I’ve been digging into how we might interact with AI, beyond chatbots, and whether we could have NPCs as colleagues...
In particular I’ve been writing actual code (ulp) around actual multiplayer apps (ulp) to see what the interactions and issues might be
It is slightly ridiculous to imagine AI NPCs as dolphins... but why not, right? We’ve got a lot of language around “companion species” as a metaphor for AI, so let’s jump and see if that works.
So here’s a Twitter/X thread of my first sketches: multiplayer cursors that look like other users, but are actually NPCs
Big lessons: escaping the chatbot format might let us answer the AI affordance issue (ie how do we know what the AI can do). Here the NPC can proactively tell you. But also apps will need significant re-engineering to present a machine API and NPC runtime
Gonna dig in this direction for a couple weeks, so up for chatting with anyone about the intersection of AI/multiplayer/collaboration/etc
📝 Matt Webb :cherry_blossom::blossom::cherry_blossom: on X
How do we collaborate with AIs? What if they were just like our human colleagues, cursors and all? Well not exactly human
I’ve been sketching NPCs-as-dolphins — you build a little pool, summon them, and that’s where they hang out
(NPCs = non-player characters)
AND THEN...
It's been fun watching progress of this over your shoulder :) Looking forward to more!
🙂 well, now I’ve got the framework, there’s all kinds of weird automatons I want to put into tldraw…