Here's the results of my New World Notes survey last week, asking SLers what's the most they would be willing to pay for the new Project Zero option of streaming Firestorm/Second Life on a browser.
As you can see above, a strong majority aren't interested in any option, even one that's free with advertising. About 15% were willing to pay $.50 cents/hour to $2/hour, but the most popular "paid" choice by far was the ad-supported, free version. (The Patreon member version of this survey garnered pretty similar results, with 32% preferring free with ads.)
Which is somewhat surprising, from one angle. Rather than pay, say, $2500 for a high-end gamer laptop that runs Second Life pretty well, why not get a low-end $500 laptop and stream a highly optimized version of Firestorm by the hour? Even at $1/hour, this would be more cost effective for most SLers.
However, from another angle, these results point out another reality: By and large, Second Life users are core gamers and/or power users who already own and prefer a high-end PC for many other applications beyond SL.
As promised, I showed these survey results to Linden Lab:
Continue reading "Firestorm Streaming Survey Results: Most Aren't Interested... Unless It's Free." »
Anti-AI Backlash in Second Life is Out of Control (Comment of the Week)
There's been a good discussion in last week's post about SL creators debating whether they should use gen AI in their content, with a pro-AI position from "SatanicPanic":
No word on protestors against ConvAI bots yet but I'm still looking!
I do definitely see some level of hostility around AI that's out of control. For one thing "artificial intelligence" is a broad, broad umbrella that includes applications that have been in virtual worlds for years without any objection.
There are also use cases of gen AI that seem generally non-controversial. When I wrote about the image to 3D mesh AI converter (above), for example, I noted that many SL merchants would find it useful for rapid prototyping purposes. (I.E. "Hey fam, before I go through the trouble of creating/rigging/branding it, would you even want a shoe like this in SL?")
Would anyone be against that use case?
Further, the idea that Gen AI will "take people's jobs" is still far from proven. Like I've pointed out before, the US unemployment rate remains low (though that's changed recently for totally unrelated, Elon-flavored reasons), and Gen AI's promise to make creativity much more rapid and cost effective is very much lacking any substantial examples.
In any case, I'm planning to run a short survey on the topic soon, and am open to suggestions on questions to ask. For instance:
Continue reading "Anti-AI Backlash in Second Life is Out of Control (Comment of the Week)" »
Posted on Monday, March 10, 2025 at 03:49 PM in AI, Comment of the Week | Permalink | Comments (7)
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