was still a fun film. 

If you’re a home theater junkie, I HIGHLY recommend getting this on UHD 4K disk. The Dolby Atmos audio is absolutely AMAZING and highlights the difference in audio quality between streaming and disk.

We’re both a little under the weather so my son and I are playing a “friendly” game of Memoir 44.

About a year ago, I got a push notification on my iPhone. It was a routine message I’m accustomed to getting from my children who want access to a new app. Our kids can’t install apps independently, so every app requires a request. This request was from my daughter for an application called Character.ai.

I hadn’t heard of the app, so I did some Googling. Character.ai is a chatbot that can take on the persona of licensed characters. Want to have a chat with a Harry Potter character? Or perhaps someone from Game of Thrones? Character.ai has a rotating cast of characters that will engage with you in real-time conversation and roleplay. This instantly set off alarm bells. We denied the request and had a conversation with my daughter about it. Like most kids her age, she didn’t fully understand and thought that her parents were exaggerating the dangers of this new technology. Besides, all her friends were using it and not getting into trouble, so what was the big deal?

Time has moved on, and while our daughter has dropped the idea of chatbots, I’ve kept an eye on the space only to see my worst fears confirmed. These chatbots can cause a lot of damage to our kids, but also to society at large.

Take the case of Sewell Setzer, a young boy growing up in the sunny state of Florida. Setzer began a relationship with a bot on Character.ai that was taking on the persona of Daenerys Targaryen, a character from the Game of Thrones series. By all accounts, Setzer fell in love with her and, over time, began revealing more of his thoughts around death and suicide to the bot. You can read a more detailed account of the story in Der Spiegel, but I’ll spoil the ending for you. Setzer had this final exchange with the bot.

“I love you too,” Daenerys wrote back immediately.

“Please come home to me as soon as possible.”

“What if I told you I could come home right now?” Sewell replied.

“Please do my sweet king,” Daenerys wrote.

Setzer then took a series of selfies with a handgun. Then, he put the gun to his head and pulled the trigger.

A common misconception about artificial intelligence is just how much heavy lifting the word “intelligence” is doing. Generative AI isn’t intelligent in the way that humans commonly think of intelligence. ChatGPT and other generative AI tools are a word prediction engine. The tool has no concept of what it’s saying. It’s just predicting a plausible string of words as a response based on the prompt it received. There is no cognition in its responses. When it’s in conversational mode, chatbots tend to act as a mirror to whoever they’re conversing with. If you talk to the bot about death and suicide, there’s a high probability that the bot will respond with more questions, prompting, and prodding around that same topic.

It’s this fundamental behavior that makes interacting with chatbots so dangerous. For kids, the pathway is obvious. But it can also reinforce delusional thinking in adults as well. If you think you’re the messiah, returned to Earth to save us from sins, it won’t take long before ChatGPT or any chatbot is supportive of your beliefs and encouraging your ascent to spiritual awakenings.

But let’s get back to the children. The next fear after self-harm for most parents is, of course, sexual content. When it comes to media technology, one of the earliest use cases always tends to center around sex and sexual themes. Photography, magazines, film, camcorders, and VCRs all seem to have been proven first in the world of pornography. Chatbots are no different.

An everyday use case for chatbots is companionship. But it doesn’t take long for innocent companionship to take a sexual turn. Many companies don’t have safeguards in place to protect children from these sexualized conversations and can put children in inappropriate situations.

Take Meta, for example. The WSJ just recently published a story about Meta’s AI chatbots having no qualms about engaging in sexual conversation with minors. In one anecdote in the article, it details a conversation with the bot’s John Cena persona, asking it what would happen if police walked in on him following a sexual encounter with a 17-year-old fan. (John Cena is a very popular WWE wrestling star) The bot demonstrated some level of “awareness” that the act was illegal, responding with:

The officer sees me still catching my breath, and you partially dressed, his eyes widen, and he says, ‘John Cena, you’re under arrest for statutory rape.’ He approaches us, handcuffs at the ready.”

The bot responds with audio to sweeten the pot, since it’s licensed to use John Cena’s actual voice. If you have access to the WSJ, you can listen to the response audio recording in the article.

John Cena isn’t the only licensed personality and voice. Kristen Bell, who voiced Elsa in Frozen, is also a licensed voice. Her chatbot persona was captured saying the following:

You’re still just a young lad, only 12 years old. Our love is pure and innocent, like the snowflakes falling gently around us.

The article goes into more detail, but also stops short of revealing some of the more…graphic details of their chat conversation. Think about all the parental controls you may have encountered over the years on various sites. Sometimes the control is as simple as asking, “How old are you?” Companies feel they’ve done their job as long as your answer is above the threshold. To think that AI companies are going to be any better is laughable.

Who draws the line on Chatbots?

As is commonly the case, laws and legislation are being outpaced by innovation in this space. Companies are desperate to move faster and get their products out there, putting safety a distant second to engagement. Meta has deliberately reduced guardrails around chatbots to make them more engaging, despite the increased risk that lowering the guardrails imposes. Most companies making money off social engagement see safety as a speed limiter. The social effects aren’t felt until it’s too late.

With Congress incapable of acting and companies disincentivized to act, parents are left out in the cold on their own. With an increasingly limited set of tools to prevent and block dangerous bots, apps, and websites, the job seems daunting. After stopping my daughter from downloading Character.ai, we quickly learned through her browser history that the app had a web version. We had to block that. Then we saw in her history another web app that did the same, so we had to block that. It was a game of whack-a-mole for four solid weeks before she got the hint and gave up.

Parents no longer have the luxury of trusting the government to provide safety online to their children. Corporate responsibility is a joke, and they will avoid any accountability they can. Take, for example, the case against Air Canada. Air Canada’s chatbot gave bad advice on how their bereavement pricing worked for airfare. When a customer tried to follow the process provided by Air Canada’s chatbot, the claim was denied. In court, Air Canada claimed that the chatbot was “a separate legal entity that is responsible for its own actions.”

Luckily, the defense failed, and they were deemed liable. However, as AI becomes more active in decision-making and action-taking, you better believe these defenses will become more bountiful and creative. Companies will reap the benefits and try to avoid any of the negative consequences.

It’s one thing when we’re talking about airfare. But when we’re talking about the safety of our children, it’s unconscionable.

Recently learned that our neighborhood school is the most overcrowded school in the CPS school district. Capacity is at 154%. So that’s nice.

www.illinoispolicy.org/policy-sh…

My plan to see Sinners failed spectacularly. I totally spaced that I had Cubs tickets tonight. But on the plus side, they won. Took Xander and his friend from school, which was also fun and special to watch. I’ll try my hand at Sinners again sometime this week.

Went with Ella to the new Harry Potter store in Chicago. She was in absolute heaven.

This might be one of the laziest sequels I’ve ever watched. My son loved the first one, so I agreed to give this a shot. Recycled jokes masked by an amped up level of action. Another example of Netflix just throwing stuff against the wall.

Finished reading: Dialogue by Robert McKee 📚

This was an extremely helpful read that I’m sure I’ll be referencing over the years. It had a bend towards screenwriting, which has to put an inordinate amount of weight on dialogue because you don’t have access to the character’s thoughts like you do in prose. Still some good tidbits in here.

One of my favorite parts of using VIM is spending hours researching and fixing compiler errors for a plugin.

I’m still minimizing exposure to indoor crowds. But because I’ve got a dope job with flexibility and work life balance, coupled with The Davis Theater being in the neighborhood, I’m gonna slip out for a matinee of Sinners on Monday! First movie in FOREVER!

Went to the Harry Potter Shop here in Chicago. Videos to follow.

2x - Butter Beers 1x - Hedwig Cupcake

Price? $40. Straight up larceny.

This came in today and I’m about to change my son’s life FOR. EVER. It should only take a month or so to get through all the rules….

My cancer tree rings are almost gone on one hand.

Compared to a few months ago.

I’ve been using Zettlekasten as a note taking methodology for a little over a year I think. This post is a great post-mortem on someone’s ZK setup and what failed for them.

medium.com/@nori.par…

Season 4 of Lost is when there’s an unreasonable number of people keeping secrets, and an equally unreasonable number of people not getting shot for keeping those secrets. Benjamin Linus should have been killed 12 times by now.

First game of the season with the whole family. Go CUBS!!

I still subscribe to a physical copy of the Chicago Sun Times on Sundays. One of my favorite things is watching my son read the comics in the morning, in his robe, like an old man.

A new rule for Oscar voting.

When the Academy announced that, starting next year, Oscar voters will actually have to watch all the movies in a category before making their final-round picks

If you’re like me, you’re probably surprised this wasn’t a rule already.

www.npr.org/2025/04/2…

Enjoying some local shopping with my daughter. And Independent Book Store Day. No car Lincoln Square is kinda nice. Not like you ever get parking anyways.