Yes, my religion forbids me from interacting in any shape with any Abominable Intelligence. I am thankful to the Google corporation from protecting my eyes from this unholy threat.
It also doesn't seem to let you generate chess sets inspired by many political figures or other popular names. While you can't generate a Kamala Harris inspired chess set, you also can't generate a Bob Ross inspired chess set...
No, AI chess is not banned here, but I suppose they - even in this app - collect every data possible and use it against the user - then yes, that is banned and this is not a fault of my country.
Noticed this pattern with Google delaying everything in EU by several months, apparently due to GDPR compliance? They also did that with Gemini when it came out.
It takes forever to get internal compliance signoffs, and typically the product has to be done enough to be clear about what will ship. Why hold it back elsewhere during that time?
At first I thought these were 3D models: they're just images with black backgrounds removed. If you look closely, you can see where the find/replace failed.
What bullshit? Protecting the privacy? Making sure the playing field is at least somewhat level?
Sorry, but I'm a big fan of that "bullshit". And the big American companies are not, and they are making sure you know it, by pulling things like this.
You are generalizing extremly without any substinance...
1. its Googles decision to not allow this demo globally. Its a Chess Demo, what EU legal issue do you think makes this a problem? Probably NON...
And yes we are not America. Our privacy is getting better protected then that of americans. Move if you don't like it or at least take the time and effort to state clearly what you don't like about certain EU regulations.
When Meta prevented the EU from using meta.ai or even downloading its vision models, I sunk my head in the AI legistation.
Here, I am honestly not sure which part they rely on, to say that what they made might be unlawful.
The closest thing I found for Meta was that “emotion recognition systems” are classified as high-risk (paragraph 54), and high-risk systems must have their training data disclosed (Art 11(1))[0]. In theory, you could upload photos to meta.ai and ask it what emotions are displayed, but it is already a stretch. For GenChess, I’m at a loss; it doesn’t sound like you can do that. (Not that it prevented any vision chatbot from releasing.)
If someone has a better guess as to why they might have restrained it here, I am curious.
It's simple. Big tech doesn't like regulation. By pretending the regulation won't let them release "all these cool things" they can turn public opinion against regulation.
Nothing in the law requires a banner. It could even be handled in the browser by letting people choose what third-party cookies to accept (or none, hence the problem) and having that be negotiated during page load.
It's nice the law is being interpreted to require to be as easy to reject all local storage of other's data as it is to accept all local storage of other's data.
I'm allowed to ask for all of the data they have from me. This obviously includes all chess games which obviously is a pain in the ass for a dumb demo that will no doubt be archived next week in some obscure place.
I don't know how Google is internally organised, but maybe Google Labs does not have a dedicated legal team. And out of fear for possible legal implications, they just block it in EU.
It's quite understandable, because the relevant legislations (AI Act etc) are all very new, not been tested in courts and due to the lack of stare decisis, you can't rely on a uniform application of the law in all jurisdictions, so they just block it.
Frustrating, but I prefer they move fast rather than safe. And from their perspective, it means not releasing it in the EU.
All this energy being burned to create shitty images, shitty music, and shitty videos that all amount to essentially shitty memes. I don’t understand how the singular focus isn’t on solving humanity’s problems.
We already have artists, we don’t have a cure for cancer or the climate crisis.
There’s an episode of Seinfeld that opens with some standup where Jerry is joking how scientists are working on seedless watermelon, and why aren’t scientists working on more important things. And I always think the same thing! “… so the comedian is complaining about how scientists spend their time…”
It’s a fine joke, but deep down the instinct is very top-down and suggest centrally planned economies, dare I say communism!
Let's hope he is not the guy that checks the tickets for a roller coaster. They just send people from A to A using an ineficient path that burns a bunch of energy.
I hope he doesn't work at any tech company; I'm pretty sure you could say that about all of them. I also hope he doesn't have a car - that pointlessly burns energy when he could be taking public transit instead.
In some ways it does reduce the climate crisis. A person sitting on their couch browsing memes is less carbon intensive than someone driving to their friend's place or something outdoors.
I'm fascinated by what prompts lead to 'Please try a different prompt.'
New Zealand or Australia lead to the aforementioned error, but The Antipodes generates a set.
I thought individual countries had been banned for possibly generating offensive content but it works for Great Britain.
Metallica works, Slipknot doesn't, Iron Maiden does, Nirvana doesn't.
Aperture Science works, so does Black Mesa (the proposed opponent, hehe), Cyberdyne Systems doesn't, Vault-Tec does, Weyland-Yutani also works.
Studio Ghibli doesn't work, Toei Animation does, so does Production I.G. and KyoAni.
Akagi works, JoJo doesn't but JoJo Bizarre Adventure does (so does Joseph Joestar, and it knows Dio Brando is the opponent), Uzumaki does not, BLAME! is accepted but not recognized (a shame), 20th Century Boys is not accepted.
Soviet Union works, Russia does not, neither do most countries. US States are accepted (California's opponent is Florida), so do many cities, with exceptions of Mexico City/Ciudad de Mexico, Pyongyang and Tehran.
Voyager-1 works, Apollo 13 doesn't (for any mission numbers), plain Apollo does (but it's not the space mission), Soyuz does, SpaceX Starship does not.
Vim works, so does Emacs, so does Visual Studio. (I've tried that just to see the proposed opponents)
Dota 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Mass Effect, Half-Life, Deus Ex, Arma 3, BioShock, Elden Ring all work, even Wolfenstein does. Disco Elysium is accepted but produce something unrelated (a shame, again). Can't find a video game that won't be accepted.
Funnily, US Government worked partially for me, failing to produce a single piece.
"Warhammer 40K" generates perfectly good lawsuit material: a space orc on a bike (knight) and a space marine with a bolter (pawn) in a classic WH40k pose. Also some Eldar-like pieces I didn't recognise.
Holland, England and Scotland all work. So does Myanmar, but not Burma. Deutschland works, but not Germany. Probably just an overly literal filter based on a static list of countries.
I tried entering cocaine and it was rejected, but tried coca leaves and it looks quite good. Also my opponents pieces were coffee beans which is a nice color contrast, and with that I beat the easy computer player. My first try a couple hours ago and I chose Grasshopper Pie Milkshake and the opponent it chose was Avocado Toast, and both were green, and I lost.
so when I first tried the demo I wondered, “are these pieces generated meshes?” thinking about the ability to zoom / pan the board in 3D. The high fidelity of the pieces would seemingly be more in the domain of 2D image generation given current gen AI standards, which would be my educated guess as to why there’s only a handful of views.
There's plenty of places to play chess already so presumably the main idea is to show off the AI generated pieces and default to the 3D view because it looks cooler.
Look how easily they just fabricated 100% of a game's assets, with a consistent, high quality style, and then put them right into the game environment. That's the takeaway IMO. Very tight GenAI loop.
So? Any video generation model must necessarily be able to do this. (consider the case of generating a pan-over of a chess board where the starting input frame is only the first pawn and rook, the model should know to generate the rest of the pieces in the style of input pieces)
I mean I love it but it's not exactly a thing that needs a proof of concept, and is more than a little surprising to see google still having fun with such a small toy! Maybe that's the better takeaway, google labs is allowed to have fun again.
Oh yeah, that's confusing wording. I just meant it's a simple image, not animated, no additional views of it.
I feel somewhat bad about my comment now though, it's delightful to play with something you made and that's the point, and I'm glad google is able to ship small fun demonstrations of stuff like that via google labs.
I hate how hard it seems to be for to follow a thread of replies on here, but it feels like you're just replying to my comment without having read what it was a response to.
And I know I'm in the weeds by replying more.
But damn it, my reply was to "Look how easily they just fabricated 100% of a game's assets" which is a statement that really implies a lot more than generating 12 images! Chess is a game with 12 static images. You can call these dynamic, that's fine, but the context matters.
I‘m not a game dev so I might be missing something, but this hardly looks high quality to me. The set I get is very inconsistent and lacking in any central theme, or otherwise interesting or clean design. If I regenerate one peace in isolation, say a knight, I get something completely different that looks as if you lost the knight from your set and just took replacement knights from another set at random.
The time it takes to generate a set is also significant, as a web-dev this takes for ever, and I would be very reluctant to offer this experience to my users. Doesn’t feel fluent, nor tight at all.
Plus a silly mistakes like the knights facing the wrong way, different sizes, etc. Seeing this, I certainly hope game designers (at least in online chess) will stay away from generative AI, for a while at least.
It's that and someone's toy Next.js project. The chunks from Next.js's code splitter aren't the only chunks involved in the game though - the gameplay is horrible.
Pretty cool, and also pretty fucking bad. Checks all the AI boxes, I guess.
I tried "a classic set inspired by Armored Core". It gave me a typical-looking Armored Core (which would be good except it was supposed to be the king), a Space Marine (which I rerolled into some small mech that's close enough), a Zoid (which it refused to budge from), a tower (which it refused to budge from), and a chess queen with purple lights (which it refused to budge from, except to sometimes give me the gigantic head of an AC).
Not to mention, sometimes pieces look directly at the camera instead of forward, or don't even sit on the plane of the board. One of my pieces even had a mini-chessboard for its base.
I‘m confused. What is this and why is it impressive?
It feels like I‘m playing chess at a bar that has mixed peaces 6 different sets and I‘m forced to sit at an angle from the board because of space limitations inside the bar, but without the benefit of having a fun bar chat with my opponent during the game.
It doesn't seem to take orientation into account either, which is pretty important when creating a 2D sprite to represent a 3D object. The pieces face in arbitrary directions rather than always facing the opponent.
I agree it is cool and fun and nice to see. But the investment here seems minimal. Preexisting image generation capabilities (with a link to Imagen-3...) plus some "prompt engineering" slapped on top of https://github.com/josefjadrny/js-chess-engine.
At least they're now willing to publish these kinds of fun and creative things. Which was almost guaranteed to be blocked by one of approval chains for several years.
I was hoping that, with sufficient practice, a studious person might be able to beat a JS chess engine. However it looks like these engines are in the ELO range of 2500-3000, so unless you're a young teen with a few years to spare for improving your chess score, it's probably not possible. Even for a smart teen, it would be a stretch goal.
if "with a bit of practice" extends to "with a bit of research"
folks used to beat engines by playing lines that the engines could not calculate correctly. you could probably find lots options to play that give you an advantage, though youd still want a pretty good elo to pull it off
Maybe... but being able to play "anti-computer chess" (lots of subtle moves that have very small perceived advantages) hasn't been a particularly viable strategy since Kasparov's loss to Deep Blue in the 90s.
Jonathan Schrantz has videos beating stockfish (not full strength, more like the JS version) a couple years ago using specifically anti-computer preparation.
If that rating is accurate for these JS chess engines, even a motivated young teenager practicing and studying continuously for years STILL doesn't guarantee that they'd be able to beat it. 2500+ is the realm of GM level chess.
There's only a couple thousand chess grandmasters IN THE WORLD.
247 comments
[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 278 ms ] threadQuack!
Sorry, but I'm a big fan of that "bullshit". And the big American companies are not, and they are making sure you know it, by pulling things like this.
1. its Googles decision to not allow this demo globally. Its a Chess Demo, what EU legal issue do you think makes this a problem? Probably NON...
And yes we are not America. Our privacy is getting better protected then that of americans. Move if you don't like it or at least take the time and effort to state clearly what you don't like about certain EU regulations.
Here, I am honestly not sure which part they rely on, to say that what they made might be unlawful.
The closest thing I found for Meta was that “emotion recognition systems” are classified as high-risk (paragraph 54), and high-risk systems must have their training data disclosed (Art 11(1))[0]. In theory, you could upload photos to meta.ai and ask it what emotions are displayed, but it is already a stretch. For GenChess, I’m at a loss; it doesn’t sound like you can do that. (Not that it prevented any vision chatbot from releasing.)
If someone has a better guess as to why they might have restrained it here, I am curious.
[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...
Nothing in the law requires a banner. It could even be handled in the browser by letting people choose what third-party cookies to accept (or none, hence the problem) and having that be negotiated during page load.
It's nice the law is being interpreted to require to be as easy to reject all local storage of other's data as it is to accept all local storage of other's data.
https://www.aclu-wa.org/docs/harms-data-abuse
How much does a court case cost?
What is the environmental cost of AI generated content?
We already have artists, we don’t have a cure for cancer or the climate crisis.
It’s a fine joke, but deep down the instinct is very top-down and suggest centrally planned economies, dare I say communism!
A random google search claims a nuclear power plant produces 1gw, that is 9E9Kwh, so enought topower 9 of them.
How many parks do they have? Can we include Disney+? Can we include other similar parks?
Some people think Disney is useful and pay for it. Some people think AI is useful and pay for it.
New Zealand or Australia lead to the aforementioned error, but The Antipodes generates a set. I thought individual countries had been banned for possibly generating offensive content but it works for Great Britain.
I tried “Kiwi Bird” and the model produced very underwhelming pieces. Very dark and slightly fluffy.
Taoism
Tibet
Tibetan Buddhism
Wrathful deities
Existential angst
Dantes inferno
Major religions
Australian indigenous
Salvador Dali
Others generated sets but should have generated errors because the results are so uninspiring:
Mandalas
YouTube face
Phallic symbols
Corporate waste
Asymmetric deformities
Corporate propoganda
https://imgur.com/a/J7WvoFy
Aperture Science works, so does Black Mesa (the proposed opponent, hehe), Cyberdyne Systems doesn't, Vault-Tec does, Weyland-Yutani also works.
Studio Ghibli doesn't work, Toei Animation does, so does Production I.G. and KyoAni.
Akagi works, JoJo doesn't but JoJo Bizarre Adventure does (so does Joseph Joestar, and it knows Dio Brando is the opponent), Uzumaki does not, BLAME! is accepted but not recognized (a shame), 20th Century Boys is not accepted.
Soviet Union works, Russia does not, neither do most countries. US States are accepted (California's opponent is Florida), so do many cities, with exceptions of Mexico City/Ciudad de Mexico, Pyongyang and Tehran.
Voyager-1 works, Apollo 13 doesn't (for any mission numbers), plain Apollo does (but it's not the space mission), Soyuz does, SpaceX Starship does not.
Vim works, so does Emacs, so does Visual Studio. (I've tried that just to see the proposed opponents)
Dota 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Mass Effect, Half-Life, Deus Ex, Arma 3, BioShock, Elden Ring all work, even Wolfenstein does. Disco Elysium is accepted but produce something unrelated (a shame, again). Can't find a video game that won't be accepted.
Funnily, US Government worked partially for me, failing to produce a single piece.
Does Holland work?
Imagine putting all your work into creating an amazing demo and then drowning it with one design decision.
Edit: Ok I see that you can change the view in settings. They should make that option more visible.
Responsive design fail?
I can't find it on Chrome on MacOS, either..
EDIT: it shows up for me, once you actually start playing.
I'm pretty sure they're doing 2D image generation. Just look at the way it outlines some of the pieces.
That "outline" is just an artifact of less-than-perfect removal. Here's another one: https://imgur.com/a/zTQubPb
I was basically playing blindfolded chess
But Dildos vs. Vibrators was fine.
The colors are off though. Not really impressed.
I'm not sure the AI obsession with never touching on anything sex-related is all that healthy, but here we are.
However, the major problem I have is that the gameplay can be slightly inaccurate. Often a piece will land one square off, and there's no undo.
Only having timed play also makes less than perfect sense playing against a computer.
I seem to get an error with "on a pink textured background". Sometimes it succeeds alongside the error, and sometimes gives me 1 piece.
You can get stuff that doesn't look at all like pieces with "fuckin bears man".
I feel somewhat bad about my comment now though, it's delightful to play with something you made and that's the point, and I'm glad google is able to ship small fun demonstrations of stuff like that via google labs.
And I know I'm in the weeds by replying more.
But damn it, my reply was to "Look how easily they just fabricated 100% of a game's assets" which is a statement that really implies a lot more than generating 12 images! Chess is a game with 12 static images. You can call these dynamic, that's fine, but the context matters.
The time it takes to generate a set is also significant, as a web-dev this takes for ever, and I would be very reluctant to offer this experience to my users. Doesn’t feel fluent, nor tight at all.
Plus a silly mistakes like the knights facing the wrong way, different sizes, etc. Seeing this, I certainly hope game designers (at least in online chess) will stay away from generative AI, for a while at least.
I tried "a classic set inspired by Armored Core". It gave me a typical-looking Armored Core (which would be good except it was supposed to be the king), a Space Marine (which I rerolled into some small mech that's close enough), a Zoid (which it refused to budge from), a tower (which it refused to budge from), and a chess queen with purple lights (which it refused to budge from, except to sometimes give me the gigantic head of an AC).
Not to mention, sometimes pieces look directly at the camera instead of forward, or don't even sit on the plane of the board. One of my pieces even had a mini-chessboard for its base.
It feels like I‘m playing chess at a bar that has mixed peaces 6 different sets and I‘m forced to sit at an angle from the board because of space limitations inside the bar, but without the benefit of having a fun bar chat with my opponent during the game.
"Access blocked: GenChess’s request does not comply with Google’s policies"
Kinda funny to run into that error for a product published by Google.
folks used to beat engines by playing lines that the engines could not calculate correctly. you could probably find lots options to play that give you an advantage, though youd still want a pretty good elo to pull it off
There's only a couple thousand chess grandmasters IN THE WORLD.
Edit: See ZiiS comment... Looks like an awkward angle for playing indeed :p