In this week’s episode, we take a look at Microsoft’s new Bing Chat AI, and discuss whether it is a good idea or not. I also talk about Magic The Gathering: Arena, and describe how my Facebook and Amazon ads performed into February 2023.
TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 Introduction and Writing Updates
Hello, everyone. Welcome to Episode 148 of The Pulp Writer Show. My name is Jonathan Moeller. Today is March the 3rd, 2023, and today we’re going to talk about Microsoft’s new Bing Chat AI. Is it a good idea? Is it a bad idea? Let’s find out. We’ll also talk a little bit about a game I’ve been playing recently called Magic: The Gathering Arena and we’ll do a catch up on my current writing projects and see how my various book ads performed for February 2023.
Before we get into that, let’s have a catch up on my current writing projects. I am on chapter…it’s either chapter 13 or 14 of 20 of Dragon Skull: Wrath with the Warlock. I can’t remember off the top of my head, but it’s either in chapter 13 or 14. I am hoping to get to 60,000 words once I finish recording this podcast, and then if all goes well, I am very much hoping I can wrap up the rough draft next week. I am also 6,000 words into Cloak of Dragonfire and also 6,000 words as well into Silent Order: Thunder Hand.
Recording is underway for Dragon Skull: Sword of the Squire. That will be narrated by Brad Wills and we are hoping to have that for you sometime in April, if everything goes well. For Sevenfold Sword Online: Creation, it is at about 96% of the sales goal it needs to reach by Mach 13th if it’s going to be viable for a sequel, so only four more percent to do in another 10 days, so hopefully that will go well.
00:01:42 Book Ad Results for February 2023
So let’s see how my various book ads performed for February. First up, my Facebook ads. Here is what I got back for every dollar I spent on advertising this series. The way this works is I will advertise the first book one of the series at a discount and then total up how much they make from the rest of the series and compare it to the cost of the ad. So for Frostborn, for every dollar I spent, I got back $3.65 and the audiobooks were a quarter of the total revenue. For The Ghosts, for every dollar I spent, I got back $2.89 and the audiobooks were a third of the total revenue. And for Cloak Games and Cloak Mage, for every dollar I spent, I got back $4.21. We can see that the Facebook ads were doing quite well in February and it does help to have a sort of deep catalog of audiobooks since all the Frostborn books and all of The Ghosts and Ghost Exile series are also in audiobook. It’s just very expensive and a lot of work to get to that point when you have a really long series.
So let’s also check in on my Amazon ads. Remember, for an Amazon ad to work, it needs one sale for every six to eight clicks. So I’ll describe how many clicks it got to get a sale and how much I got back per dollar spent. For Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire, I got a sale for every 0.83 clicks (less than one click per sale) and that got back $6.63 for every dollar I spent. Cloak of Dragons didn’t do quite as well. I got one sale for every 5.05 clicks. And for every dollar I spent, I got back six cents. So while the Cloak of Dragons ad didn’t lose any money, it didn’t make any money. I think the reason for that is, as I’ve mentioned before on this show, Amazon ads kind of have a chicken and the egg problem where they work really well if you already have traffic going to your book. But the whole point of ads is to get traffic going to your book. So the reason Dragonskull: Sword of the Squire did so well is because that’s currently my most popular series. But I think the Cloak of Dragons ads will improve when I release Cloak of Dragonfire, which hopefully will be in April or possibly May.
Finally, let’s see how Demonsouled did, which I advertised in both Amazon ads and Facebook ads. For Demonsouled for every 2.25 clicks I got on the sale of Demonsouled Omnibus One and for every dollar I spent combined across Amazon and Facebook, I got back $1.40, which is pretty good. It could be better. It should be better, but what I decided to do since the Facebook ads don’t really seem to be working for Demonsouled is I shut those off and just focused on Amazon ads for Demonsouled for March and then the budget I was putting towards Demonsouled on Facebook will probably go to lead generations for my newsletter instead. So thanks for reading, everyone and I am glad so many of you were able to pick up my books, whether organically or through ads.
00:04:45 Magic: The Gathering Arena
Now, before we get into our main topic, let’s talk a little bit about a game I’ve been playing over the last few months. I’ve written quite a few things critical of Hasbro regarding their open game license situation, but it’s important to be fair and I’ve been playing another Hasbro product I enjoy quite a bit. Magic: The Gathering Arena is an excellent free to play game and I’ve enjoyed it a lot over the last six weeks or so. Back in the 1990s and early 2000s I played a bit of Magic: The Gathering, but I eventually stopped for three reasons. One: I was really busy all the time for the rest of the 2000s. Two: those cards get expensive and three: finding new people with whom to play was often a hassle. I still have a shoebox worth of Magic cards sitting in my closet, but I don’t think I’ve opened that box for like fifteen years. Anyway, while I was reading about the OGL problems, I also came across a few posts referencing that Magic had become a billion dollar brand for Hasbro. A billion dollars? I hadn’t expected that. I recalled vaguely that there was a Magic computer game in the 90s, so I wondered if anything like that existed now.
After some research, I came across Magic: The Gathering Arena, discovered it was free to play, that it would run on my tablet, and gave it a chance. It’s a very well designed and slick app. The onboarding tutorials are excellent. It starts with a color challenge where you play against the computer using a deck of each of the game’s five colors and when you win, you get a bunch of free virtual card decks you can use to play against actual humans. It also does an excellent job of resolving all the various insane rule combinations you can get in a Magic match.
The game has the hedonic loop (which is a way of referring to the effort reward cycle) down pat. Every day there’s a challenge where if you play 20 cards or 25 cards of a certain type, you get a bonus in gold and experience. If you win matches, you get gold and experience. If you get enough experience, you get rewarded with more virtual cards. Of course, microtransactions are liberally laden throughout. You can buy custom card sleeves, custom avatars, virtual pets, and gems that permit entry to various tournament style events. Despite that, you can enjoy yourself thoroughly without spending a single actual penny. And while the app is great for casual play, you can pop in quickly, play a quick match while waiting for the bus through the doctor or something, and then be done in a way that is impossible with physical cards.
One of the great strengths of Magic as a game is that the matches can be over really quickly depending on how the cards are drawn (as quickly as two minutes in some cases), so the app is good for casual play. I think its main strength is that it automates out the most annoying part of Magic: the Gathering, finding other players and then dealing with their personality quirks, which may or may not make for a pleasant gaming experience. The game can usually pair you with a player in under a minute (often less) and interaction is severely limited during the game, basically a few words like hello and good move, that kind of thing. And if someone’s annoying, you can simply mute them, that way you don’t have to deal with someone rage quitting and flipping the table, or endless argumentation over some fine point or another of the rules. I’ve enjoyed the Magic: The Gathering Arena app quite a bit, and it makes playing the game so frictionless that in the past two months, I’ve probably played more actual matches of Magic: The Gathering than I did in all the ‘90s and the 2000s, and now I can say that I’ve won several Magic: The Gathering matches on my tablet while using the restroom. In the ‘90s, if you had said you won Magic games while in the bathroom, people would have been gravely concerned, but this is less of a concern in 2023. So that was talking about a fun bit of technology.
00:08:14 Main Topic: Bing Chat AI
So now let’s talk about a less fun bit of technology: generative AI, specifically Bing chat AI. I was able to get into the Bing chat AI that’s still fairly sort of in a limited beta testing program type thing. So I gave it a try. To start with, I should make it very plain that my opinion about all the new generative AI tools is quite low, much like my opinion of cryptocurrency and NFTs is quite low. I think that while these new generative AI tools have some utility, it isn’t nearly as much as their proponents believe. I also think they are massively overhyped. I also think there’s a bit of a narcissist effect going on with this kind of thing. The tools just vomit the portions of their data set indicated by the generated prompts to the user and the user then gazes in admiration at the reflection of their own psyche. Or it’s a bit like the Israelites and the golden calf from the Book of Exodus in the Bible. Look at this beautiful thing we made. Surely it must be a god. In the modern version of the golden calf, it’s look at this mathematical formula we made that brute forces probabilities. Surely it must be an artificial intelligence made in imitation of our own minds and not an infinite crap generator. This is not a golden calf, and no one thinks generative AI is a god, at least I hope not, but I think the same psychological mechanism is at play. If I was feeling really snarky, I’d say that Web One was static content, Web Two was user generated content, and Web Three is the scammer’s paradise.
In particular, my opinion about AI image generation remains highly negative. Image AI generation is essentially copying the images that it’s been trained on. I don’t even like the word trained to describe it, since it boils down to essentially a million photocopiers taking a million pieces from a million different images. The artificial intelligence involved is basically brute force copying patterns of these images in its data set, and when the user enters a prompt, it uses those copied patterns to spit out an allegedly new image.
For example, if you go to any of the AI image generators and use Magic: The Gathering plains card as the prompt, the AI will dutifully produce a mishmash of every Magic: The Gathering plains card its data set scraped from the Internet, complete with weird symbols where the text would be because it’s essentially trying to copy every single card and produce an average of them. While I am also dubious about AI text generation, I am slightly less dubious about it than image generation because it tends to be really fancy autocomplete. Granted, I don’t think highly of it, but I don’t think it’s as ethically sleazy as AI image generation, and it’s possible these tools have a use I don’t see yet. I mean I don’t like voice assistance at all, but I recognize they’ve been hugely helpful to people, especially during the pandemic, particularly for elderly people and people with mobility or health concerns. And while I am dubious about cryptocurrency, it can be very helpful to people who live in countries with weak financial regulation or authoritarian governments. And there have been documented cases of various migrant or guest workers who use cryptocurrency to send funds back home because if they tried to use normal currencies, their employers would steal it. So within that vein, while there are enormous problems with AI text generation, they’ve already been thoroughly explored by people smarter than I am, but I remain open to the possibility that there is a use for it, I’m just not seeing it. With that long winded introduction (somewhat cranky, opinionated) out of the way, let’s get to Bing Chat.
When (as I said at the beginning) Microsoft started opening up its Open AI-fueled Bing chat, I decided to give it a try and my opinion is it’s possible that Microsoft might beyond the beginnings of a good idea. Possibly. One of the big problems with the present form of the Internet is that search is dominated by Google and Google derives most of its revenue from online ads. This has a distortion effect, which means that the top search results for many Google searches now are just a bunch of SEO optimized ad farms. I’m sure we’ve all Googled for a recipe and it ended up on a page with a billion ads and the recipe way at the bottom. Finding accurate information with a Google search has become harder and harder because a lot of very smart people have optimized Google search for maximum ad revenue, so the top results for a particular search are often equally optimized for maximum search ad revenue.
Bing Chat, by contrast, is designed for questions. The way it works is that you ask the chatbot a question, it searches for relevant results, and then summarizes them in a few tidy paragraphs. Then you can ask more refining questions to get better results. Every answer also contains hyperlinks indicating where the chatbot got its information for the answer. This is more efficient than scrolling through page after page of search results. Though you can see the weakness: the answers are only as good as the information it was drawing from, so it’s possible the AI could give you a neat and definitive answer full of absolute nonsense. For example, I was talking with someone familiar with horse research, and she suggested a very specific question related to a very specific equine medical problem. Bing Chat ground out an answer that was authoritative sounding, but both very vague and entirely incorrect, which we suspected would happen because there simply isn’t very much medical research on this particular equine health problem, and therefore nothing upon which Bing Chat could draw.
It’s also very bad at value judgments. I was talking about this with some education people and they suggested I ask it a very specific question: whether Montessori preschools or Waldorf preschools have better outcomes for child development. I have no idea what that means either, but when posed the question, the chatbot ended up providing a summary of both types of preschools. At a casual read, it seemed like it answered the question, but it totally didn’t, which remains the biggest problem with generative AI text. It sounds authoritative and knowledgeable, but it isn’t at all. It’s just a fancy autocomplete stringing together words most statistically probable to be located together in a sentence.
So it’s possible that in this particular instance, AI could improve search, though I retain my overall negative opinion of AI. I think the biggest danger for this kind of chatbot is what’s called apophenia, the human tendency of seeing patterns where none exist. You can see this on Twitter all the time, where many people assume that every news event is part of a sinister plot perpetrated by a cabal of all powerful, yet highly incompetent conspirators. Because while typing with the chatbot, it feels like you’re chatting with an actual well-organized person on the other end of the connection. It’s not, of course, it’s just an illusion created by the way the human mind works. We tend to anthropomorphize everything: our pets, our tools, the weather, and we so often see patterns where one simply just doesn’t exist. For many people, this can be an intoxicating illusion. I can easily see people developing unhealthy relationships with this kind of chatbot and accepting uncritically anything it tells them. I’m susceptible to this anthropomorphizing as well. I know Bing Chat is just a mathematical formula, but I still use please and thank you while typing to it (or maybe I was just raised well). Despite these dangers, Bing Chat might actually be a useful implementation of AI. Overall, however, my opinion of generative AI as a technology remains negative for three reasons. One, it doesn’t solve a serious problem. Two, the trivial problems it does solve are outweighed by the massive new problems that it creates. Three, overall, I think it makes the world slightly worse. If one creates an infinite crap generator, it’s reasonable to expect an increase in the overall level of crap.
Hopefully all the corporations investing massive resources into AI generation will take a massive loss and then the technology can be marginalized. That’s what I would like to happen. We’ll see whether it actually does happen. Probably not. And I retain my negative opinion of AI, though I am open to having my mind changed if someone can demonstrate why it’s not a bad thing. But I have read a lot of the arguments and listened to a lot of the podcasts about people who are very positive about generative AI and think it’s a good thing, but I just don’t. I am just not convinced.
So that is it for this week. I hope you enjoyed this week’s show and found it helpful. If you like the podcast, please leave a review on your podcast platform choice, whether it’s Apple, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, or anywhere else. It really does help. Until then, I hope you all stay safe and healthy and see you all next week.
