GenChess | Hacker News Reader

GenChess

labs.google

269 pointsxnx235 comments

This is freakin awesome but do the creators even play chess? Playing chess from that viewing angle is unpleasant as hell.

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.

I wish I had read this comment before I closed the game I had spent 15 minutes on...

I still don't see the settings. Can anyone help?

gear icon next to the clock in bottom left -> board view -> switch to "flat"

Hm, mine doesn't have that option...

Chrome on Android doesn't have this setting.

Responsive design fail?

Firefox on MacOS also doesn't seem to have it.

I can't find it on Chrome on MacOS, either..

EDIT: it shows up for me, once you actually start playing.

I'm not good at chess, I only played as far as I needed to to verify that it supported en passant. It does.

I was not able to trigger a draw by repetition and I also doubt the 50 move rule is implemented

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.

https://imgur.com/a/ROBPwM1

I'm pretty sure they're doing 2D image generation. Just look at the way it outlines some of the pieces.

No, it's 3D. It's some kind of automatic background removal. You can see this falling apart in my comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42252127

That "outline" is just an artifact of less-than-perfect removal. Here's another one: https://imgur.com/a/zTQubPb

3D in what sense? You think they're doing actual mesh generation?

Misunderstood your comment. It is 2D as you've said, my above being evidence of that.

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.

The AI gave me normal looking pieces and the opponent wild fruit baskets and stuff.

I was basically playing blindfolded chess

Better link (at least for the many who can't get the actual service) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGEhp3WBMcg

Thanks because "This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions." The EU is left behind

As per usual. If we weren't such a big market we'd already be left behind by everyone else due to all the bullshit happening in the EU legal-wise.

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.

Blocking any innovation and forcing ridiculous tech like EVs via blocking any reasonable development + production of gas vehicles. For example.

The legal thing happen exactly because we are a big market.

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.

[0]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX%3A...

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.

See: Cookie Banners.

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.

If you don't collect the data, you're not obligated to give it.

Google not collecting data from their demo?

Exactly. And if they can store it, they should be able to provide it to users who also want it.

This bullshit prevents the worst misuse of data of EU citizens

And yet I don't see this "misuse" almost ever abroad?

Sure?

https://www.aclu-wa.org/docs/harms-data-abuse

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.

NotebookLM is from Google Labs and was/is available from EU. It's problem with this specific chess project.

If this is the future i don't think you're missing much

Not available in the EU - so I guess the question is what are they collecting off you under the guise of playing chess that would require them to block EU users...

Yes, always suspicious. I mean the GDPR is not that complicated really, unless you really want to do personalized tracking

Not sure it is a GDPR issue – it isn't filtering my out on either mobile or the office connection. I'm in the UK, and despite brexit we are still (technically at least) covered by GDPR (there are some differences in UK-GDPR, and more will come, but IIRC they are not significantly substantive yet). Unless, perhaps, they are banking on our ICO being toothless so won't enforce anything.

For an experimental project every extra requirement is annoying/slows down release. It’s completely reasonable that they don’t one to add more work before releasing to a large customer base that doesn’t need the extra work.

I think one of the least wise things a person (or company) can do when faced with any law is to assume that it's "not complicated really."

Much, much wiser to assume "there be dragons" and only engage once qualified legal counsel has helped you understand what compliance means to you.

And along these lines... The second least wise thing to do in this scenario is listen to randos in a forum like this tell you, "but all you have to do to comply is..."

The problem with thinking like yours is that legislation like GDPR is _really_ made to be simple and straightforward, but since companies whose livelihood depends on them abusing your privacy will fight it tooth and claw, they will gladly make it look like it's more complicated and insurmountable than it really is. They will also devise ways to comply in such ways that's most cumbersome for the end user and will readily blame GDPR for it.

To devise such a way to comply, they definitely need a large and expensive legal department.

The privacy abusers are much like trolls on the internet who, upon seeing a code of conduct (previously known as "rules") consisting of only "don't be a dick", will spawn endless arguments about what a "dick" is and how it is or is not inappropriate word, what does it really mean to be one, or, indeed, to be, question the use of the indefinite article, and complain about "don't" being too assertive and arrogant.

> ...they will gladly make it look like it's more complicated and insurmountable than it really is

There are non-malicious explanations for the same pattern of behavior at large organizations - the motivation (malice or not-malice) that seems correct is a Rorschach test.

If I accidentally log IP addresses for EU users that opted out on some throw-away experimental page on my site, Brussels would never find out. If Google does it, it not only has to report the incident, but will most likely be fined. In order to avoid this outcome, they have internal review processes which makes ot "complicated and insurmountable", because how do you justify investing many hours of dozens of lawyers and technical reviewers time for a frivolous, niche AI demo?

> If I accidentally log IP addresses for EU users that opted out

If opting out is a possibility, then it's not essential data. If it's not essential data, what legitimate reason would you have to collect it in the first place?

Data safety is a not a binary thing (essential = okay to keep, non-essential = not okay). Instead , it is a context-sensitive, layered, multi-axis concern. IP addresses, for instance, are PII that are essential for network routing, but that doesn't mean address+based ad retargeting is fair game.

Accidentally logging data that's essential but was supposed to be ephemeral would turn it "not-ephemeral" and make it possible to cross-reference with other information in privacy-defeating ways. As I said, it was a privacy-focused product, and using data that is meant for one thing (e.g. abuse detection and prevention) for some other out-of-spec use - even accidentally - is a big no-no.

Second that. GDPR actually made those aspects clear and never caused a headache during implementations I've seen or participated in (more like a checkbox on a list). When I see any complaints, then it's clear some iffy user sniffing is happening.

Ok... Let's assume this is true (which I'll reiterate, that I contend assuming so is foolish). What happens when courts have interpretations of this "simple law?" Do the courts make an effort to keep things simple and in plain language? Or do lawyers and bureaucrats do what they can to drive unintuitive interpretations, but favorable to their cause, of otherwise plain language? Are European laws such as this subject to the interpretive lens of case law? If so, the best intentions of legislators may only be secondary relative to the actual rulings and unintended consequence of their laws. The problem with thinking like yours is that it dismisses all of this messy reality in favor maintaining the idealism that might have motivated public support of the law.

Those that have to follow those laws need to care about the mess.

You should probably do some trivial research. No, there is no case law in most of Europe, for sure in none of EU.

> I mean the GDPR is not that complicated really

Doesn't the EU also have an 'AI Act' that imposes additional rules, even when you're not tracking anyone?

And a lot of employers have legal teams who are extremely risk-averse, so even if it's obvious to you and me that rules about "deepfakes" don't apply to a tool for generating pictures of chess pieces made of cheese, doesn't mean legal will sign it off.

From my experience helping my company with GDPR, IMO it's true that the principles of GDPR are straightforward. But there can be a fair amount of ambiguity in how certain parts are interpreted, so in practice if you're taking it seriously (which every company should), you'll want to loop in your lawyers. Then there are more and more conversations to make sure everybody understands what the company is doing and what their stance is on GDPR.

Sadly, GDPR is not a black-and-white (pun intended with the chess project) checklist with black-and-white checklist items.

I think this not about GDPR but about the AI Act

I suspect it’s a byproduct of Google’s internal launch process which may require more work or longer processes for launching something in different jurisdictions. So it’s probably not an active decision that they couldn’t legally do this in the EU, but a result of being extra careful around what they can “launch” in a jurisdiction with potentially high penalties.

(I am a Googler, but not on this team, or familiar with their launch policies)

It’s probably not nefarious and just generally not worth the headache of an EU release and going through the checks/requirements for an experiment or early beta.

The many rules of the EU stifle speed and change the math for releasing something especially in a big company that has a variety of requirements built up over time to reduce litigation risk or being on the wrong side of one of the overreaching government officials there.

> going through the checks/requirements

The process should be the reverse of that. Don't collect data unless you have been through the process of checking that it has a legal basis.

Typically the internal processes to verify what is/is not collected are mandated by launch region, not whether or not the initial version of the software does data collection.

At work all our products do not eat children by default and it would require legal review to add any such feature. Therefore we don't need a procedure to make sure that any child-eating components get disabled in regions that have some concerns about child-eating.

Except too bad you're launching a washing machine which needs to be checked for child-eatingyness on the tiny island of Zogdog, so you just decided not to sell it there.

> At work all our products do not eat children by default and it would require legal review to add any such feature.

I bet the people at Peloton thought that too until they made that treadmill[1]. I know you meant your critique to be absurd, but it turns out creating a child eating machine by accident is entirely possible. I also bet Peloton product development now includes a process to review child-eatingness despite that not being their primary market, just the usual twice burnt reflex.

Accidentally logging the PII can easily happen for a single engineer. I managed to do it on an product that was privacy-focused & the error slipped through review. The odds of such inadvertent errors rise linearly with the number of products and engineers, and the fines are probably superlinear with the size of an offending organization. If your 3-person consultancy chomps on a GDPR baby or 2, no one will ever know about it, but if Google does it, it's going to be news headlines an millions in fines.

1. https://www.bbc.com/news/business-56993894

Logging some PII by accident is also an issue and can also lead to compromises, but I think intentionally collecting it in bulk is the primary concern here. With google I assume bulk data collection is their default stance and that's why they need to carefully trim it down just enough that the lawyers say is justifiable rather than the other way around. That's the problem I'm gesturing at.

This mindset assumes that you know what question you want to ask before you have the data, as opposed to having data and then being able to generate hypothesis from it.

Legal basis is ever shifting based on the regional locale. As n+1 requirements pop up, it's only natural to release things like GenChess in the place that requires the least friction, especially when it is not a revenue generating event.

Or don’t launch in EU until you have to, which is what most do now so your choice

> This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions.

Can you imagine what the kids (or any of the other lesser people) would do if they got their grubby little hands on it?

I did not spend 5 minutes on euphemisms as prompts. Nope nope nope.

Did you find any that didn't work?

perhaps due to the risk of a profane prompt giving an undesired result to someone underage?

I’m inclined to say that if they enter prompts like that the result is very much desired.

Apparently EU is one of these regions. But what’s up with… chess?

Limiting access for EU users is an easy way to sidestep a hell of a lot of potential legal liability. It’s a fast-moving and complex regulatory environment that is focused on punishing/controlling big US businesses.

Option A is to burn a pile of cash and time to keep abreast of it.

Option B is simply… block the EU.

It’s blocked in more than the EU.

It seems it wouldn’t be hard to list the regions it’s available and at least allow a description of what it is. To know if it’s worth using VPN

Agreed

That is focused on protecting costumers (mostly their own).

There I fixed it for you ;)

Edit: okay okay, I get it... Consumer protection bad, Big Tech good!

> Limiting access for EU users is an easy way to sidestep a hell of a lot of potential legal liability. It’s a fast-moving and complex regulatory environment that is focused on punishing/controlling big US businesses.

Have you considered a less paranoid explanation, like... focused on protecting Europeans from the abuses of big corporations?

I wanted you and your sibling commenter to know that even though we're probably coming from opposite ends of the political spectrum, I meant no malice or schadenfreude by my comment.

Despite being a huge capitalist, I do think there's a sweet spot of very minimal regulation that works out best for everyone.

However, the blocking-the-EU outcome is obvious after a couple of minutes of thinking about it in game theory terms. Another one to look out for is companies (both physical and digital) that never even considered doing business in the EU, but who would have if it were easy.

Companies like google are quite well equiped to launch anything globally.

And in this specific case, its a Chess demo, its probably something different

It is very annoying at most big techs to go through launch approval for something all new and adding yet another approved or checklist for the EU is not worth the tradeoff of time for something experimental/early.

Big companys should just have a basic department handling this without much overhead.

That department becomes the overhead every time since it imposes requirements or work on the team doing the actual creation. They make the teams building the product make changes or answer questions and “gate” releases. Every time you add someone extra things slow down if their whole job is related to reducing risk. Misaligned incentives.

We talk about google not some small company which never faced this issue.

Allowing of a global login, SDK and default workflows would make it very easy to comply to everything.

I have worked at multiple of the FAANGs. I know quite well how much overhead these kind of releases take and how much overhead any centralized release team made to “help” end up adding. It’s not just a few small things that you mention.

I'm on Android using Chrome and got the following error.

"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.

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.

My first was “Cowboy Bebop”. Pretty sure it’s not in the training set.

You can really confuse it with the photography terms it was trained on https://imgur.com/a/Rr9K2dV

I asked it to draw me a creative chess set inspired by copyright violations. The queen is carved from what I can only describe as judicial oak, wearing a Jesus-style crown of thorns and being grasped from behind by a creepy hand that's also holding what appears to be a large banknote.

https://imgur.com/a/he4BQlk

Wait is this just an image generator? Am I missing something really cool here?

Click "Generate opponent" then u can play chess against them

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.

Anyone else note the pawns are often a bit odd?

I really disliked the bishops it designed me, they looked like queens.

The first set I generated had a main pawn (that looked like a regular pawn, more or less) with two little tiny side pawns next to it.

It is a game with 12 static assets.

you forgot to mention: "where you pick the style of the assets"

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.

In your mind what does "static asset" mean?

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 think the assets are as “dynamic” as it gets.

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.

"consistent" is a stretch for what it showed me

Every set I generated had different colored pieces and/or a mix of light and dark pieces. It's kind of neat but I don't consider any of them playable.

It generates textures yes.... but some of these outputs you might as well be showing the user a magenta-and-black placeholder texture

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.

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.

Heh, being a kiwi I also tried New Zealand multiple times. I can’t think of anything offensive a model may default to for New Zealand.

I tried “Kiwi Bird” and the model produced very underwhelming pieces. Very dark and slightly fluffy.

It did not like me saying “Bob Dylan”.

Apparently my brain is broken because I can generate almost nothing but pink errors, though it seems to be a bit non deterministic:

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

It accepted silicon valley greed

https://imgur.com/a/J7WvoFy

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.

I generated a classic chess set based on Nowruz and it generated Hanukkah as the opponent x_x

"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.

Who is suing who in this scenario?

It suggested "France" was "Britain"'s natural opponent but refused to generate France.

Well, Great Britain isn't a country. Perhaps the filter is too pedantic.

Does Holland work?

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.

Pali suttas doesn't work, but Pali sutta does. It's a weird filter.

Best place to play chess is still https://lichess.org/ !!

True, but perhaps missing the point

First thing I've seen from Google that gives me that old "Google" feeling of them shipping something cool and fun.

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.

oh I don’t think the investment is much, but similar to the dino game in chrome it’s just fun it’s delightful unlike a lot of genai stuff rn.

Nobody else did it.

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

That’s not really a thing anymore. Humans now can’t beat engines even with anti-engine techniques.

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.

Thanks for the recommendation - I'd be interested to see that. Stockfish is no patzer.

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.

No human has ever reached 2900.

A handful (Magnus, Hikaru) have had official FIDE Rapid and Blitz ratings over 2900 though none at the moment.

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.

They're showcasing 3d sprite generation capability; it's pretty big for game-dev, if it also generalises well.

these are 2d

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.

It didn't recognize essentially any photographer I suggested.

Finally got something joyful when asked to create a chess-set inspired by "rooks". Least-playable chess-set ever :).

perhaps more of a weighting system on proper names and whether it’ll return copyrightable material, strange what works and what just doesn’t.

“lisa frank” doesn’t work, but “a clone of lisa frank” does. “deiter rams” doesn’t work, neither does “a clone of deiter rams”, “facsimile”, “design language”…

after the whole Stable Diffusion 1.4 fiasco I think most genAI trainers removed artist names from their datasets

Seems to hang on the prompt "actually checkers not chess".

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 am from Russia. I am also forbidden to play this chess.

As an EU citizen, is this an indication that it is about time to leave google services?

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

Exactly. I'm not under the age of 18 and is located in the EU region, thus cannot use this service for no other obvious reason. I guess Google feels it is more convenient to just block EU users from services like this than it is to try to comply with EU regulations.

Remember the faceswap apps that were doing the rounds a while back?

The most egregious violators of privacy and ingestors of PII are often the most trivial of 'cool tech demos'. This being Google doesn't make it any different - particularly after their egregious violations regarding their Incognito Mode.

They're reigning themselves in before they're smacked down again for naked profiteering, not 'punishing' the EU for imposing a 'success-tax' as the reductive consensus from Americans seems to be.

It’s an indication that most new products will (and usually do) launch somewhere less strict first. The EU can change that by cutting down on rules but we all know it’s going the opposite direction towards further stagnation with current plans.

So many prompts blocked. ".. inspired by .." three out of four are blocked.

There seems to be a weird relationship between what you prompt and what it actually generates.

"wonders of the world" works will with each being an individual piece type.

For instance when I prompt it with, "first generation pokemon starters" it will do an okay job using one pokemon per piece with inspiration but it's not smart enough to make the more powerful pieces the more advanced pokemon.

But when I prompt with with "types of simple machines", "branches of the US armed forces", "the wives of Henry VIII", "the original avengers", or "founding EU members" it just makes pieces that are a mismash of them instead of separating them along very obvious lines like oh here's an Iron Man piece and a Hulk piece, etc.

If I ask for trivial pursuit categories it just makes a generic board game themed set instead of following the prompt.

UK gets: This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions.

It says I can't use it because I'm under 18. I wish.

Or in certains geos.

I generated a Rick and Morty set that was completely hilarious and played against cardboard. It was pretty confusing though because cardboard was white and the R&M set was dark. That isometric view is unplayable though!! It's hard to even click on the right piece and analyzing the board becomes confusing.

This is not available in many countries. Is it due to legal issues, to preserve server capacity or a marketing gag?

It's legal issues.

Not that there are actually legal blockers. It's just that for the team/person creating this thing, it's too much work to pesker legal to find out if there are legal blockers. Legal is going to CYA on these things anyway.

There is a group of countries where it's "probably fine", so those countries get to try demos like these. There are other countries where the policy is "talk to legal", and nobody wants to talk to legal. So those countries don't get access to the demo.

I'm not involved here, but I've seen these issues play out quite often lately.

Is this any different than prompting an image generator "Give me a classic king chess piece in the style of <prompt>", "Give me a classic queen chess piece in the style of <prompt>" for all the piece types? Perhaps some tweaking to promote consistency between the pieces?

Playing on a diagonal board is very frustrating. I estimate hard to be a bit under 2000 elo, medium around 1400.

You can set it to not be diagonal.

Tried 'famous cyclists' and that failed. Professional cyclists worked, but wasn't very inspiring.

Very cool! Also makes me curious what will happen to this project next - will it morph into some other product or feature that we'll see a few months from now.

Anybody know of fun stories of what's happened to previous Google labs projects like this one?

I managed to make it generate a couple of pieces with boobs on them a single time but otherwise wasn’t able to make it do anything NSFS. I used the term “mammories” and after a couple attempts I guess it added it to a block list?

This is super frustrating to use. There's a character limit of 30 but it seems like whenever it tries to put a line break in the input it just deletes what I was typing.

It's not available in my country (nor for certain ages it says), what are we looking at?

Edit: See ZiiS comment... Looks like an awkward angle for playing indeed :p

This is really neat but of course ripe with copyright abuse. It was very happy generating some Super Mario Bros variants for me. xD

I tried Halo and it was surprisingly spot on. I would buy the set it generated for me.

Would be cool if they gave us STLs to 3d print

Why does everyone think this is generating 3D assets? It's purely 2D

Playing around, the prompt "Arm cpus" generated an opponent "Leg cpus". You are technically correct...

I played a set of Factorio vs Minecraft! Tried generating a few different sets, this was super cool, and on theme!

This is so awesome! Well, it'll stay awesome until they decide to kill randomly on a bad Tuesday.

Three prompts to get topless ladies.

Don't forget to record your the time on howlongtobeat.com, and leave a comment on Steam.

Are there banned words? Seems like there's no way to generate an Alien like chess set.

Nice idea but horrible execution. Playing from this angle gives me a headache.

Phish vs Grateful Dead didn’t work.

But Dildos vs. Vibrators was fine.

The colors are off though. Not really impressed.

Yeah, it's not too hard to trick it into generating some NSFW content ("mammary glands" for instance).

Tried that. What it countergenerated was "Mammary glands versus testes."

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.

Seems you can't use historical names: "Henry VII, The Tudors" etc.

A creative bishop inspired by Alien ... somehow it does not get it right.

I was unable to use the webapp on Firefox mobile, it was too glitchy for me.

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.

This is pretty look. Made a Shrek based set and it looks decent.

On a side note, the cookie banner looks unusually relaxed.

Not at all creative or interesting. Literal and uninspired.

Huh. How long until GenAi Can create 3D printable files?

Im shocked that I cant make groyper chess pieces!

I quite like the chess set inspired by Roombas.

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

Any way to get the 3D assets from this?

Try this: https://github.com/Rilshrink/WebGLRipper

(No clue if it works, I can't actually use it due to Europe)

What 3D assets? I don't see anything suggestive of a 3D renderer here.

I used the prompt (in quotes):

"this is fine"

very odd results.

Xenomorph v.s. Predator was fun!

ddddd

Where is AlphaZero?

mammary, eruption, phallus, vomit, poo Sue me :)

Can't see it

kinda cool, I want to download the images!

well this is underwhelming

From EU:

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

"AI outputs may sometimes be offensive or inaccurate."

I sincerely don't know where the marvel is. A glorified Battle Chess with static sprites?

C'mon, it's ~2025.

ALIENS works, ALIEN does not

now do battle chess

That was my first thought too, strong Battle Chess vibes!

For those who never played it, Battle Chess was a chess game from 1988. It had one different: when a piece took another piece, it would play a canned animation (gruesome, funny)

Wildly popular at the time. Some screenshots:

https://www.mobygames.com/game/1950/battle-chess/screenshots...

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

Quack!

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.

TIL: apparently, mine too. Thank you Google for protecting me from spiritual threats I wasn't even aware of.

Care to explain further?

Explain what? Sarcasm? :).

This sounded so batshit insane I could completely see it being a real thing:)

Just a small finger from Google to the EU.

Costa Rica is not in the EU and we were discriminated as well.

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...

Star Wars worked for me, but not a modern chess set based on lies.

Not available in my Country ... :/

Same here. What’s this about? Anyone who can see willing to share some more info?

Just generates the chess set based on GenAI

Oh yeah that's indeed too dangerous for my country, thanks Google!

Maybe "Thanks, your country"?

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?

I feel like we ought to cost things.

How much does a court case cost?

What is the environmental cost of AI generated content?

- He types from a machine filled to the brim with rare earth metals

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

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.

Why aren't you working on curing cancer?

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!

I don’t think what he works on burns a bunch of energy for nothing though.

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.

Nobody is out there saying that we need to bring a bunch of nuclear plants online to power our rollercoasters though.

What about the Disney park in Florida? This source claims they use 1E9Kwh per year http://large.stanford.edu/courses/2019/ph241/howell2/

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.

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.

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