An unrelated thing from teaching audio & image models side by side: for image models it's nice to use the time dimension for timelapses (below, 30 steps of stable diffusion generating "snowy mountain peaks, abstract painting"). But audio inconveniently already uses the time dimension for itself!

So there you have it, twin study estimates were greatly inflated, and molecular data sets the record straight. I walk through possible counter-arguments, but ultimately the uncomfortable truth is that genes contribute to traits much less than we always thought.

The theme for #PROCJAM 2025 is: ❄️ ☃️ COLD PLACES ☃️ ❄️ Brr! We selected this theme using a new method: I asked community members to send in theme suggestions, then we turned them into word vectors, found the average, and looked at the words nearest to that! A little bit of unpredictability. 🔮

📖 Free open-access edition: neuroevolutionbook.com

Excited to announce our book “Neuroevolution: Harnessing Creativity in AI Agent Design” by Sebastian Risi, Yujin Tang, Risto Miikkulainen, and myself. We explore decades of work on evolving intelligent agents and shows how neuroevolution can drive creativity in deep learning, RL, LLMs and AI Agents!

#procjam starts tomorrow! As a reminder: you can bring an old project, you can start early, you can finish late, you can do whatever you want (except use generative AI). Come make something that makes something, and make new friends in our wonderful community too.

Finally! 🤩 Our position piece: Against the Uncritical Adoption of 'AI' Technologies in Academia: doi.org/10.5281/zeno... We unpick the tech industry’s marketing, hype, & harm; and we argue for safeguarding higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, & scientific integrity. 1/n

The maximum acceptable level of risk for an "AI-powered toy" targeted at young children is absolutely too low for use of an off-the-shelf commercial LLM to EVER be a reasonable choice. gizmodo.com/ai-powered-t...

Now that I'm done traveling and have slept the requisite amount - I wanted to share how incredible AIIDE was and how amazing the community is. The amount of kind and brilliant people blew my mind. I've been buzzing for a few days on the ideas shared there and am reinvigorated on my research. (1/5)

Oh my!!! "AI through the experts' eyes" is live on Amazon! Pre-order your copy today! (Arrives September 1, 2026) www.amazon.com/Through-Expe...

Doctor says, 'Dont worry, parser design is simple. Great programmer Kate Compton has written the parser you seek’

📌 Three new papers at #aiide25 from me: 1. A 'vision' paper about why game design is like procedural design bsky.app/profile/mtrc... 2. A new system for generating mechanics called Pixie bsky.app/profile/mtrc... 3. A big group paper about speedrunning as an AI challenge bsky.app/profile/mtrc...

#AIIDE25 wrapped! Thanks to everyone who made this year’s @aiide.bsky.social such a success. We’ll be back soon with announcements for ’26’s location and call, plus the ‘25 recordings. But for now I’m going to turn off my brain for 48 hours.

Kotaku wants to get in touch with developers about how AI is being used in your studio. You can contact our tips hotline [email protected] or my secure email at [email protected] We'll keep your identity protected and anonymize info so it's not traced back to you.

New Paper: Pixie: Code-Level Mechanic Generation for Game Designers. How do you connect automatic game design to real games? Pixie is a mechanic generation system for Unity games, as an example framework for how to build AGD systems into real game platforms. Read here: ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AI...

Final day of #AIIDE25 and final day of Emily's live posting!

NEW: The first two years of Massachusetts' millionaire tax has raised $3 billion more than expected. And rather than driving the rich away, IPS researchers found that the number of millionaires has *increased.* Tax the rich. Greg Ryan in @bloomberg.com:

Related but distinct from #AIIDE25 is the release of SIMA 2 from DeepMind. Will Douglas Heaven has a nice, measured writeup and kindly included some critical quotes from me in it. www.technologyreview.com/2025/11/13/1...

Follow along with us through Emily's live posting for #AIIDE25 Day 2!

As of this morning, Starbucks workers across the country are officially ON STRIKE. And we're prepared for this to become the biggest and longest ULP strike in Starbucks history. Say #NoContractNoCoffee with us: DON'T BUY STARBUCKS for the duration of our open-ended ULP strike! $SBUX

I am extremely honored and humbled to have been awarded a Test-of-Time award for my 2005 paper "From Linear Story Generation to Branching Story Graphs" with R. Michael Young

Hello everyone! Welcome to day 1 of AIIDE 2025, starting off with some opening remarks from Seth Cooper and Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social Just like EXAG/INT, I'll be live posting throughout the presentations throughout AIIDE for those who cannot make it!

Emily is again live-posting as we reach the first real day of #AIIDE25, follow along!

I would agree, and also say that proc gen *is* a form of AI, it's just that genAI has now become interchangeable with the term and nuance has been lost despite the fact that creative computing and algorithmic art has existed for decades

What other conference gives you the Aurora Borealis? Only #AIIDE25! (Photo credit: David Thue)

Watching a NES running a neural network to detect hand drawn images LIVE. EXAG undefeated. #AIIDE25

Just want you to know that when I asked Geoff why he gave the silent treatment to an open letter written by his own "future of games" program (& co-signed by 3000+ industry peers), he replied: "Because that's my show and nobody gets to tell me how I should use my platform". 💀💀💀

I was so so happy to give an invited talk today at EXAG, a workshop I co-founded over ten years ago! It was quite a personal talk about how research communities grow and change (and die sometimes), what generative AI means for our community today, and the value of weird, pointless research.

EXAG/INT Workshop Keynote from Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social with incredible slide design. Shout outs @bombsfall.bsky.social

Follow along with Emily’s live posting of day two of the EXAG/INT workshop! #AIIDE25

On my way to the 21st AAAI conference on AI and Interactive Digital Entertainment aiide.org Easily one of my favorite conferences. Full of fun, passionate people Stay tuned for some news

Looking forward to seeing friends and colleagues in Edmonton this week for AIIDE! I'll be trying my hand at live tweeting the paper sessions at both the main conference and EXAG/INT, which I'll try to keep in this big reply thread (starting off tomorrow). @aiide.bsky.social @exag.bsky.social

My fantastic PhD student Emily is live bskying #AIIDE25! Follow along to see summaries of all the fantastic @exag.bsky.social sessions today!

Excited to be welcoming everyone to #AIIDE25 Here at the University of Alberta!

Just thinking again how Democrats asked people to accept short-term suffering in order to give space to prevent long-term, worse suffering and then said, "Thanks for suffering in the short-term. You'll get to suffer long-term too so that our Thanksgiving plans don't get disrupted."

AIIDE '25 proceedings are up! And the conference starts in two days. 🧳✈️

Even outside of these results now (which are really interesting!), there’s no guarantee that LLMs will even retain this level of human likeness given that finding new sources of pure human text at scale is becoming increasingly difficult.

LLMs are now widely used in social science as stand-ins for humans—assuming they can produce realistic, human-like text But... can they? We don’t actually know. In our new study, we develop a Computational Turing Test. And our findings are striking: LLMs may be far less human-like than we think.🧵

We’re stoked to bring this project back and cant wait to share it with y’all 🍃 #ttrpg #ttrpgs #thequietyear #CapCut

As I've always been saying, LLMs have no relation to Truth at all. They can answer questions, generate ideas on a theme, and many other amazing things, but they don't know the difference between true and false, opinion and hyperbole. These results support that. www.nature.com/articles/s42...

Game design is simple, actually. Except when it isn't. Here are the 12 things you need to know.

If you do gender-based violence prevention work in Edmonton, Sexual Assault Voices of Edmonton will be running our Shifting Perspectives training on anti-carceral approaches to violence prevention in partnership with CIAFV next week - there are still spaces open! www.eventbrite.ca/e/shifting-p...

Y'all, I know two hours is a big time commitment, but this panel I arranged and hosted last month is one of the most important things I've ever done for video game history. The launch of the NES is a crazier story than most people realize, and my guests were extremely generous with their memories.

If you’d like to bring a guest to these AIIDE’25 events there’s now a separate ticketing option for that!

If you’re interested in attending only the #AIIDE25 Welcome Event or Poster/Demo session, you can use the separate registration links below: Welcome Event separate registration: aaaiforms.wufoo.com/forms/aiide2... Poster/Demo Session separate registration: aaaiforms.wufoo.com/forms/aiide2...

LLMs are trained to compress data by mapping sequences to high-dim representations! How does the complexity of this mapping change across LLM training? How does it relate to the model’s capabilities? 🤔 Announcing our #NeurIPS2025 📄 that dives into this. 🧵below #AIResearch #MachineLearning #LLM

I have an upcoming guest lecture at UDelaware on my usual schtick - violence prevention in games both commercial and serious. Come hang out if you want to hear me on my soapbox! (do I need more than one headshot plz say no) 🫥 events.udel.edu/event/games-...

Been a while since I've been on my procedural rhetoric shit, but I thought this extremely simple quiz—you predict who got a person's vote based on their stated policy priorities—was a very good, extremely simple example of the difference between being told something and enacting it.

Brendan is like a sort of mad genius

Turn off Gemini in Google! It's been turned on by default. Go to your Drive, click the gear icon, click settings, go to "manage apps" and uncheck that nasty "use by default" box. www.zdnet.com/article/how-...