BackSlash WhoAmI

Morning Folks! Yesterday Wilhelm Arcturus aka The Ancient Gaming Noob aka TAGN ran a bit of a thought experiment on his blog. He asked the three most common Large Language Models for Chat who he was, and got some less-than-stellar results. However, eventually, Microsoft CoPilot managed to get the correct answer at which point it led to a whole series of questions asked… some of which were given reasonable answers. This of course made me curious what my results would look like, and within minutes I was looking up the pages for the models from Microsoft, Open AI, and Google and asking it a simple question.

Who Is Belghast?

Open AI / Chat GPT

I figured we would start with the most mature of the three, ChatGPT by Open AI. It was simple enough to get into the tool through a web browser and type my simple query. For the most part, it nailed it in one. It indicated that I wrote a blog called Tales of the Aggronaut that is focused on MMORPGs… but that is essentially something you could get from the short description of my website. The bit about the significant following through that feels like freestyle and not exactly something I would agree with considering my dwindling readership over the years. It got a little less on the nose as I asked it additional questions like what games I play… which admittedly it did specifically call out World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. However given that the model is using data from 2022… it is completely missing my obsession over Path of Exile, Last Epoch, New World, Guild Wars 2, or even Diablo IV.

All in all, it was a good effort: B+

Microsoft CoPilot

Since this is the service that Microsoft desperately wants me to give access to my computer… I figured I would turn next to CoPilot. The key difference between CoPolit versus ChatGPT is that Microsoft has decided to give its AI monster direct access to the internet. So when I ran this query again this morning it specifically called out my weekend podcast where I talked about the New World Aeternum debacle. All in all, I like the summary thought and it specifically name-drops Blaugust with a short explanation of what it is. The Twitch bit is a little off the mark because while I technically do have a channel there it has been three or four years since I last streamed to it. The thing I like the most about this is that it specifically links a bunch of relevant things including Aggronaut main page, the Blaugust Announcement from last year, AggroChat and my Twitch page. Where it fell apart was on follow-up questions where it essentially regurgitated back the above paragraph when I asked it what games I played.

Another pretty solid effort thought, but I am giving it a B+ only because I liked its formatting and mentioning Blaugust. The follow-through needs some work. What is weird is that CoPilot seemed to work the best for Wilhelm but it absolutely did not for me.

Google Gemini/Bard

Next up we try Google Gemini which I believe until recently was referred to as Bard. This is the thing that is gobbling up all of our content and serving it up to web browsers without ever sending readers to our websites. The first strike against this is that I could not run it in an anonymous browser session, and had to log in with a Google account… which gave it a headstart in knowing this information. I am apparently a “multi-faceted online personality” and honestly I am not sure how I feel about that. It goes on to break down the things I do… which again everyone seems to be leaning hard into Streaming when I did it enough to get Twitch Affiliate while Elder Scrolls Online was launching and then basically never did it again with any regularity. The weird text formatting is I believe Grammarly complaining about something because it only happened the first time I tried to use it. When I dug down a bit further about what games I play, it gave me some pretty generic answers: MMO Gamer, Variety Gamer, and RPGs.

I think this is the one that I liked the least of the three so I am giving it a straight-up B or maybe even a C+.

Personality and Branding

I was curious about something. I know that I am way more widely known as “Belghast” than I am as the title of my blog “Tales of the Aggronaut”, and as such I think the Large Language Models had a bit easier time honing in on who exactly I was given that I use the same name on pretty much every platform and said the name is not exactly commonplace. While I know Wilhelm by the name Wilhelm Arcturus, I only do so because I have read his content for years. If I were going to tell someone about something he wrote I would probably use TAGN or The Ancient Gaming Noob instead because that is the “brand” that I associate most strongly with him. So Chat GPT was one of the LLMs that struck out horrifically and I decided to give it a test run by asking it who “The Ancient Gaming Noob” is.

Sure enough, it nailed it on the first attempt, because LLMs are ultimately just search engines. They are way more complicated search engines, but at the end of the day, all they are doing is sifting through harvested data and then trying to extrapolate something that looks like an answer based on that data. When you search “Wilhelm Arcturus” you don’t get the blog until the fourth link down. However when you search “The Ancient Gaming Noob” you land on the WordPress blog in one hit. With me, if you search for my name or my blog title you get essentially the same results every time. This is not necessarily an intended effect or something that I spent years of SEO nonsense trying to accomplish, but just something that happened over time. I just figure Wilhelm would have had better results had he started with TAGN rather than his pen name.

Anyways! It was a fun experiment and I figure at some point Wilhelm will read this post so thanks for the idea. It was definitely an interesting journey.