Sentient AI, People Hate Diablo, Grammy Awards for Games, and NOT E3.

Is LaMDA Sentient?

Language Model for Dialogue Applications, or LaMDA, is Google’s system for creating chatbots. Google engineer Blake Lemoine is convinced that it has achieved consciousness, and has broken his confidentiality agreement with Google to show the world transcripts he has with the AI to prove as much. In a statement, Google’s spokesperson Brian Gabriel has said “Our team – including ethicists and technologists – has reviewed Blake’s concerns per our AI Principles and have informed him that the evidence does not support his claims. He was told that there was no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against it)”. To read the full transcript of Lemoine’s conversations with LaMDA, click here.

Diablo Immortal holds lowest ever Metacritic score

Diablo Immortal is a free-to-play rendition of Blizzards long-running Diablo series, released this month on both PC and mobile devices. Fans have taken to Metacritic to express their rage at the game since its release, leaving it with a score of 0.2. The large majority of complaints against Immortal are being aimed the games microtransaction system, with many players slamming it has having the worst pay to win scheme in the history of mobile gaming. With Diablo 4 having a proper gameplay trailer released this announcement season, it will be interesting to see if the controversy from Immortal impacts the sales.

Video Games at the Grammy’s

The Grammy’s have added a category for music in Video Games. The “Best Score Soundtrack for Video Games and Other Interactive Media” award doesn’t have the simplest name, but the goal is to recognise excellence in music made specifically for video games. Candidates going forward will include “score soundtrack albums comprised predominately of original scores and created specifically for, or as a companion to, a current video game or other interactive media released within the qualification period.” This is another step forwards in video games being viewed as a serious form of media. Just a pity they didn’t do it in time for the Wii menu music.

Not E3 overwhelms us with announcements

Starting June 2nd with Playstation’s State of Play, we’ve had 2 very full weeks of presentations, with 17 shows in total! That’s a heck of a lot of announcements to go over, with several hundred games shown off! Some notable announcements include Resident Evil updates, Bethesda’s Starfield gameplay, Last of us 1 remake for the PS5, and for Xbox fans in Australia, designlab is finally available! Obviously, it’s impossible to go over everything announced, but if you’d like to know more, click this link to see the full list of announcements!