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Matthew Guzdial

@matthewguz.bsky.social
980 followers 352 following 933 posts

Associate professor @ University of Alberta and Canada CIFAR AI Chair @ Alberta Machine Intelligence Institute. Games, machine learning, and creativity | he/him

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Reposted by Matthew Guzdial
Mascot Texorcism 🐯 @texsaber.bsky.social · 6h
I've had this stupid joke in my head for the past 3 weeks, I had to put it into drawing
Theatrical poster for "Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me," except the portrait of Laura Palmer is replaced with a Walkling from the game Big Walk, and the film name is replaced with "Big Walk with Me"
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Timnit Gebru @timnitgebru.blacksky.app · 18h
I'm not sure if y'all saw a CNN report on how the US had almost started WW3 with China based on fabricated information generated by a chatbot, claiming that a Chinese vessel was carrying components of nuclear weapons. That was an "existential threat" to humanity www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...
theguardian.com
Forget ‘superintelligence’: error-prone AI nearly sparked world war three this month | Timnit Gebru and Emily M Bender
The risks of AI aren’t what we think they are, as a recent security incident between China and the United States reveals
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brendan mordheim @brendanmcleod.dev · 17h
This month on PAPER LABYRINTHS, we chat with narrative designer and writer Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev about video game writing as a distinct discipline, information theory, weird fiction, and the AmWriting industrial complex. sites.libsyn.com/568595/site/...
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Mark J. Nelson @mm-jj-nn.bsky.social · 01/10/2026
We have an opening for a tenured Professor / Associate Professor of Interactive Media "with an emphasis on interactive storytelling, worldbuilding, and/or playful design in the public interest". I'm on the hiring committee and happy to answer questions.
american.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com
Associate or Full Professor of Interactive Media Film and Media Arts School of Communication
American University is a student-centered research institution located in Washington, DC, with highly-ranked schools and colleges, internationally-renowned faculty, and a reputation for creating meani...
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Marco @mcognetta.bsky.social · 30/09/2026
🚨 [Token][ization] Paper Alert 🚨 Tokenization is a wildly understudied area of language modeling despite it having effects across all of NLP. Over the past ~8 months, 32 (!) tokenizer researchers put together the most comprehensive survey of the field. Check it out!
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Amanda Silberling @amanda.omg.lol · 30/09/2026
sometimes writing about bluesky discourse means you're just too deep in the echo chamber but other times bluesky discourse uncovers the unsettling reality that there are minecraft jokes coded into an official government website techcrunch.com/2026/09/29/a...
techcrunch.com
America.gov gets really weird when you ask it about Minecraft, but it's not a glitch | TechCrunch
For the sake of national security, it's a relief to learn that America.gov is not hallucinating to the point that it's penning lengthy poetry.
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WIRED @wired.com · 29/09/2026
However, some see the doom talk as a distraction from discussions of the technology’s actual harms. Timnit Gebru, one of the fiercest critics of AI, told WIRED believes the doom talk is about founders making money, not saving humanity. www.wired.com/story/the-bi...
"The funder, the founders, the investors who stand to benefit and profit the most from these companies IPO-ing are saying this, that they have been the ones seeding this narrative going back multiple decades." - Timnit Gebru, AI researcher and prominent critic
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 29/09/2026
The schedule's out - I'm speaking at the Roguelike Celebration again this year! My talk is titled "The City, The Street, The Lens" and it's about street photography, collisions in time and space and how to think about procedural generation differently. More here: www.roguelike.club/event2026.html
A photo of a truck by the side of the road in Tokyo. The driver's leg is sticking out of the window resting on the side of the trailer. The title of the talk is written on the truck. It will happen on October 18th, online. Tickets are roguelike.club
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Alfred Reinold Baudisch @alfredbaudisch.com · 24/09/2026
Pet project: 1) Advanced PS1/N64 game extraction (+all animations). 2) Website where you can browse and compare models, textures, animations, FMVs, for preservation. Already have FF7, Mega Man Legends 1 and 2 and MediEvil fully ripped. #FF7 #FinalFantasy #FFVII #PS1 #PSX #RetroGame #N64
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
We've got info up on the recommended hotels for AIIDE 2026, including the special rate for the AIIDE block at Mercure Belo Horizonte Lourdes!
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 27/09/2026
Jackbox Party Pack 12’s MegaPals is the ESP Game with scoring based on single-linkage clustering, a little gift for me and anyone else who needs lecture examples.
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
They’re so, so desperate for large scale real world data from consumer’s perspectives. They will do anything short of just paying people to get it.
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 26/09/2026
was literally just referencing this—the “who is having the most fun, the player, the designer, or the computer” question—earlier today. it’s such a core concern when making something heavily systemic or relies a lot on procgen
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brendan mordheim @brendanmcleod.dev · 25/09/2026
Star Wars Zero Company has been nominated for two Golden Joystick awards - PC Game of the Year, and Best Supporting Performer (Vic Michaelis!). Vote now! www.gamesradar.com/goldenjoysti...
gamesradar.com
Golden Joystick Awards 2026: Vote NOW for your games of the year!
Did your favorite games make the shortlist? Find out below
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 25/09/2026
Someone asked Muse to dump its entire virtual machine file system, and it did
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
Digging myself out of a month deep e-mail debt, thank goodness it will never get that bad again! (behind Matthew an even larger e-mail debt looms menacingly)
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Mike Cook @mtrc.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
New Post: Why I Love AI Next month it'll be twenty years since I went to university, learned to program, and studied AI. I wrote about why I loved it, why I still love it, and why, unfortunately, it no longer exists. www.possibilityspace.org/blog/posts/i...
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Wait but I thought these folks were true believers of the possibility of recursive self improvement?
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John Gallagher @johnrgallagher.bsky.social · 20/09/2026
Free preview of AI Through the Experts’ Eyes! (introduction) upittpress.org/wp-content/u...
upittpress.org
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Shannon Vallor @shannonvallor.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
This is going around as essential reading and for very good reason. Honestly the most incisive and full summary of the longtermism/x-risk pathology I have seen. Every stanza is a gem, and the closing is genius, but my personal favorite, because I have had this exact conversation almost verbatim:
[nitter.app post excerpt from banteg]

>someone asks where the one-in-a-million number came from
> expert judgement
>which expert
>us
>how calibrated
> extremely thoughtfully

›reduce estimate to one in ten million to be conservative
›still beats curing cancer by 38 orders of magnitude
›epistemic robustness achieved
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AIIDE @aiide.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
We invite paper authors to submit companion software, dataset, or tool to the optional Artifact Evaluation. ​Accepted artifacts earn special recognition at the conference! Learn more: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...
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Gautam Kamath @gautamkamath.com · 16/09/2026
Nihar Shah did a heroic experiment for TMLR: he spent 20-25 hours over two weeks interviewing authors of seemingly low-quality submissions about their own papers. He confirmed what we all suspected: people submitting these papers have *no idea* what is going on in them.
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brendan mordheim @brendanmcleod.dev · 13/09/2026
with Band of Blades back in the TTRPG collective imaginary, may I recommend OATHSWORN, a complete Band of Blades actual play set in an original world? Eldritch skies, body horror, political infighting, comedic interludes - we've got it all. oathswornpodcast.com
oathswornpodcast.com
OATHSWORN
A Band of Blades Actual Play Podcast
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Jake Gold @jacob.gold · 12/09/2026
There's no slowing down frontier models by regulation that wouldn't lead to regulatory capture. But we could simply force all AI model companies to release their model weights openly. It's the world's data after all and nothing would slow their funding/progress more effectively and universally.
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Katie Mack @astrokatie.com · 12/09/2026
“these solutions are announced in a rush, leaving no time for a proper writeup, the isolation of new methods & ideas, & citing relevant previous work of others. … We are witnessing a general threat to intellectual work, with misalignment between the outcome of the use of AI and its initial purpose.”
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
We’re so deliciously close to the bubble popping.
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Jesse Felder @jessefelder.com · 11/09/2026
'A team of Stanford University computer scientists find that SLMs can find the same — or better — answer to the kind of queries that dominate current chat requests almost every time and cut compute and energy costs by between 60 and 80 per cent.' www.ft.com/content/4858...
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Ed Zitron @edzitron.com · 11/09/2026
It means there’s potentially over a hundred billion dollars’ worth of GPUs in warehouses bsky.app/profile/drin...
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
Can’t believe posting this didn’t get me multiple tech media exclusive interviews.
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 11/09/2026
The people building video games do earnestly believe that NPCs could crawl out of the screen ("like that ring girl") and kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt.
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Maria Antoniak @mariaa.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
New from our lab! #COLM2026 When people generate stories, they don't just write one prompt. Instead, they explore narrative space via branching edits 🌱 We reconstruct 24k of these edit trees 🌳 from chat logs and map edit types, story formats, how they relate to tree depth, and more!
The Garden of Forking Prompts: How Users Explore Narrative
Space in Story Generation
Advait Deshmukh♣ Nora Benedict♠ Melanie Walsh♡ Maria Antoniak♣
♣University of Colorado Boulder ♠University of Georgia ♡University of Washington

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have changed the way people engage
with stories. Drawing on public chatbot logs, we can see that when users
generate stories, they iteratively edit their prompts to explore narrative
possibilities, adjusting characters, redirecting plots, and swapping fictional universes. As aggregated data, these prompts represent rich traces of creative preference at scale. Yet story generation evaluation benchmarks rely on static, one-shot prompts that cannot capture this exploratory behavior. In this work, we study how users revise consecutive story prompts in the wild. Using a dataset of naturally occurring user-chatbot conversations, we construct WildStories, a sample of 275,635 story generation prompts (labeled with story format, prompt components, and explicitness), and WildEdits, a collection of 24,291 edit trees that model how users iteratively edit base story prompts and explore branching story possibilities. From these trees we develop a framework of edit types crossing four directions (adding, removing, changing, and extending) with fourteen targets (e.g., plot, character, genre). We then use our datasets and this framework to
analyze user behavior in navigating narrative space via LLMs. Finally, we
show how automated permutations based on the framework can be used
for story generation benchmarking. Content Warning: This paper works with “wild” chatbot logs, which often include toxic and sexually explicit themes.
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 10/09/2026
Thank you DLSS 5 for making my favourite character, Menu Warlock, look how I always imagined!!
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
Registration is open for AIIDE 2026, come on over!
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AIIDE @aiide.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
The deadline for the QDA-VC competition has been extended! It features a suite of problem spaces, simulated users, and baselines to test how well an approach can adapt to constraints under various situations. Submit your entry by Sep 15th. Learn more: sites.google.com/view/aiide20...
sites.google.com
AIIDE 2026 - Call for QDA-VC Competition
Description Artificial intelligence has been advancing rapidly, with the latest algorithms producing very impressive outputs. However, even the highest performing algorithms struggle to guarantee that...
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Melanie Mitchell @melaniemitchell.bsky.social · 09/09/2026
What, an Anthropic researcher states (without evidence) that there is a 10% chance that AI will cause human extinction? Incredible, we have never before heard such a claim!
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blair @blairaf.com · 09/09/2026
If you're interested in working on trans issues in AI policy or equity/justice in AI more generally, I'm still looking for PhD students! Email me if you'd like to apply
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Julian Togelius @togelius.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
Here are the initial recruitment ads - please spread widely and encourage talented candidates to apply! Postdoc: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha... PhD students: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha... More rounds of recruitment to follow!
chalmers.se
Vacancies
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Cat Manning @catacalypto.bsky.social · 08/09/2026
the way you can tell this is bullshit emanating from a very particular SV strain is “engineered pathogens”
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merr-itt came from outer space @merrittk.com · 08/09/2026
you HAVE to get on board with beanie babies. beanie babies are going to leave you behind. you must devote your time to studying all the new beanie babies and how it impacts yuor life. also theyre alive and im in love with iggy the iguana
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Bruno Dias @brunodias.dev · 07/09/2026
azhdarchid.com
The Flavors of AI Guy You See on Bluesky
Bruno Dias' personal blog.
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Raj Patel @rajio.bsky.social · 21/02/2025
Many of you might be interested in organizing LUNCH at work. LUNCH is actually a lot easier than you may think. You can in fact do it right now, especially if you find yourself suddenly having fewer coworkers to invite out to LUNCH. Others who have gone for LUNCH are very happy to advise
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Roguelike Celebration @roguelike.club · 07/09/2026
Excited to see y'all in our freshly painted MUD space with preview event speakers @martinpi.bsky.social, @matronboy.bsky.social, and Greg L. who made this lovely little ad as part of a coding demo for his talk! September 13, 2026, 2PM PDT | 21:00 UTC www.roguelike.club/event2026.html
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 05/09/2026
Getting older means pizza tastes just as good but you pay more for it later. I propose that instead pizza taste should increase linearly with age. Devs please consider for the next patch. 🙏🏻
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Polygon @polygon.com · 04/09/2026
A panel of experts said the game industry is currently in the worse state it's been in 40 years.
polygon.com
‘Worst Crash We’ve Seen Since the 1980s,’ Warns Epic Games CEO
A panel of experts said the game industry is currently in the worse state it's been in 40 years.
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blair @blairaf.com · 04/09/2026
Announcing non-binding agreements with industry and telling Indigenous & rural communities with concerns about local infrastructure projects "we're the government you can trust us" is probably not a wise approach and is certainly not grounded in strong historical self-awareness
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The Verge @theverge.com · 02/09/2026
As a new Harry Potter trailer makes the rounds, it bears repeating that there’s no way to watch this show without supporting J.K. Rowling’s bigotry and the structural violence she’s inflicting on the trans community.
theverge.com
There is no ethical consumption of HBO’s Harry Potter series
You can’t without supporting Rowling’s transphobic bigotry.
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AIIDE @aiide.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
Missed AIIDE's deadline but still want to join? There's time to submit the The Experimental AI in Games Workshop and Workshop on Automated Game Design! Both are amazing venues on interactive digital entertainment! Go: wagd.site, exag.org
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Stephen Totilo @stephentotilo.bsky.social · 01/09/2026
SCOOP: A few weeks before the launch of Star Wars Zero Company, most of the developers at its studio were furloughed The studio says they hope to secure funds to restore their pay. Some are skeptical it'll happen I learned about this via a bitter lawsuit: www.gamefile.news/p/star-wars-...
gamefile.news
‘Most’ of Star Wars Zero Company studio Bit Reactor was furloughed ahead of launch
The details emerged amid a legal dispute between company founders. The lawsuit also provides an unexpected look into a studio behind one of the best-reviewed Star Wars games in years
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Mark Riedl @markriedl.bsky.social · 31/08/2026
Yann LeCun throwing bombs at the ACM AI Leadership Summit
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Matthew Guzdial @matthewguz.bsky.social · 30/08/2026
Gone but NEVER forgotten 🫡😭
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