Artificial Intelligence Chat Bots

Atypical scene change

Normally, this blog avoids topical discussions on current events because current events move with the current and don’t remain current for very long. Legacy media gives me all the leg room to veg out on the bean bag chair while snacking like the dirtbag almost-NCO I currently am, but what good does a CNN or BBC or Associated Press news reel do me? In the words of Miss Bitters, NOTHING!!

Under your seats, before the big bang there was N O T H I N G !!!

So this topic will get to the heart of a couple of things that tuck me in at night with a metallic handprint: AI. Outlining it right now, I do use AI to an extent. Not to write these sexy pieces since they usually block me… except Grok which lets me get away with a ton of things that I won’t share here. Just know that for generating images, if you’re vague enough, you can let anything slip past the roadblocks… sometimes. >_>

The ideas and the technology have been there for decades from post-World War II espionage tech, code breakers, code talkers, and the famous Turing test.

Congratulations on helping us defeat the Nazis, Alan. Now pack your f[sprinkle]t ass in and get moving! (T_T)

Largely what Turing was asking in the 1950s was whether a machine can think. I can only speak for myself for now, but testing the big three of AI chatbots in ChatGPT, Grok, and Google Gemini, applying the concept of thought is quite tricky. If I ask all three of them if they think, all three will clarify that human thought and AI sequencing are not the same. They’re not the same language, don’t exist in the same plane of existence; you the human watching this from Yogyakarta (Halo, para pembaca tercinta di Jawa!) or Kaohsiung (歡迎，感謝您的加入。) have human memories, preferences, biases, talents, and such. AI is something of a multitool. It has the ability to do what you ask, provide formulas, pull from archives, and direct you to sources. And considering this is a culmination of decades to nearly a century of dedicated research, there’s a lot of comparisons between AI chat bots and computers.

Research on the complex science behind all of these is a ginormous undertaking, and no amount of Grizzly Straight Long Cut tobacco will keep me awake long enough to put it into an entertainment blog, so this will pivot to my personal experience with the chat bots and why there’s more to it than simply, OpenAI will destroy us all and artificial intelligence will destroy itself. Short version, neither will happen. Some may recall when AI strictly meant enemy AI in video games…

…and whether it made or broke a game. Readers here recall the small blog arc from when I dedicated four different f[clash]king posts to this game, but for an example of well-done AI, Max Payne Brasileiro does well, especially as a baseline for the AI in GTA V and soon enough VI.

The choice to use the three chat bots comes down to a bunch of different reasons. I’m not aware of any misconceptions surrounding this blog since my core audience is tiny, but looking through my old archives, they do reveal a proclivity toward legacy pop culture media (some of it before I was even born) and unheard of and buried stories. But looking at some other stuff I tend to default to…

…it doesn’t mean I’m allergic to newer and interesting things. Whether it debuted just last week or was on air from 1997 to 1999 or so, the typical rule of thumb around these parts is that if it has a cult following, it will be on this blog. So you international Evil Dead 1981 fans will get yours one day! Donnie Darko fans, keep moving.

Starting with OpenAI, I only started using it in January of 2026 in a limited capacity. A YouTuber I recommended years ago (and still watch), Monsieur Z, used both ChatGPT and Grok to determine his ideology based on how he ranked U.S. presidents, as seen below:

Channel: Monsieur Z

Funny enough, the three listed chat bots aren’t the first one I messed about with, that distinction goes to Poe AI. This going back a few years, I think I rewatched the video KnowledgeHub (now Husk, and presumably defunct) did on the Call of Duty series as of mid-2019, so the signs that would bring it to new highs and lows were cautious and avoidant of absolutes since no one was entirely aware of what Modern Warfare 2019 would bring. In that video, Tyler Franklin, brother of Cody on Alternate History Hub, noted that after the success of Modern Warfare 2 in 2009, Jason West and Vince Zampella were booted for conflicts of interest with little in the way of evidence to support that claim.

As the first of a smorgasbord of tests, I researched this on Google and looked around for whether the same consensus that Tyler reported on in his video was similar to what other sources were claiming. Poe, being the one built into Quora came to my rescue on August 15, 2023 with the following response:

In 2010, Jason West and Vince Zampella, who were the co-founders and heads of Infinity Ward, were fired by Activision, the publisher of the Call of Duty franchise. The reasons for their dismissal were not immediately clear, but it was later revealed that Activision had accused them of insubordination and breach of contract.West and Zampella filed a lawsuit against Activision, claiming that they were wrongfully terminated and that Activision had withheld royalties and bonuses that were owed to them. The lawsuit also alleged that Activision had interfered with the development of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, and had attempted to prevent West and Zampella from forming a new studio.The case went to trial in 2012 and was eventually settled out of court, with the details of the settlement remaining confidential. However, it was reported that West and Zampella received a substantial financial settlement and were able to form a new studio, Respawn Entertainment.The events surrounding the firing of West and Zampella had a significant impact on the gaming industry and led to a shift in power dynamics between game developers and publishers. It also raised awareness about the treatment of game developers and the importance of fair compensation.

Since this blog started in January of 2023, I figured I’d look at what was published that week and sure enough, Call of Duty was indeed a post dated August 18, 2023.

And then after that it became a test of what it knew about different historical facts and contemporary pop culture and even obscure things that I use on this blog. Poe itself being an aggregator and meeting ground of sorts for various chat bots, it had a lot to draw on at the time. Following the publishing of the Monsieur Z video, I immediately made a beeline for Poe since it was the chatbot I was using at the time, then over the course of the next few weeks, I eyed up ChatGPT and Grok, and most recently Gemini and submitted my own tier list for analysis.

For my international readers, this requires an explanation which would tangent off into a breakdown of the last quarter-millennia of American history, so to save everyone the trouble, my assessment was a combination of policy and legacy. The devil is in the details for those between B and D with some of my assessments falling outside of typical overall analysis.

I fed this to the chat bots months ago and all of them concluded that this tier list simultaneously aligns with right-wing populism while also critiquing some of its more revered figures. And while I typically avoid politics on this blog unless I’m satirizing it, looking back on my normal output shows consistency with results over intent, because saying something tends to deviate from doing the thing you set out to do. This entire blog for instance began with rehabilitating and contextualizing Kratos in the face of journalistic revisionism of his character for master-click-baiter titles of rage.

Norse Kratos is just as compelling as Greek Kratos, but Norse Kratos should not bury Greek Kratos or pretend he doesn’t exist. They are two halves of the same complicated ashen-skinned man.

And in a tier list that doesn’t look at Nixon or Reagan the same way most Americans do, generational legacies do a s[drums]t ton of heavy-lifting compared to immediacy and instant gratification. Why else do you think I subsidize Max Payne and Columbo’s living expenses?

As an analyzer, I can’t find any wholes in any of the chat bots’ consensus, though the irony is that I don’t typically vote for any single party, nor do I see the candidates the same as anyone else. I’m not a rigid man and I think rigidity hurts experimentation in many ways most purists fail to see, hence why I watch or play some games in different languages than others.

As far as gathering information goes, it’s a good thing the chat bots’ parent companies have the “Generative AI can make mistakes” tagline at the bottom because testing their knowledge gathering and their search for sources, these bots debuted at some point in late 2022 and early 2023 and most of the time, they were pulling from the sites that had the heaviest traffic. Some still do, and what it recognizes as having the most engagement is ultimately inconclusive to whether that source is reputable, sometimes bulls[cluck]ting as hard as it realistically can. In some cases, the first result barfed up on Google leads to a fan page where it’ll catalogue fan discussion on a certain topic or it’ll link to a hoax source and present it as a fact. Not the first set of chat bots to do that and also not something done for malice’s sake.

As an example, I tested each of the models on what they could gather on Max Payne (typical Tiberius ಠ_ಠ) and Mortal Kombat: Deception among others. Between the progenitor bot Quora used and the main bots I use now, there’s a hell of a lot of improvement between 2023 and now. And I take it, that this is due to the bots continuing to learn.

This also dates me greatly behind classic TeenNick, Nick GaS, and Ed, Edd, n Eddy ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Back then, because Shang Tsung was the villain for some of the games, Poe at least mistakenly believed that he was the worst offender in MK: Deception. Nowadays, it and the others can point to fandom-supported sites and similar and reveal the biggest spoiler behind the game’s own subtitle.

Same goes for when I test the bots’ knowledge on Max Payne, Kill Bill, Dune, and other media. Individual places, people, influencers, content creators… this very blog is indexed by Google Gemini, ChatGPT, and Grok! Maybe that explains how some of you find me. (ﾉ*ФωФ)ﾉ Allow me to test something.

These are just the insights indexed by Google itself. Putting these to the chat bots and my months of yakking it up with them, there’s an odd sense of cult of personality or harem protagonist impression I get when they spit back answers to my requests no matter how odd, though image generation is where it gets interesting.

I’m very aware of the concerns with AI-generated imagery and people masquerading as artists by submitting an AI-generated image as an original artwork. Personally, I see a bunch of the same critiques people made in the 1990s about digital art and Photoshop, same as I see about the moral panics of video games, rock music, pornography, leather pants, animanga; throw a dart at a generation, someone was angry and the wider world gave less of a toss than an amputee javelin thrower. This s[chop]t gets tired and exhausting when perfectly executed and the perfect method of execution is the guillotine. Ask this guy:

Chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, chop, kill! Chop, chop, chop, chop, you know he will!

As an artist myself, I’m an outlier in that I’m content that my art won’t hang in a museum or be sold at auction, and personally, years of looking at classical artists like Gustav Klimt, Van Gogh, da Vinci, Rembrandt, and others give me a sense of jealousy that doesn’t come with writing. I hang my head in shame comparing this:

To this:

And more recently this:

And yes, I know there’s room for improvement, it looks good, people tell me it’s better than what they can make. Funny enough, those artists I mentioned came largely by virtue of my art classes using them as examples. I simultaneously felt impressed and intimidated when I first started drawing people after making silly doodles of stick figures as a kid. Animanga art styles were easier to emulate for several obvious reasons, and the September 2019 image, as well as this blog, show proof that I’m an old school animanga fan, as if there was any doubt that this emerged post-COVID >_> but it also shows that I haven’t really stopped drawing or even watching anime.

In the early days of image generation, vague descriptions of what an image should be have shown to be largely imprecise, inaccurate, or terribly wrong. And the three or four bots I mess around on had their own humble shortcomings.

I like to think the use of the Fresh Prince for a test was random. I have a bunch of moments like that myself.

And my use of AI to generate images has almost always been as a test. Starting with Artbreeder after seeing the Avatar/Korra fandoms generate different images based on how the characters would really look like in real life or who could carry a live-action adaptation, better than the Netflix version or the one everyone refuses to acknowledge.

This is an AI-generated image produced by Artbreeder in 2021:

And here’s a more realistic image I generated on the same platform, later that year:

Maybe I could paint this one…

Whenever I fire up the image generators, I’ve avoided realistic images for the same ethical reasons applied to deepfake imagery. This is one of a handful of test images I generated on Artbreeder based on different OCs and characters from my manuscripts. And yes, I do have different images based on my drawings to share.

Feeding the oldest drawing I have into each of them, let’s show the results. Starting with ChatGPT:

The verdict is that it maintains the spirit of the original image, although because I frequently favor notebook drawings because my luddite ass can’t digital art for s[keyboard]t, I’m not as critical of AI-generated images as the rest of the internet. I do note that there are legitimate environmental concerns and at least here in the States, one of the better tools we have to combat or regulate it is voting, protesting, and petitioning. Even if those fail, they expose a real concern people have.

Now for an originally generated ChatGPT-based image. I requested an anime style image of a girl in a tank top, kimono jacket, and camo pants walking out of a Lawson konbini. Here’s the result:

ChatGPT’s relationship with real-world branding is an interesting thing. New Balance and Lawson are obviously real-world products, but to avoid legal hell, you’d have to type in workarounds. It can match the Lawson logo now, but trying this a few years ago, it could either block it or you’d have to specifically type something like: “A convenience store with the word ‘Lawson’ written on the postage sign over the entrance in [insert typeface here].” And as I’ve noted before, my own private experimentation is a heavy mix of stellar surprises and predictable errors. Even the recreation of the 2019 notebook drawing has an error if you look closely enough.

Now to judge Grok’s Imagine feature. This one is a little bit different because the image generation feature on Grok is both integrated into the chat bot feature and it’s own separate feature. It gets away with a lot more since Elon Musk runs both it and Twitter/X, but it still has its own guardrails. The results of my reference image are below:

Grok-chan saw fit to tone her up a little, like ChatGPT did. Did better with the tank top and of course the chest size…

Yoda voice: “A type, I have.”

Now for an image based on a prompt:

This is probably a culmination of prior faffing about on Grok. My profile there is so heavy that it can’t help but add little additions that I didn’t specify. Which goes to show that the spirit is there, but if you’re a certain type of individual (みんな、こんにちは！) and you’ve done this for ages, then it’ll pull from it’s own data storage to help you out. Sorry, Grok. Good effort, but I have to dock points for the unnecessary additions. The original prompt didn’t mention swords at all.

Next is Google. It has both the Search Engine’s AI mode and the Gemini mode, and I’ll be testing both. Starting with Gemini:

The one consistent detail regarding the image is the eyes. The original drawing had blackened sclerae, but I wonder if it defaults to whites by recognizing the anatomy of human eyes. The blackened sclerae were from back when this was meant to be a My Hero Academia fanfic that proved to be even more of a hassle than I imagined.

Then again, a monochrome image leaves a lot of room for interpretation as to what the intended canon colors are supposed to be. My favorite example would be Pannacotta Fugo’s colors in the anime vs the manga. Observe:

Credit: u/MrTrashMan221, r/ShitPostCrusaders

His background and motivations make him even more complex when JoJo still favored pure evil villains compared to the antagonists come Steel Ball Run in 2004.

Now let’s see what kind of image Gemini will give me:

I specifically asked Gemini to make her perform maintenance on the sword, but that seems to be another vague term that can apply to anything. For example, in the U.S. military, maintenance is specified by weekly maintenance of vehicles like Humvees and other such tactical vehicles. Check the tires, check the oil, check the engine, bring discrepancies up to the mechanics, rinse and repeat the week after until the vehicles are needed for a specific purpose.

At least it gave her a sword without any other interpretation, though I didn’t say necessarily that Ba Mei would be the specific model.

Lastly, there’s a wildcard. The Gemini AI and the Google AI are entirely different platforms with the same parent, so I’m squaring up this last one against her sister. The result of the notebook drawing are thus:

(ノへ￣、) The thing that stands out the most is that it got the hanzi wrong. In the original image it’s this: 陈. The image itself translated the tired look pretty well, but I’ve gotta dock points for the wildcard itself. Now the prompt-based image:

Ehhh, it did better this time around, but this little science experiment has taught me that whoever plans to use or continue using AI-generated images, should do a few things. Specify that an image generator was used for the image, use heavy details to achieve your definition of perfection so make sure you have a thesaurus and a dictionary available in another tab, and to add to that last one about opening a dictionary/thesaurus, make sure you have the proper terminology or you’ll get the hallucination issues that experts want users to be mindful about.

Based on this grading system, ChatGPT is the winner. Gemini takes home silver, Grok gets copper so that it can follow in Papa Elon’s footsteps and wire electrodes to its heart’s content, and Google’s AI Mode unfortunately comes last.

All in all, it took decades of heavy research and pattern recognition to get artificial intelligence chatbots to where they are now and only a few years to get short clips of Will Smith to enjoy his noodles as opposed to absorbing them like an amoeba. Perhaps like my original October 2023 piece on VTubers, I’ll revisit this topic as the technology continues to develop. Maybe I’ll put this into any one of the chatbots I use for analysis. None of them have human emotions as of this writing, but if one day they do evolve that far, then I will hope that they don’t start taking this too seriously. Ultimately, chatbots are utensils like any other–they’re not do-it-all miracle machines. They can help a lot of things, but not everything. The images used for this post are evidence of that.

And despite this being one of my uncommon long form pieces, there’s a lot more on AI to go over, but I’m leaving it mainly on this note since this is an entertainment blog and not a software analysis blog. Rest assured, dear reader, next week’s topic will cover something that’s not as thorny online.