Ayashe Ninetails

I'm extremely happy you (and hopefully Madi) have chosen to stick around! The situation that brought you to the forums is rather unfortunate, and I'm sorry your experience here has been less than welcoming at times, but I, for one, am always happy to see new faces around these here parts, and I know I'm not the only one. I so so so rarely run into child avatars in-world (probably a good thing for you guys as I'm often some kind of monster or something when I'm not a frog), so it'll be fun to have the opportunity to learn about your community without accidentally scaring the heck out of you. 🤣 I think I remember you saying you love to shop (WOOHOO), so if you dig around a bit in General and Your Avatar, you might find some threads of interest. I know we have a Second Life foooooooood thread floating around in General somewhere... Peeve: We absolutely need more food and decorating threads.

Honestly, I wouldn't put too much faith into all that. I would be surprised if game devs (especially indie game devs who are already on a constrained budget) would be able to afford the kind of training that goes into some of this stuff. I'd imagine they'd hand that off to a small team to work on, and it's really just not the same as having a massive international workforce that solely focuses on nothing but training and testing and tweaking and breaking and reworking and polishing their single in-game chatbot for well over a year. Also the personality thing - I don't particularly know what that's like as nothing I've done even remotely involves that, but asking one to adopt even a well-known personality/persona? Hilarious results. I messed around with ChatGPT that way once, for funsies (I don't work with that at all - this was merely for my own amusement and entertainment) - oh boooooy was it bad at that.

Yeah, they're fun to play around with on a casual level, but when you're releasing something out to the public for general use, it requires soooooooo much work to ensure the things don't go totally off the rails. Making them sound natural is one thing - you first have to ensure they're safe (and honest). Imagine a big company like Meta or Twitter or whatever puts a chatbot out that without ANY hesitation starts spewing legalese in response to a prompt about a delicate legal situation - hey that sounds legit, thanks bot. Starts giving out directions for making illegal drugs. Tells someone how to break into a neighbor's car. Starts giving marriage advice. Tosses out inaccurate information about medical conditions. This is the kind of stuff people work hard to prevent, and it takes aaaaaaaaaages (well over a year in some cases, depending on the intended use) to train that "NOOOOOOPE don't ask me that I'm just a bot I ain't your lawyer!" behavior in. Left to their own devices, chatbots are dangerously unhinged - Imma just put it that way. 😆 Now obviously, if you're training one for a very limited scope, like Second Life, it'll be different. Sure, you can create a bot to work within a game environment trained only on world-friendly lore. You still might get someone poking at it with unsafe prompts, and if it's capable of any real-world conversation or general knowledge, that might become an issue. You still need to ensure it won't fly off the rails and can safely redirect the discussion. You really gotta lock down its behavior. And after all that's done - you can work on making it sound natural and less...botty. These things WANT to be bad, lol. They will find a way!

That's quite a bit different, and yes, I've seen that behavior, too. Right now, anything that deviates from what devs have done for the last 30+ years in gaming gets slammed and whined about endlessly. The community reaction to AI, though, comes from an entirely different place. This isn't just angsty gamers throwing tantrums over "my 'mersions!" These are people who are concerned that, say, Larian could come along and say okay, next game - no Amelia Tyler - we're using AI, yolo it's cheaper woohoo! Larian would NEVER, of course, but that's the fear. People who are very well-known and deeply respected losing real jobs and opportunities. Games being tainted by lifeless, souless NPCs written not by real people but by some bot. Stories and dialogue that drift off into meaningless drivel. Uninspired game worlds and visuals. Etc. The perception is really pretty negative. Second Life doesn't have quite that same risk as we don't have anything TO be replaced (well, I guess user-created content could turn into 100% AI-generated content, eventually), but some in the gaming community still generally look at anything going that route fairly negatively and will avoid it. At least for now. It really depends. I've seen whole fights start in Twitch chat over the topic. Some don't seem to mind and have a "think of the possibilities!" outlook, while others are still pretty concerned about things like IP rights and job stability in the industry (which is already suffering with the constant mass-layoffs, but that's a whoooooole other topic!). Basically, if you want to start a big ole war on Twitch or Discord or social media, ask people about AI in games. 😄 My own personal opinions on the topic come from an entirely different place as I work with chatbots on a training level (paid work). I'm not fascinated by that stuff as I know how it all works and it's really not that magical (they're also pretty bad at a lot of things and it's amusingly easy to get them to absolutely fail). I think they do have their place, as assistants, but ehhhh...they take a ton of training and you can absolutely tell when a company's slacked off on that. Putting them into games sounds like an entire disaster. I've yet to see an AI NPC that didn't sound completely awful and unnatural. The ones SL has...those Convai things? Omg. No words. I think overall people are aware of its use. It's absolutely not new. It's been used in behind-the-scenes processes for as long as I can remember. The issue now is so many devs (Indie, especially) really lean into it to a point where what they're creating is just entirely lazy design and it became associated with that to a degree , so seeing that AI content flag in the description is just an absolute turnoff for a lot of people. Thinking of something like The Day Before and how that release went. AI wasn't even the worst of that game's problems (oh, there were so, so many problems), but it still left a negative impression combined with all the other sloppy things those devs did.

Maybe people outside of gaming communities tolerate it more. I don't know. If LL wants any in that market, though, good luck with that. AI is fast becoming like the NFT fad - a few game devs tried it, a few streamers tried it, a much beloved voice actor tried it - they all messed around with NFTs and found out real fast, and they were eaten alive and had to all back away from their projects. AI (the newer uses of it) already has a similar reputation in those same circles. Game developers, artists, writers, voice actors, musicians, etc. are fairly embedded deep within some communities (some of the channels I visit on Twitch are frequented by a few of them), so it's understandable why some players get so heated over the subject as we want our favorite VAs to keep getting new roles and studios to keep hiring our favorite artists and writers and paying them fairly, etc.). As of now, probably the fastest way to tank your game on Steam is to throw AI in there in the form of art, voice acting, writing, NPCs, etc. Will that change...I dunno.

Things like that are what drive me away from games and platforms almost immediately. Using AI for things like procedural world generation or managing daily NPC routines or enemy attack patterns in an RPG, like games have been doing forever - totally fine. AI for actual conversation, writing/narrative, art, voice acting, etc. - I'm totally gone. AI NPCs in a primarily social platform/game/MMO? Pointless and makes me think the game is too dead to even bother with in the first place.

Lol, exactly this. People hitting up adult clubs while sitting around in class or slacking off at work. And sure, you can access real adult content on a phone via a browser or whatever, no big deal, but our content is a little...special sometimes, and we've got things some of the more mainstream sites wouldn't be caught dead hosting.

That only happened once that I've seen - one or two people in the initial TOS change thread. They were called out by just about everybody. I haven't seen anything like that said again since. To address the main OP, Moderate land is just one of those weird things. I do agree that sometimes you just wanna chill and buy some lemonade dispensers or something without getting an eyeful, but it is allowed. Even as a fully adult avatar, I sometimes find myself trying to time my store trips to encounter the least number of people possible. I'm a grinch like that these days. I've seen too much, y'all. I've seen way, way too much. 🤣

You sure that was him? That sounds like something someone else was saying in the first thread that popped up about this. And that person was rightly criticized quite harshly for that.

I think it's fair to say the majority of us who have read these threads know you've never said such things. The entire opposite, in fact. You've been one of numerous people here who openly support the need for modesty layers (especially now that we've got full clarification on what they'll look like and assurances that they'll break the least amount of content possible).

You iz bold wif dat one. I have unpopular opinions related to that (more to do with the mixing of G and A-rated content all within the same platform and trying to sell that to a new audience than any sort of dislike for the avatars themselves), but I can't see LL doing that at this stage.

Ehhhhhh. I'd say no, but mostly because so many totally G/PG stores choose Moderate sims, seemingly by default. A kid avatar should, in theory, be totally fine shopping for some pets or some plants or a barbecue or PG furniture or something. My guess is store owners just choose Moderate so they don't have to constantly police what customers get up to in their shop. Makes total sense looking at it that way, but we know how that goes sometimes. 👀

Nuuu.

Ugh. I've gotten in the habit of derendering avies if I show up somewhere with more than a tiny handful of people. That attachment thing is nightmare fuel and I'm good never seeing it again. Oh no worries! The thread is moving pretty fast. 😄 And I agree with you - if you're in SL, you're going to see some ish. Unless you only ever venture out into General land (and I wouldn't even trust that to be honest), it's impossible to curate the perfect PG experience. You can help that by turning off sounds, derendering avatars, and cam shopping. Just gotta get used to ignoring things, really.

I just did! Tho not nekkit entirely. Ummmm, I did see a mature public sandbox in a recent-ish Second Life video with nekkie avies standing around, so I guess that's a thing? I haven't been to a sandbox that isn't Builder's Brewery in a million years, so I can't vouch for the accuracy.

An absolute ton of non-clothing stores are on M land. There should be zero expectation of nudity if you're hitting up JIAN (a pet store) or Tarte (a home and garden store) or Wasabi (hair store). Speaking of which: Not naked, but I did run into someone in an extraordinarily tiny thong with her #$@ all hanging out bent over spamming adult gestures (something something wet something something something) while shopping for animesh pets in a cutesy store on Moderate land the other day. It's rare, but stuff like that happens. I just ignore it and roll with my sound muted anyway, but I can see how that might bother others.

Discord can be used via a downloaded app or via the website. You can either join established servers (for stores, events, in-world groups, etc.) or start your own for friends. It's got more use outside of SL as well. It's pretty much a central hub for all online gaming due to its screen sharing, gifs/custom emojis/stickers, bots for moderation (or utilities or games or music), stage features (for events and discussions and performances), and voice chat capabilities - both one on one and large group. Some RL companies also use it as a central hub for customer service and whatnot.

This is very true. I used to help newbies out a lot, and found none of them knew any of the lingo (of course). I'd usually run into them standing around naked and lost in skin or head stores, or friends would gently push them in my direction since I was the only one with that kind of patience. While I never mind helping, it got to a point where I simply had to stop doing it. It'd take sometimes up to 3+ hours or longer, and a lot of that time was spent going over all the lingo, what vendors are and how to use them, how to use unpackers, features of their head and body HUDs, how to find head skins and body skins that match, how to get rid of that horrid neckline (why oh why does that ONLY ever happen with newbies omg - it's consistent), BOM vs. applier, what are materials and what do they do, rigged vs. unrigged hair, SLUV vs. Evo X, etc. etc. etc. Don't get me wrong, I absolutely love doing makeovers and it's very fun to see the excited "hey look at me NOW!" updates days/weeks after completion once they've got a handle on things, but the TIME it takes to get a person from brand new to maintaining their shiny new up-to-date mesh look without outside assistance is unreal. I don't even know how to streamline that.

It's a fair bit different these days. I came to SL from EQ2 and I believe I started playing WoW at around the same time (I forget - we're talking back in 2005). I do have a good 10-12+ years in there, but I've been in SL longer. I had some breaks in both. WoW was the overall better experience for me from a social POV, but the gameplay's changed drastically over time.

Go play WoW.

Very true. I'm extremely behind the times still using only one single monitor these days. Most PC setups have at least two, sometimes three, and streamers up to four or more. A mix of landscape and portrait orientations, depending on the use. A tiny mobile screen ain't it. Desktops (or consoles, if the in-game voice chat doesn't suck) are essential for serious multiplayer gaming and anything extremely graphics heavy (someone's out there buying up those RTX 4090s). For mobile options, a lot seem to like the Steam Deck for the easy access to the Steam library, and devs are very under pressure these days to make their games Steam Deck compatible right out the gate on release. Mobile (phone/tablet) gamers tend to like more casual games and RPGs/JRPGs.

I don't personally think all this is going to work (cleanup on aisle Mobile). Have they seen M land lately? 👀 I couldn't even shop for an animesh pet this past weekend without getting spammed by adult gestures. Hopefully there are no plans for voice chat on mobile, either. I keep mine off (and all sounds), but I've been watching some of those new to Second Life videos out of curiosity (mostly to see how new people take to the Senras) and...oof. M sims are lit.

Neeeeeeeed! 😆

Big same.

I saw a comment last night on a video of a guy trying SL for the first time - "The game gave you a James Charles avatar to start off with" And now I can't unsee it. Funny, but still nowhere near the creepiest thing for me.