Don't make a Fralli, you may break the AI!

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Friday, June 13, 2025 - 08:06 pm: Edit

Please please don’t do Fralli.

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Saturday, June 14, 2025 - 02:52 pm: Edit

If you must do a Fralli, please be kind and include an appropriate bulls eye target marking over center mass.

Star Fleet Shooters United, thank you.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:29 pm: Edit

Orion Captain by Lar Bergen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:30 pm: Edit

Orion Engineer by Lar Bergen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:31 pm: Edit

Orion Marine by Lar Bergen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:32 pm: Edit

Gorns by Lar Bergen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:33 pm: Edit

Gorn officer by Lar Bergen

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, June 15, 2025 - 06:35 pm: Edit

I am not sure why one Gorn incorrectly has a tail that the others correctly lack.

I do wonder if the three represent a Greenscale, Brownscale, and Grayscale, respectively.

By Joe Carlson (Jrc) on Monday, June 16, 2025 - 06:06 pm: Edit

Can we go back to the cardboard counter age!

By Jeff Wile (Jswile) on Tuesday, June 17, 2025 - 05:33 pm: Edit

Well, okay, so long as there are SFB players still pushing cardboard across a map.

The problem with doing things “Old School” is we all reach the point of “game over” and the next message your soul receives is some variation of “Welcome to…(Heaven, Valhalla, ellizian fields, hell, happy hunting grounds…)”.

By Dennis Surdu (Aegis) on Wednesday, June 18, 2025 - 09:08 pm: Edit

So science has learned that the ratio of brain mass to overall body weight/size is a strong indicator of an organism's intelligence. Unlike most reptiles on Earth, I see Gorns as having a larger "brain case" than these images suggest. Just my two cents. That aside, these are nice images and excellent examples of AI generated art.

By Matthew Lawson (Mglawson) on Friday, June 20, 2025 - 08:18 pm: Edit

I don't think I could be in the Star Fleet Universe since I don't have the required 6-pack all these members have.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Friday, June 20, 2025 - 11:40 pm: Edit

Lar, which AI bot are you using to create these??


Garth L. Getgen

By Lawrence Bergen (Lar) on Wednesday, June 25, 2025 - 04:48 pm: Edit

Matt: A co-worker once told me he had a washboard stomach, he just had a load (of wash) in currently.

Garth: It's just ChatGPT.

By Garth L. Getgen (Sgt_G) on Thursday, June 26, 2025 - 09:17 pm: Edit

So, playing around with Chat-GPT and asking it to create images of characters from my fiction writing. It's been hit-or-miss, mostly miss. One image of the Tac-Team included an Andorian. Nothing special, except I've never seen a bald Andorian before, have you?


Garth L. Getgen

By Ted Fay (Catwhoeatsphoto) on Thursday, June 26, 2025 - 11:21 pm: Edit

Model use is all about prompt engineering. The more description and constraints you put on it, the more likely it is you'll get the kind of output you're looking for.

Also try different models (Gemini, Copilot, and others). They will produce different results for the same prompt.

Models can also produce different results with the *same* prompt because the processing is so complex.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Thursday, June 26, 2025 - 11:39 pm: Edit

I am pretty sure we will never use AI, at least not any time soon. There are too many moving (legal) parts to the equations, with lots of artists claiming that their art was used to train the bot. The wargame industry as a whole has pretty much said "maybe later" to this.

Still, it is breathtaking.

By Jessica Orsini (Jessica_Orsini) on Friday, June 27, 2025 - 08:02 am: Edit

On that moving legal parts front: Disney and Universal are jointly suing one of the big AI firms (Midjourney) both for using their intellectual property to train AI systems and for allowing people to generate obvious copies of that intellectual property. When the House of Mouse sics its highly-paid attack lawyers on something, it rarely ends well for that something.

By Douglas Lampert (Dlampert) on Friday, June 27, 2025 - 08:52 am: Edit

I'd always heard copyright invoked in claiming generative AI is bad/illegal, and that strikes me as highly questionable. The generative AI doesn't do a direct copy and pretty much all artists and authors take elements from other works. There are no new stories, just old stories told in new ways.

But Disney almost always goes with Trademark Law in their lawsuits, and that strikes me as an open and shut case for Disney.

I simply hadn't thought about AI and trademarks till Jessica's post, but if a prompt that doesn't specifically mention a Disney trademark produces a product that violates a Disney trademark because the AI was trained on the Disney trademark and is copying the Disney trademark, how do you argue in court that the AI has NOT violated a Disney trademark?

By Alan Trevor (Thyrm) on Friday, June 27, 2025 - 11:07 am: Edit

I have a niece who writes stories and scenarios for a small gaming company that publishes "Choose Your Own Adventure"-type books:


"You hear a metallic "clanking" sound from behind the door with the engraved rune. Do you -
Open the door? (Go to page 23)
Listen more closely" (Go to page 106)
Ignore the door and continue along the passage? (Go to page 47)"


That sort of thing. The company she works for has decided not to use AI artwork until the legal issues are more clearly sorted out.

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, July 19, 2025 - 12:48 am: Edit

I thought you guys might get a kick out of this. I saw a video that posed the question "What the heck is going on?" in reference to a new rock band, the MASTERS OF PROPHESY. They released 15 rock videos and rocketed to the fasted-growing (and one of the biggest) YouTube channels. Here is a link to one of their songs/videos.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V8Wudh4SJfg

The thing about this group (obvious by the topic I am posting this in) is that there is no such group. It's all AI. No artists, no vocalist, no drummer, no lead guitar, no bass guitar, no keyboard, no sound mixer, no songwriter. All AI, created by some bot in less than an hour.

Some say the music has no soul, but I don't agree there. It seems to me to be as good as any of the songs coming out this year from human bands.

Random art from the video...

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Saturday, July 19, 2025 - 11:39 pm: Edit

Things on YouTube worth looking at.

Enter STEAMPUNK as a search term and find no end of videos of clockwork dirigibles and gorgeous busty girls in Victorian corsets. I didn't see any that actually told a story but the visuals are stunning.

Another fun romp is STAR-BABES & STARSHIPS, a series of videos by a company called 21st Century Mouse, which are various test runs for AI-driven girls in skin-tight 44-caliber combat bikinis along with cars, motorcycles, starships, and aliens. One of these, #17 in the series, is actually a pilot episode of the eventual SciFi series they plan to do, complete with characters, plot, dialogue, back story, and fascinating technology. It seems someone figure out how to build an artificial android body and transfer a human soul and consciousness into it. They offered a deal to anyone who was old, sick, crippled, or just bored: move to a new beautiful android body and serve the company for 100 years then move your soul and consciousness to an actual biological body able to have children and age normally and go to heaven in due course. Some people were still in the android bodies 350 years later. The androids were used by the company to expand into space, since androids could be made on arrival at a new planet and the chips holding the souls plugged into them, eliminating the need for life support during a decades-long trip.

By Shawn Hantke (Shantke) on Saturday, July 19, 2025 - 11:54 pm: Edit

I wonder what would happen if someone used an AI video creator and gave it a prompt to create a video in the style of ST:TOS and told it follow a script and you cut and pasted in a story from Captain's Log?

By Steve Cole (Stevecole) on Sunday, July 20, 2025 - 12:46 am: Edit

I wonder that, too, but given how many lawsuits are going on in AI and how angry Paramount can get about intruding into TNG (which is not in our license) I think that's a door better left closed.