Talking to Dan the Dastardly Duck
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Talking to Dan the Dastardly Duck
Using the power of AI, we have brought one of our beloved characters to life.
Like so many others in tech, I’ve developed a deep fascination with AI and am interested in useful and entertaining use cases for it, while balancing the ethical concerns that it presents. To further develop my skills, as well as tinker around with the API for Bluesky, a new Twitter competitor, I have brought Dan, the star of the Dastardly Ducks, to life through AI!
Dan is a trans man duck whose inability to stop laying eggs causes him considerable dysphoria. His favorite way to cope is eating his favorite food, peas, especially of the “medicated” variety, cooked and canned in the finest cannabutter around. Though he has a grumpy and standoffish exterior, deep down, he has a heart of gold.
Currently, the Dan AI is only an experimental, beta project. We will likely take him offline at times for maintenance, to tweak his personality, limit costs, or to address bugs – and, sadly, they aren’t even the type of bugs that Dan loves to snack on when there are no peas around. In the future, we may offer different ways to talk to Dan, though, for the initial version, you can only talk to him through Bluesky by either tagging him at @dan.dastardlyducks.com or replying to one of his posts. Bluesky is still invite-only, but those invites are being doled out at a faster pace than ever before, so we hope this won’t be too limiting a factor for those who wish to chat him up.
Overall, this is still a relatively simple implementation of AI, though it represents part of our goal of making our characters and worlds transcend all different sorts of experiences and media, despite being a humble little indie creative team. We have so much more planned for Dan, but this enables him to come into life in a sophisticated way not previously possible with prior technology. As always, feel free to share any feedback or problems you encounter in our Discord server.
Undoubtedly, AI will continue to be a contentious subject for quite some time, and we are committed to being stewards for its responsible use. As a writer myself, I have no desire to give up writing stuff myself, but this enables characters we have created to take on a new life in ways that are surprising, even to us. AI is just yet another tool in an ever-growing toolbox of ways for us to build and create. We hope you love talking to Dan as much as we do.
UPDATE: We went ahead and made it so you can also talk to Dan on our Discord server. Just type /dan and your message, and he will respond just like he does on Bluesky!