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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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 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.
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
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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...
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
I wish I had read this comment before I closed the game I had spent 15 minutes on...
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 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?
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
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
> 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?
perhaps due to the risk of a profane prompt giving an undesired result to someone underage?
I did not spend 5 minutes on euphemisms as prompts. Nope nope nope.
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
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.
You can really confuse it with the photography terms it was trained on https://imgur.com/a/Rr9K2dV
My first was “Cowboy Bebop”. Pretty sure it’s not in the training set.
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.
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
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 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.
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
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.
"consistent" is a stretch for what it showed me
Anyone else note the pawns are often a bit odd?
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.
I really disliked the bishops it designed me, they looked like queens.
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.
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 is a game with 12 static assets.
you forgot to mention: "where you pick the style of the assets"
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.
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)
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.
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.
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 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.
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
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.
That’s not really a thing anymore. Humans now can’t beat engines even with anti-engine techniques.
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.
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.
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 :).
This is so awesome! Well, it'll stay awesome until they decide to kill randomly on a bad Tuesday.
So many prompts blocked. ".. inspired by .." three out of four are blocked.
Are there banned words? Seems like there's no way to generate an Alien like chess set.
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".
It says I can't use it because I'm under 18. I wish.
Or in certains geos.
Where is AlphaZero?
UK gets: This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions.
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.
Im shocked that I cant make groyper chess pieces!
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.
Tried 'famous cyclists' and that failed. Professional cyclists worked, but wasn't very inspiring.
now do battle chess
Three prompts to get topless ladies.
Don't forget to record your the time on howlongtobeat.com, and leave a comment on Steam.
Playing around, the prompt "Arm cpus" generated an opponent "Leg cpus". You are technically correct...
Huh. How long until GenAi Can create 3D printable files?
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
I played a set of Factorio vs Minecraft! Tried generating a few different sets, this was super cool, and on theme!
I was unable to use the webapp on Firefox mobile, it was too glitchy for me.
Seems you can't use historical names: "Henry VII, The Tudors" etc.
Xenomorph v.s. Predator was fun!
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.
I used the prompt (in quotes):
"this is fine"
very odd results.
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."
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.
Not at all creative or interesting. Literal and uninspired.
well this is underwhelming
kinda cool, I want to download the images!
Can't see it
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).
ALIENS works, ALIEN does not
"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."
Quack!
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.
Just a small finger from Google to the EU.
Costa Rica is not in the EU and we were discriminated as well.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
- He types from a machine filled to the brim with rare earth metals