Russian AI, the Pokémon dragon calendar, and a game you can play in your living room with your pet gorilla

I dreamed that I visited Francis Berger’s blog and found that he had posted a long series of images tiled in a grid layout. These consisted of maybe 8 to 12 unique images, which occurred again and again in an unpredictable sequence like the digits of an irrational number. If the same image occurred two or three times in a row, this was represented with a larger rectangular version of the image, occupying the same space as two or three ordinary square tiles.

The images were colored line drawings of fantastic creatures, mostly somewhat dragon-like. There was a red dragon which seemed to me to be the most important one, and a few of the other creatures were pale blue or cyan. I think one of them looked a bit like my Pokélogan, and there was another that was like a mermaid but less human-looking. Overall, the images suggested the Pokémon aesthetic.

I understood that the grid of images was a calendar of the future, and that whenever there was a long red dragon series, that was a time period when something big could be expected to happen.

I wondered where Frank had gotten the images themselves and figured that they were AI-generated. I refreshed his blog and found a new post gushing about this fantastic new AI service. It was Russian and accepted only Russian-language prompts, but all the cool kids were using it anyway because it was totally uncensored and had no coded-in diversity. Frank also seemed very impressed with its capabilities and wrote that it “may well be the first AI to become an EI.” I didn’t know what EI stood for, but I took it to mean that he thought it had the potential to become literally intelligent, like a human being. (This is of course totally inconsistent with the real Frank’s views on so-called AI.) I can’t remember the name of the Russian AI except that it began with the letter Pi (which is used in Russian as well as in Greek).

As examples of the AI’s amazing capabilities, Frank had posted an image of the mermaid creature and a short video of soldiers on horseback with the word Russia in Russian behind them. I thought both of these were of mediocre quality and couldn’t see what he was so excited about.

Later I saw a commercial for a game based on the group of creatures from Frank’s calendar post. There were some plastic objects about the size and shape of bottle caps, each with a different creature on it, and you could stick these on various surfaces around your living room. These would light up in an unpredictable sequence, and if you had the whacker (which looked like a hand towel), you had to whack the lit-up object before the light went out and then throw the whacker to another player. The commercial said you could even play it with your pets, and it showed a toddler and a silverback gorilla playing together, tearing around a living room and jumping and diving like baseball players to whack all the lit-up objects in time. Both child and ape seemed to be having a great time, but I couldn’t help wondering who would want something like that going on in their living room.