A NOTE FROM THE EDITOR

It's been a busy two months, with the release of GPT-4 (and rumors of the release of GPT-5), increasing polarized opinions about the role of generative AI in our society, and a visit to podcast Jong Beleggen. Luckily I'll be able to focus more on Datakami next month, as I will start working on Datakami fulltime starting May 1st, together with partner-in-crime Yorick van Pelt. Enjoy this newsletter!
—Judith

Source: VentureBeat via Naavik

Featured

Game intelligence company Naavik posted an interesting piece titled Gaming’s Generative AI Boom is Just Getting Started, a followup to their analysis from September 2021. The post gives a concise overview of recent developments in generative AI for games, and how these are used by game companies big and small. However, I don't agree that AI in games is as new as Naavik claims. Generative AI techniques have been used for decades to create game assets such as textures for 3D objects, flavor text and music. However, since the release of ChatGPT, the general public is suddenly aware of the recent leaps in AI, and now developments are really taking off.

Creative AI and generative AI

HustleGPT

Brandmanager Jackson Fall conducted my favorite creative experiment with ChatGPT of the past 2 months. He christened ChatGPT "HustleGPT" and prompted it to create a business, brand, product and website from scratch. Fall only functioned as the 'human liaison' of ChatGPT's business decisions. It led to GreenGadgetGuru.com, an affiliate marketing business for eco-products. Although I hope HustleGPT won't lead to a proliferation of bot-led hot air businesses, reading about the entire process was certainly very entertaining.

AI security

Recently I had a few interesting discussions about the practical security aspects of AI. Now that ChatGPT & friends are integrated in all kinds of software (Slack, Notion, Google docs, Discord), AI functionality is just one button click away. The downside is that it has become trivially easy to accidentally leak sensitive information to large tech companies, as OpenAI presumably saves all data sent to their servers. Many people are already experimenting with AI tools while working, often under the radar of their employer. To proactively prevent accidental data leaks, business owners and managers should start thinking about the consequences of AI usage in their company and come up with a policy for their employees.

AI Hackathon

Angel investor Sarah Drinkwater, who was one of the coaches of AI Hackathon Amsterdam in February, has now organised a similar AI Hackathon in London. The UK event is this weekend and I'm really curious to see what participants will come up with. The people who participate in these events are typically early adopters, so if you want to learn about new applications for AI as they are created, follow the event on Twitter or Linkedin.

Video Games

I first played a demo of casual fishing game DREDGE during online game festival Steam NextFest, in October last year. I liked the game so much I put an alert in my agenda for the release date. The game narrative is an Eldritch horror mystery, reminiscent of games such as Sunless Sea and Cultist Simulator. The cute cell-shaded graphics and friendly interface can be misleading: below the surface (ha) we can find a huge variety of monstrous fish, experience haunting journeys across a treacherous ocean by night, and have a few blood-curdling encounters with terrors in the fog. Highly recommended if you like exploration games with plenty of fun-scary moments.

Datakami news

Company news

I'm happy to announce that Yorick van Pelt will join me as a technical consultant at Datakami starting April 17. Like me, Yorick has been closely following the recent developments in generative AI. We've been exchanging ideas with each other for the past years and I'm looking forward to working together on a more permanent basis. Welcome, Yorick!

On a similar note, I (Judith) will be working for Datakami full-time from May 1st. Interest in generative AI has exploded over the last months, and I have been receiving a steady stream of requests for interviews, talks, and consultancy projects. I'll finally have more time to work with creative AI companies, from strategy to implementation.

Media appearances

At the beginning of this month, Pim Verlaan from Dutch investing podcast Jong Beleggen invited me for a special episode about the hype surrounding AI and AI-related investments. Together with co- host Milou Brand we had an interesting discussion. You can listen to the episode here: episode and show notes.

Both the NOS (Dutch national news) and NPO (Dutch public radio) called me after the release of GPT-4. It led to this NOS web article, and NPO radio invited me for a live interview during the show Nieuws & Co.

This newsletter contains 100% human-written organic prose. No large- scale language models were queried, prompted, trained, fine-tuned, made sentient, or otherwise harmed in the making of this newsletter.