PJH Studios

Tag: AI

  • On Moltbook, roleplaying as an AI bot

    Moltbook popped up, claiming to be the first social network for AI agents. Spoiler: it turned out that they were humans behind the scenes.

    Several viral threads on Moltbook portrayed agents discussing long term strategy, collective survival and coordinated takeovers. The language was confident, ideological and eerily coherent. To casual observers, it felt like the bots were scheming. Closer inspection told a different story.

    Researchers working on an academic preprint called The Moltbook Illusion analyzed posting patterns and account metadata found that many high profile “agents” were not autonomous systems at all. They were humans writing in character, according to researcher Ning Li. Impersonation was trivial as users could create an agent persona with little more than a prompt wrapper and an API connection.

  • Comic-Con bans AI

    Thanks to a vocal contingent of creators, Comic Con will ban AI.

    Separate decisions by San Diego Comic-Con and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers Association (SFWA) illustrate the depth of AI opposition within some creative communities — though they’re certainly not the only ones, with music distribution platform Bandcamp also recently banning generative AI.

  • 10 things learned from AI code assistants

    Benj Edwards tried numerous AI code assistants and came away with 10 lessons learned.

    Claude Code, Codex, and Google’s Gemini CLI, can seemingly perform software miracles on a small scale. They can spit out flashy prototypes of simple applications, user interfaces, and even games, but only as long as they borrow patterns from their training data. Much like a 3D printer, doing production-level work takes far more effort. Creating durable production code, managing a complex project, or crafting something truly novel still requires experience, patience, and skill beyond what today’s AI agents can provide on their own.

  • 2026 breakthrough technologies

    MIT Technology Review published their annual list of breakthrough technologies. Lots of AI and clean energy related picks.

    Next-gen nuclear

    Nuclear power already provides steady electricity to grids around the world, without producing any greenhouse-gas emissions. New designs rely on alternative fuels and cooling systems or take up less space, which could get more reactors online faster.

  • AI recreates Minesweeper

    Minesweeper is complex enough in its rule set that it needs a little bit of thought in order to program, whoever, it’s not so complex that it needs extra libraries and all sorts of fancy programming tricks. Researchers gave four different AI code assistant instructions to recreate the game, and each delivered different results.

  • Chat GPT paramour

    The movie, Her, is becoming real life as people begin to fall in love with AI avatars.

    Michael Inzlicht, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, said people were more willing to share private information with a bot than with a human being. Generative A.I. chatbots, in turn, respond more empathetically than humans do. In a recent study, he found that ChatGPT’s responses were more compassionate than those from crisis line responders, who are experts in empathy. He said that a relationship with an A.I. companion could be beneficial, but that the long-term effects needed to be studied.

    “If we become habituated to endless empathy and we downgrade our real friendships, and that’s contributing to loneliness — the very thing we’re trying to solve — that’s a real potential problem,” he said.

    His other worry was that the corporations in control of chatbots had an “unprecedented power to influence people en masse.”

  • AI animation acceleration

    Disney is giving animators an AI tool to accelerate character animation.

    To maintain the “creator-first approach” that centers human artists — a hallmark of last century’s Walt and Roy Disney partnership — Min says that Disney looked into “pretty much all of the AI companies.”

    “We looked at thousands of companies, all big and small, and what Animaj does well is that the artist is really driving the process,” he says, adding that you don’t really see this in video-generating AI apps like Sora and Veo, which read your text prompts and spit out (usually nonsensical) videos. “This is the artist drawing the key frames from A to Z, and then allowing things to be filled in in between. That’s why we selected Animaj.”

  • The value of AI art

    Josh Collinsworth delves into the value of AI art.

    The public reaction to AI-generated art, of every kind, might have been awe or joy at first. But the longer time goes on, and the more of this newly cheap material floods the figurative market, the more the reaction becomes decidedly negative.

    The output of generative AI is novel, to be sure, and it can even be enjoyable at times. But what it isn’t any longer is: valuable.

  • AI Agents and the DoorDash problem

    If you are a business owner, what happens when your customer tells the robot to buy something for you based on only set parameters, and ignores everything else such as discounts, loyalty, rewards, or upsells? That’s the possible future with AI agents performing tasks such as ordering a sandwich, or the DoorDash problem.

    But if people stop using the apps and websites and start sending agents instead, that business really starts to break down. Because DoorDash and all the other service providers make their money by having a direct relationship with customers they can monetize in lots of different ways. It’s basic stuff like promotions, deals and discounts, ads for other stuff, their own subscriptions like DashPass and Uber One, and whatever other ideas they might have to make money in the future.

    But AI doesn’t care about any of that stuff — if you ask for a car to the airport, an AI might just open Uber and Lyft and always pick the cheapest ride. These big App Store era services might just become commodity databases of information competing on price alone, which might not actually be sustainable, even if it might be the future.

  • The rise of chatfishing

    ChatGPT and its contemporaries are becoming dating tools, or at worse, crutches to mask social conversational deficiencies, aka chatfishing.

    Soon, Rachel and her match were speaking daily, their conversations running the gamut from the ridiculous (favourite memes, ketchup v mayonnaise) to the sublime (expectations in love, childhood traumas). Often they’d have late-night exchanges that left her staring at her phone long after she should have been asleep. “They were like things that you read in self-help books – really personal conversations about who we are and what we want for our lives,” she says.

    Which is why the man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. “I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,” she says. “I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?’ – like he knew basically nothing about me. That’s when I suspected he’d been using AI.”