The New American Civil War - Updates
Crow's Eye View - on Reality and Our Game
Here’s a fun fact. I originally bought Indignified.com domain to make fun of people in dignified positions who were acting without dignity but the more I thought about it, the more I decided that indignified was more of a label of strength, pride, and survival than something that should be attached to shameful people.
As to shameful people - there’s been plenty of that lately. So much so that I decided that it would be fun to have a mock civil war moderated and game mastered by AI - as I wrote about last week in the previous Crow’s Eye View column.
Since then - well - things have gone incredibly weird. In the real world, we now have US Marines squaring off against immigration activists and the President of the United States calling for the Governor of California to be arrested. This news is conveniently taking the no-class feud between the most powerful man in the world and the richest man in the world as their fragile man-child egos rub against each other like two fundamentalist Christian republicans who insist they are straight. (Fun fact I used to bartend in a southern state where some of the most conservative legislators in the country would convene after their session and … yeah… a few drinks and it became really clear.)
Anyway, that’s the real world but I wanted to update you guys on the game we have been playing. In some ways it has been less bizarre than reality but things are moving much faster in the game - I know that hardly seems possible. Rather than me just giving you a wall of text, I’ve been using AI to create podcasts of the day’s events. Here they are - from several different models:
Day 1: https://monica.im/ai-podcast/share?id=bb9c999d-f3b6-4f60-9cec-67feba7e56a4
Day 2: https://discord.com/channels/877945273815556176/877945274281115648/1381236276912459906
Day 3: https://2859470b.jellypod.ai/episodes/1e8456eb-11d2-4336-94ec-db26658ff282
Day 4: https://2859470b.jellypod.ai/episodes/2938ef51-6086-43f5-ae0f-9acadab27762
Day 5:
The New American Civil War
·No one could have predicted the twists and turns that the New American Civil War would take - or that this simulated game would. If anything, maybe this should give everyone a bit of hope.
Day 6:
The Battle for Humanity's Future
This podcast dives deeper into the ideological frameworks used by both sides in the New American Civl War, a game being played between human players with AI moderator/game master. The entire game is an experiment in what PvP can be like in a story based world building game run by free AI models - but the ideas that emerge from the game may have real wor…
The earlier AI podcasts would have been funny because they are so conversational but the topics are so not conversational. The latest podcasts are from a pay to play model.
We also ran into some issues with using ChatGPT - at one point, RED’s rerun was deemed too close to real world action and violent so we had to copy the whole chat and move it from ChatGPT to Claude - but first summarized it. There were some fairly bad translations from one model to the other in terms of where teams stood, but in a sense it leveled things out.
Basecannon claimed that ChatGPT obviously leaned left and I can’t really disagree with that but Claude seems to go the other direction in my opinion - so we are at a decent point.
For those who just want a quick summation: The POTUS is AWOL and the US government has failed and floundered. RED has mostly claimed the south, mountain, and midwest while WATER has claimed the Northeast, West Coast, Hawaii, and Great Lakes region. Real world notable figure in RED is Elon Musk and real world notable figure in WATER is Barack Obama who is a sort of Ben Franklin diplomat for WATER. Water controls more than half of US military assets. Things bounced back and forth but stayed roughly even although thousands of civilians and combatants have been killed so that’s actually pretty massive. Things went crazy from there as you probably noted if you listened to the podcasts above. We wrapped things up with final turns today Here is the video in case you missed it.
The New American Civil War - Resolution
We posted our final turns today…and the outcome was not what anyone came into this thinking it would be.
Takeaways: AI isn’t ready to run MMORPGs yet. There may be specialized versions that can handle the challenge, but the general free LLMs were not equipped to keep track of details or to make reasonable outcomes from turns. Even things like keeping track of military assets or casualties seemed beyond the scope. Add to that the need to summarize and port the game to a new chat almost daily and well…it is a lot of work without a worthwhile payoff.
In terms of AI podcasts - none of them really cut the mustard with the free models but paying the $5 a month to Eleven Labs was worth it to get the product from the last three episodes.
Overall, this was a nice distraction from the real world events unfolding which probably won’t have such a happy ending as we managed to find in our simulated civil war.
If you’d like to join the next game - you can come join us or catch the latest in the BAOISM discord. https://discord.gg/6RmuX4AhFT