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Amazon has officially announced the dates for its next annual shopping event. Prime Day 2023 will be on July 11th and 12th this year — the event will begin at 12AM PT/3AM ET on Tuesday, July 11th, and conclude at the end of the day on Wednesday, July 12th. As it has been for the past few years, Prime Day will be a two-day event during which Prime members can snag deals on everything from electronics to fashion to Amazon's own devices.

The past couple of years saw Prime Day in different seasons, mostly due to COVID-19 repercussions. In 2020, Amazon had to delay Prime Day until October, and it rebounded a bit in 2021 by having Prime Day in June. Last year, Amazon fully returned to its roots by having its main shopping event in July, although it did add a second Prime Day in October in the lead-up to the holiday shopping season.

Aside from drumming up a large number of sales in a short period of time, Prime Day has always been a way for Amazon to increase the numbers of subscribers it has for its subscription service. Prime Day isn’t necessarily a perk of Prime like access to Prime Video content or free two-day shipping are, but it certainly helps that most deals you’ll find on Amazon during the two-day event are exclusively available to Prime members. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the cost of Prime has increased quite a bit since its launch in 2005, and even within the past few years. An annual membership will set you back $139 right now, $20 more than its previous price.

If you do plan on putting that Prime membership to use next month, you can turn to Engadget to find the tech deals worth your month during the two-day event. Unsurprisingly, Amazon Prime Day is one of the best times of the year to get Amazon devices, since most of them will likely be down to all-time-low prices. But we also expect to see worthwhile sales on headphones, robot vacuums, laptops, SSDs and much more. You can also follow Engadget Deals on Twitter for the latest news during Prime Day, and sign up for the new Engadget Deals newsletter to get the best deals delivered right to your inbox.

Your Prime Day Shopping Guide: See all of our Prime Day coverage. Shop the best Prime Day deals on Yahoo Life. Follow Engadget for the best Amazon Prime Day tech deals. Learn about Prime Day trends on In the Know, and hear from Autoblog’s car experts on must-shop auto-related Prime Day deals.

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It looks like Fake Drake won’t be taking home a Grammy. Recording Academy CEO Harvey Mason Jr. said this week that although the organization will consider music with limited AI-generated voices or instrumentation for award recognition, it will only honor songs written and performed “mostly by a human.”

“At this point, we are going to allow AI music and content to be submitted, but the Grammys will only be allowed to go to human creators who have contributed creatively in the appropriate categories,” Mason said in an interview with Grammy.com. “If there’s an AI voice singing the song or AI instrumentation, we’ll consider it. But in a songwriting-based category, it has to have been written mostly by a human. Same goes for performance categories – only a human performer can be considered for a Grammy. If AI did the songwriting or created the music, that’s a different consideration. But the Grammy will go to human creators at this point.”

The CEO’s comments mean the fake Drake / The Weeknd song “Heart on My Sleeve,” which went viral earlier this year before getting wiped from streaming platforms over copyright takedowns, wouldn’t be eligible. Another AI-generated scammer sold fake Frank Ocean tracks in April for a reported CAD 13,000 ($9,722 in US dollars), while Spotify has been busy purging tens of thousands of AI-made songs from its library.

On the other hand, it raises questions about artists like Holly Herndon, who used an AI version of her voice for a cover of Dolly Parton’s “Jolene.” (The AI-generated performance would suggest not, but would the fact that it’s her own voice make a difference?) Or, for that matter, there’s the upcoming “final” Beatles track that Paul McCartney says will use AI to isolate a garbled recording of John Lennon’s voice. And would Taryn Southern, who (also transparently) used AI to co-produce her 2018 debut album, be eligible? We reached out to the Recording Academy for clarification about these examples and will update this article if they respond.

Awards or not, Mason acknowledged that AI would upend the music industry. “AI is going to absolutely, unequivocally have a hand in shaping the future of our industry,” Mason said. “So, we have to start planning around that and thinking about what that means for us. How can we adapt to accommodate? How can we set guardrails and standards? There are a lot of things that need to be addressed around AI as it relates to our industry.” The CEO added that the Recording Academy recently held a summit “with industry leaders, tech entrepreneurs, streaming platforms, and people from the artist community” to discuss AI’s future. “We talked about the subject and discussed how the Recording Academy can be helpful: how we can play a role and the future of AI in music.”

A US Senate committee is investigating Amazon’s warehouse safety practices. Bernie Sanders (I-VT), Chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee, sent a letter to Amazon CEO Andy Jassy today, initiating the probe. Sanders urged Jassy to address health and safety issues at the company’s warehouses and requested additional information about its response to various safety issues. In a statement to Engadget, Amazon said, “We’ve reviewed the letter and strongly disagree with Senator Sanders’ assertions,” while adding that it has extended an invitation for the Senator to tour one of its facilities.

Sanders’ nearly 2,400-word letter takes the retailer to task for reported injuries and unsafe practices at its warehouses. “The company’s quest for profits at all costs has led to unsafe physical environments, intense pressure to work at unsustainable rates, and inadequate medical attention for tens of thousands of Amazon workers every year,” Sanders wrote. “At every turn — from warehouse design and workstation setup, to pace of work requirements, to medical care for injuries and subsequent pressure to return to work — Amazon makes decisions that actively harm workers in the name of its bottom line.”

The letter contrasts Amazon’s history of warehouse injuries and safety complaints with its $1.3 trillion market value, founder Jeff Bezos’ net worth of nearly $150 billion and Jassy’s $289 million in compensation over the last two years. It cites figures from the Strategic Organizing Center (SOC), a coalition of North American labor unions, that paint the company’s patterns as “uniquely dangerous.” “In 2022 alone, Amazon warehouse workers suffered nearly 39,000 injuries, 95 percent of which were so serious that they required workers to either lose time at work or switch to modified duty,” Sanders wrote. “Amazon’s rate of serious injuries at its warehouses, at 6.6 injuries per 100 workers, was more than double the rate at non-Amazon warehouses. And despite constituting only a little more than a third of the warehouse workers in the country, Amazon workers suffered more serious injuries than all of the other warehouse workers in the United States combined.”

In an email to Engadget, Amazon disputed SOC’s data. “There will always be ways for our critics to splice data to suit their narrative, but the fact is, we’ve made progress and our numbers clearly show it. Since 2019, we’ve reduced our rate of recordable injuries across our global network by more than 23%, and we’ve reduced our Lost Time Incident Rate by 53%. This is easily verifiable by examining the data we report to OSHA.” In addition, the company highlighted a report detailing its “meaningful and measurable progress,” while pointing us to a blog post regarding its efforts to help combat the effects of summer heat.

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Sanders’ letter asks Jassy to explain why Amazon’s injury rates are “significantly higher than the warehouse industry average” despite regulators repeatedly identifying measures Amazon could take to improve safety. It also asks the company to address why Amazon’s claims of robotics improving safety don’t align with data that says its robotic facilities have 28 percent higher injury rates than non-robotic ones. Finally, it asks for communications about a connection between workers’ pace of work and the prevalence of injuries.

In addition to his letter, the Senator created a website for current and former Amazon workers to submit stories about their experiences with the company. Sanders asked Jassy to respond by July 5th.

This is far from the first complaint about Amazon’s safety practices. A company warehouse collapsed in December 2021, spurring Congressional action that described Amazon’s response as “disappointing” and part of a “wholly inadequate safety culture.” In response to the collapse, Amazon tweaked its severe-weather strategy but refused to build storm shelters at its warehouses. In addition, federal prosecutors and the US Department of Labor announced an investigation last year over the company’s workplace conditions — a move that included OSHA inspections. In April, the SOC said Amazon was responsible for 53 percent of all severe warehouse injuries in the US despite employing around one-third of the country’s warehouse workers.

“When faced with worker injuries, Amazon provides minimal medical care while hiding those injuries from regulators and workers’ compensation programs,” said Sanders. “This system forces workers to endure immeasurable long-term pain and disabilities while Amazon makes incredible profits from their labor. That cannot be allowed to continue.”

Roblox has traditionally been most popular among kids and pre-teens, despite it claiming to be a “platform for all ages.” Now, in a departure from its family-friendly reputation, the company says it will allow creators to make content specifically for users 17 and older. This isn’t an insignificant portion of Roblox’s user base either – the platform said in its press release Tuesday that in 2022, 38 percent of its daily active users were over 17.

In particular, Roblox says that creators will be able to “feature more mature themes and storylines in TV shows and stand-up comedy.” According to the company, this may include violence, blood, crude humor, romantic themes and alcohol. Players may see “unplayable” gambling content as well, though it is not immediately clear what that would entail. We have asked Robox to clarify.

To access this content you’ll need to verify your age by uploading a photo of your driver’s license or ID along with a selfie to verify that you are who you say you are. Roblox says that this system will provide “greater confidence in people’s age and identity,” and that more age verification methods may be added in the future.

Eligible creators can start making these experiences starting today. These experiences will start rolling out to “eligible” users in the coming weeks. Roblox says that its goal is to provide a safe and engaging experience for people ages 17 or older. The company isn’t being specific on what qualifies as an “eligible” creator or user. We’ve reached out to Roblox for comment and will update this story if we’ve heard back.

Roblox has traditionally marketed itself to younger audiences. For example, earlier this year, the company partnered with Razer to release kid-specific Roblox Edition gaming gear. But with a little over a third of that user base being over the age of 17, it makes sense that the company wants to provide more content geared toward adults.

Apple is widening its Self Service Repair program to cover its more recent devices, and it's reducing some of the hassles in the process. As of June 21st, you can get the parts, tools and manuals needed to fix the iPhone 14 range as well as the M2-based versions of the 13-inch MacBook Air and MacBook Pro. You can also fix the TrueDepth camera and top speaker on iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 models in the US, UK and seven European countries. M1-based desktops like the iMac are also included, Apple says.

Crucially, you won't have to call Apple to finish your repairs. The System Configuration tool, which verifies and authenticates fixes with official parts, now works simply by putting a device into Diagnostics mode and following instructions. While staff will still be on hand if needed, they're now strictly optional. The tool is vital for a fully functional device as it not only calibrates parts, but ties biometrics (such as Face ID and Touch ID) to the Secure Enclave.

The program effectively gives users many of the repair resources previously limited to Apple technicians. You can buy necessary components and either buy or rent necessary tools. While it's potentially expensive, it may be more viable than conventional support if you're comfortable with fixing electronics and don't want to send your hardware to someone else. This may be particularly helpful if you don't live close to an Apple-certified repair shop.

As before, Self Service Repair isn't an entirely altruistic gesture. The company is facing increasing pressure from national and state governments that are passing Right to Repair laws and regulations. The European Union wants to mandate replaceable batteries, for instance. Apple's program potentially heads off legal trouble alongside efforts that include easier-to-repair devices.

Apple isn't alone. Samsung, Google and others have similar initiatives either in-house or through alliances with do-it-yourself companies like iFixit. Although self-repair isn't practical for many people, the option is now relatively commonplace.

Spotify has really let its desktop app go in recent years, throwing most of its resources at the mobile apps and certain vaccine-hating podcasters. However, the desktop side of things just received a major overhaul in what the company is calling “one of the biggest revamps yet” to bring the standalone app and web app up to speed with more popular smartphone-based cousins. After all, Spotify was originally a browser-based experience even before it made its way to fancy phones.

The main content area remains unchanged, with the same access to browsing and recommended songs and podcasts, but the left-side of the app window now features the recently-launched “Your Library” feature, which the company started testing a few months back. This gives you immediate access to saved music and podcast collections, helping to save time when switching between playlists. You can now collapse the library for a compact view, which is always nice. 

There’s also a new “Now Playing” view on the right side of the screen that displays the current content you are listening to, complete with biographical information on the artist. Additionally, this field gives you access to purchase merchandise directly from the artist and take a peak at any upcoming tour dates. Some podcasts will also automatically populate a transcript via this field as you listen.

The “Friend Activity” feed moved to make room for the new stuff, but you can move it back. Just look for the “friends” icon next to your profile picture at the top-right corner of the main content area and drag and drop to bring the feed back to its former glory. You can also completely remove both the "Friends Activity" and "Now Playing" windows for a streamlined look. 

All of these changes come with an eye-catching splash of paint to make everything look and feel like the smartphone versions of the app. The update rolls out today to all desktop users worldwide. This is a big day for the streaming service, as it just announced that comedian Trevor Noah signed a deal for a weekly talk show and rumors continue to swirl regarding a forthcoming hi-fi audio tier.

While lawmakers in Congress (and soon, the Senate) call for a "blue-ribbon commission" to study the potential impacts of AI on American society, President Biden on Tuesday met with leaders in the emerging field to discuss and debate the issue directly. The President met with Tristan Harris, executive director of the Center for Human Technology; Fei-Fei Li, Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute; and Jennifer Doudna, Professor of Chemistry at UC Berkeley, among others, at the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco.

Staying atop the growing swell of AI technology advancements in recent months and years, specifically the emergence of generative AI systems, has become a focal point for the Biden administration. Generative AI systems hold the promise to revolutionize many sectors of the economy and drastically reimagine the nature of modern office work. However, those same systems could just as likely wipe out entire professions, as the fields of digital art and journalism are now experiencing. 

The White House announced a $140 million investment in May to establish seven new National AI Research Institutes and has begun investigating the technology's use in business. As the White House chief of staff's office told AP, top White House staff meet regularly on the subject, two to three times each week. Biden himself has reportedly met with multiple subject matter experts and technical advisors on the subject to discuss, "the importance of protecting rights and safety to ensure responsible innovation and appropriate safeguards."

Immortals of Aveum, a fantasy first-person shooter that EA is publishing under its Originals umbrella, was one of our highlights at Summer Game Fest earlier this month. Unfortunately, you'll need to wait a bit longer than expected until you can dive into Ascendant Studios' upcoming game. The developer has delayedImmortals of Aveum until August 22nd, a month after it was previously scheduled to arrive.

"In order to realize our full vision, we are going to take a few extra weeks, making our new launch date Tuesday, August 22nd," game director Bret Robbins and the Ascendant team wrote in a blog post. "This will give us time to further polish the game, finish optimizing all platforms and deliver a strong launch. We owe it to ourselves and to you to get this right."

Ascendant, which counts several former EA and Telltale developers among its ranks, started work on its first project as a self-funded studio five years ago. Although Immortals of Aveum is a first-person shooter, it eschews guns for magic. You'll have an array of spells at your disposal.

Immortals of Aveum is one of the first major games built in Unreal Engine 5 (UE 5.1, to be precise) to be released and the visuals certainly look impressive. However, during our hands-on preview at Summer Game Fest, Engadget Senior Editor Jessica Conditt ran into a bug that temporarily broke the game when a door failed to open. Here's hoping Ascendant can use the extra time to squish that bug and work out any other kinks.

Did you ever get to the end of Wizard of Oz and have notes – the nagging intuition that you could have taken down all those pesky flying monkeys or handled the backstabbing intricacies of Munchkin guild politics more effectively than Dorothy and her band of misfits did in the books? Thanks to the new AI storytelling platform Hidden Door, which plops players into TTRPG-like adventures based in their favorite literary universes, you’ll soon have the chance to walk the Yellow Brick Road however you see fit.

What’s behind (hidden) door number one

Hidden Door is both the company and the game. Hidden Door, the company, was co-founded by Hilary Mason, who is also CEO, and Matt Brandwein in 2020 with a mission to “inspire creativity through play with narrative AI.” The staff is split nearly evenly between machine learning engineers and traditional game designers, Mason told Engadget.

Hidden Door, the game, is the company’s currently-in-development social roleplaying narrative AI project. “[We are] trying to take all the joys of a tabletop game and allow you to play it without all the friction [of having to do it physically], and AI is the technology enabling that,” Mason said.

Leveraging the capabilities of large language models and procedural generation systems, Hidden Door creates immersive RPG campaigns using the player’s preferred IP — it could be Wizard of Oz, as was released on Monday, or Star Trek, Old Man’s War, Dungeon Crawler Carl or Agatha Christie’s assembled murder mystery library. (Just so long as the IP owner agrees to license their proprietary universe for use, which the latter four have not, the former of which has been dead long enough for it to no longer matter.)

“We solve a fundamentally different, technical problem than what you would see if you were just plugging content into an LLM like ChatGPT,” Mason said. “There, what you do is take an unstructured text prompt and put it into a model which is largely a black box.”

“GPT-3 came out a few months into our project and it was clearly incredibly biased – uncontrollable and … not useful in doing something like keeping a story on the rails,” she explained. “The core of our design came from that initial desire to build a safe, controllable system for telling amazing stories.

“We realized that if we were able to accomplish our safety goals,” she continued, “we would also be able to create something controllable enough that authors would be comfortable allowing people to play in their worlds.”

The building blocks of a cursed village

Take The Wizard of Oz, for example – a public domain series originally written in 1904 by L. Frank Baum that spans 14 books in total. Hidden Door has adapted that corpus of text into an immersive in-game universe that the user, and up to three teammates, can explore. The system does so by taking unstructured inputs from the players and mapping them to the Hidden Door game state, “which is essentially a game engine that represents in a database the characters, locations, items, relationships, and their conditions,” Mason explained.

Each player starts out making a character sheet to establish their avatar’s stats and backstories. From there, the system will incorporate that data, as well as the users’ responses to in-game prompts to generate a story. Rather than create each scenario for each story from scratch every time, the story engine works on what are essentially pre-computed tropes, Mason explained, “We call them 'story thread templates' and they're at the level of things like … a cursed village. Your objective for the scene is to figure out where the curse is coming from and resolve it.”

Hidden Door

The templates serve as the basic building blocks of the story, establishing the narrative, providing structure for the players to explore and interact with the scene, and ultimately helping define when the story ends. The village curse, “you don't know what it is,” Mason said. “You don't know who has cursed the village or why, so it sets those things up and then it lets you loose so you explore, you interact, you set things up.”

Every template is either handwritten or generated and hand-edited by a person. The team has already created thousands of such templates. By stringing three or four such templates together, the game can create a compelling narrative arc that allows players to deeply explore these universes but while maintaining strong content and safety guardrails.

Safety (and inclusivity) first

We’ve already seen way too many examples of what goes wrong when you let a chatbot off its leash. Whether it’s spouting Nazi propaganda or making incorrect claims about space telescopes, today’s large language models are highly susceptible to veering unbidden into hate speech, “hallucinating” facts, and on occasion, bullying people into suicide. These are all issues you don’t want popping up in an all-ages game, so there are many things you cannot say while playing.

“You cannot submit anything you want,” Mason said. The system will generate suggested actions based on what the player writes, but will not accept the written input directly. The system will even give feedback and comment on what the player is suggesting, “it might say, ‘Oh, no one's ever tried that before’ or ‘that's gonna be really hard for you,’” she continued, but any action suggested by the system can be pre-approved.

“There is no word ever in one of those constructed sentences that's not in our dictionary,” Mason said. “That gives us control, both for safety and for preventing inappropriate content – like, if you were to type in, ‘I joined the Nazis,’ it would reply with, ‘you get a bowl of nachos.’ We're not gonna let you do that – and also, for keeping the story inside the bounds of believability for the in-game world.”

Hidden Door

The company’s adherence to inclusivity is also easily recognizable in the character creation process. “We made a very deliberate decision to pull things out where we thought a model might inject bias [like a character’s pronouns],” Mason said, “such that they are essentially on a pre-computed distribution.”

That is, there is no machine learning associated with it, they’re hard coded into the gameplay. “Things like roles are in no way coupled to your avatar, your skills or anything like that. You decide your pronouns and they're respected throughout the system,” she said. “There's no machine learning model that is deciding that a doctor should be a he and a nurse should be a she. It'll be randomly assigned.”

Go ahead, snoop around

Aside from committing war atrocities, telling aristocrats jokes and other forms of mass violence, players can do most anything they want once the game starts. In Oz, each instance starts at the same point in the story, right when Dorothy splatters the Wicked Witch of the East under her house. The players aren’t part of Dorothy’s direct story but exist in the same time and space. “It's the moment most of us think about when we think about that world, which is why we chose it,” Mason said.

But from there, the player’s decisions and actions make the Land of Oz their own. ”We think of the world almost as its own character that is collectively growing as people play the story,” Mason said. “You're discovering new locations that get generated as you're playing these stories and the world grows.”

And nothing says that you have to follow the conventional “off to see the Wizard” storyline. If a player gets to the Munchkin village, looks around and decides to declare themselves mayor, the game will absolutely adapt the story to those new conditions. Instead of completing quests of battling flying monkeys and tipping pails of water, players will be tasked with running political campaigns and winning support from key members of the community. But again, you wouldn’t be able to walk into town, declare yourself Warlord and begin summary dissident purges — because those words aren’t in Hidden Door’s dictionary.

“We have thread templates that would be, ‘you're persuading a bunch of people to support you in a political race,’” Mason said, “And once you are a mayor, you would be able to tell stories that just start in a different place.”

Those decisions are also persistent within the game instance. Deciding to help (or not) an NPC will impact their opinion of the player and influence their future interactions, for example. What’s more, those generated NPCs will reappear in subsequent playthroughs as recurring characters within your specific game instance.

“You can play as many stories in the same world as you want,” Mason said, “and everybody's version of the Wizard of Oz will be really different depending on how they play over time.” NPCs and other generated assets aren’t sharable between groups yet, but that is something the team might look at implementing in the future.

In order to prevent playthroughs from getting bogged down in side quests, the Hidden Door team has developed a design philosophy that Mason refers to as “Chekhov’s Armory.” It’s basically where the system keeps track of all of the player’s in-game decisions and their influences on other assets within the story. Whenever the system needs to move the plot forward, or inject some additional drama to keep the players engaged, it can dip back into the Armory to pull out an earlier plot thread or previously wronged enemy. This also helps the system maintain continuity of the overall storyline and prevent catch-22s from forming.

“The idea was to create this feeling of the story, where your choices matter, where you have that full agency, but also there are rails moving you forward,” Mason said. “That's been one of our most frequent design challenges, to adjust how much freedom versus how much we should motivate the story forward.”

16 secret herbs and language models

Hidden Door’s LLM differs significantly from the likes of ChatGPT in that it is not a monolithic model but rather 16 individual ML algorithms, each specialized to address a specific sub-task within the larger generative task.

We use a variety of models, some of them were building on open source models, some of them are proprietary,” Mason explained. “It's not just one big LLM, it's decomposing it into an interpretable system where we can use the best [AI] at the right moment.” It also enables the team to quickly plug in and benchmark newly released AI models against the existing system to see if it can improve game quality. “Frankly, we design these engines so that game designers and narrative designers can be the ones to come in and tune it, which means we have to give them those knobs”

“One big question we worked on for a while was a plot-prediction algorithm,” Mason continued. “So, ‘what should happen next based on the series of actions that is just happened?’” Interestingly the team quickly found that they could generate incredibly dull stories simply by consistently choosing the system’s top recommendation — because that choice is invariably, “the most obvious thing,” that could happen. Conversely, if the system works in too many twists and surprise reveals, the story quickly turns into chaos.

This granularity is what enables the designers to tweak the underlying game architecture to work for (example) a light-hearted Pride and Prejudice RPG as well as a grimdark Pride and Prejudice and Zombies version. “We think a lot about how our creative colleagues are going to be able to use this system to create the story experiences,” Mason said.

Gore and smooching are A-OK (but only if it’s canon)

While the game is designed to be family friendly, Hidden Door’s target demographic is the 18-35 age range and, as such, more mature themes are very much on the table top for designers, so long as they make sense within the existing story. For Wizard of Oz, violence is both ok and a major plot point.

“We work directly with authors and creators and can use as little, or as much, written material as they have,” Mason said. “We extract the characters, the types of plots, the vocabulary, the elements, the writing style, the locations.”

Hidden Door

The team also uses what it calls a “sub-genre based model” that helps to generate the “formula” of the story. “The Wizard of Oz is largely fantasy that has a few additional rules to it, like animals can talk, but there are no dragons or other sort of fantastical creatures.” Essentially, the system takes a more general “fantasy tale” template and molds it into the specific form of the story, “down to the specific rules of the Wizard of Oz universe,” Mason said. Authors that license their works for use in the game will be able to dictate not just the initial starting plot points of the story, but the specific behaviors of NPCs and inclusion of story arcs.

There is no “Adult” story module currently available but in-game physical affection is allowed. “You can make them kiss,” Mason said. “We have a very tasteful fade to black and then you're on to the next scene. The NPC may also reject you if they don't like you or you don't have the kind of relationship. That is something that's very tunable but we try to keep it at the level of relationship in the core material.”

The future of interactive fandom

“It raises the floor for creation dramatically,” Mason said of generative AI’s broader promise to the game industry, “but it doesn't raise the ceiling.” We’re just beginning to see gen AIs used for improving NPC dialog, Mason points out, and could be as little as a year or two away from seeing a game “fully realized” using generative AI. “The brilliance of a human with a creative vision is not something we see generally out of these systems and that is in part because of what they are: a compression of a large amount of data and an aspiration to the median.”

“I do think there's a lot of excitement in being able to raise the floor. I think it makes creativity more accessible to a large number of people who may then decide to pursue it in their own way or use it as a tool in their process,” she continued. “I also think it makes it possible for more people to be fans of things and to have some autonomy in the way they want to interact with creativity that we don't currently have.”

If you want to try Hidden Door for yourself, you can sign up for the waitlist ahead of future test runs.