A while back, during alpha, I mentioned that the Washington DC AI-generated landmarks looked like the kind of AI product that Janelle Shane likes to write about.
For those of you who don’t know her - Ms. Shane is an AI researcher and the author of You Are a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place. She blogs at AIweirdness.com .
If you visit the blog today, you’ll notice that she’s discovered MSFS and is collecting examples of some of the more extreme scenery things the AI has created.
She’s also posted this Twitter thread .
Her commentary is really worth a look.
You might, reading my post, expect snark, and maybe there’s a little. But most of what she has to say is actually pretty sympathetic. Her work has to do with understanding AI by understanding its limitations - getting a handle on what it can and can’t yet do. At the top of her Twitter thread she writes, “This [MSFS] is basically my blog in 3D form.”
On her blog today, she adds, “Even barring typos, the task of reconstructing every building in the world from height data and satellite photos is really tough. A roof’s details might give clues about whether a structure is a historic villa or an office block, but it’s easy to make mistakes if, for example, you don’t know what the Washington Monument is. Because a nondescript office building is a reasonable default guess given a square building pad and a many-story height, the AI will tend to populate the planet with them unless specifically told otherwise.”
I take her commentary as a sign that MSFS is generating a lot of interest, including from influential people far removed from the flightsim community. This is a good thing.
I will say, however, that I like one of her suggestions: “What I would like to see are Microsoft Flight Simulator add-ons that AMPLIFY the weirdness. Give me a slider that goes from normal to Ragnarok. Floating mountains, sideways valleys, strange monoliths. Traffic doggedly traversing the fractured landscape.”
Maybe - like her and like me - you’ll find a way to have fun with the oddities in the time before the fixes come along.
Read and enjoy!