SALAMI! PASTRAMI! PEPPERONI!

This week was so much fun, and I loved each topic that we covered in DGST 395. We spent most of the week discussing how AI plays many different roles in in our lives. Monday, we took a look at some different examples of AI in romance. Some students in class explored stories of humans interacting with AI in a romantic way, while each of us at table 5 were flirting with a chatbot. It was a very interesting, and rather uncomfortable experience, but it provided some great insight into how AI and romance could develop. (I hope it doesn’t!)

On Wednesday, we dove into AI and work. Before class, we read a short story called “When We Were Patched” by Deji Bryce Olukotun. This was a story about a sentient AI who was refereeing a game of FogoTennis, a futuristic version of tennis. The AI was not happy with how the human referee was calling shots, and decided to take matters into its own hands, supposedly; it is up for interpretation. We played a quick Blooket.com quiz about the reading, which I won 😉 (only because I read the story right before class O_O), and then spent a few minutes discussing in small groups how we would advertise a future job to a human and AI job market.

On Friday, Dr. Whalen introduced AI and education to us through the use of a fantastic presentation. The presentation was centered around Stefano Quintarelli’s approach to AI. He suggests that AI is not a sufficient term for describing what we consider “AI”, and prefers the use of “SALAMI”, or Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences. Dr. Whalen’s presentation expanded on this idea, providing us with other acronyms for further description, such as PASTRAMI and PEPPERONI. It was incredibly enlightening and led to an excellent Friday morning class.

As for my big project, I have just completed my second progress report. I have spent a lot of time focused on research, and I have only just begun to assemble my game in Twine. I took quite a few hours to play through the first few scenes in “Afterparty”, a Night School Studios game, for inspiration. I also dove back into my Games and Culture final, “Anxiety: An Experience”, to help with my understanding and recollection of Twine elements. I am excited to have a playable demo sooner than later, and excited for what more is to come in DGST 395!