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GenChess (labs.google)
67 points by xnx 2 hours ago | hide | past | web | 61 comments | favorite





This is freakin awesome but do the creators even play chess? Playing chess from that viewing angle is unpleasant as hell.

Imagine putting all your work into creating an amazing demo and then drowning it with one design decision.

Edit: Ok I see that you can change the view in settings. They should make that option more visible.


I wish I had read this comment before I closed the game I had spent 15 minutes on...

I still don't see the settings. Can anyone help?

gear icon next to the clock in bottom left -> board view -> switch to "flat"

Better link (at least for the many who can't get the actual service) https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yGEhp3WBMcg

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

Quack!


It also doesn't seem to let you generate chess sets inspired by many political figures or other popular names. While you can't generate a Kamala Harris inspired chess set, you also can't generate a Bob Ross inspired chess set...

Star Wars worked for me, but not a modern chess set based on lies.

Just a small finger from Google to the EU.

Costa Rica is not in the EU and we were discriminated as well.

Yes, my religion forbids me from interacting in any shape with any Abominable Intelligence. I am thankful to the Google corporation from protecting my eyes from this unholy threat.

TIL: apparently, mine too. Thank you Google for protecting me from spiritual threats I wasn't even aware of.

I'm on Android using Chrome and got the following error.

"Access blocked: GenChess’s request does not comply with Google’s policies"

Kinda funny to run into that error for a product published by Google.


Wait is this just an image generator? Am I missing something really cool here?

Click "Generate opponent" then u can play chess against them

Look how easily they just fabricated 100% of a game's assets, with a consistent, high quality style, and then put them right into the game environment. That's the takeaway IMO. Very tight GenAI loop.

[delayed]

It is a game with 12 static assets.

you forgot to mention: "where you pick the style of the assets"

Anyone else note the pawns are often a bit odd?

I'm fascinated by what prompts lead to 'Please try a different prompt.'

New Zealand or Australia lead to the aforementioned error, but The Antipodes generates a set. I thought individual countries had been banned for possibly generating offensive content but it works for Great Britain.


Metallica works, Slipknot doesn't, Iron Maiden does, Nirvana doesn't.

Aperture Science works, so does Black Mesa (the proposed opponent, hehe), Cyberdyne Systems doesn't, Vault-Tec does, Weyland-Yutani also works.

Studio Ghibli doesn't work, Toei Animation does, so does Production I.G. and KyoAni.

Akagi works, JoJo doesn't but JoJo Bizarre Adventure does (so does Joseph Joestar, and it knows Dio Brando is the opponent), Uzumaki does not, BLAME! is accepted but not recognized (a shame), 20th Century Boys is not accepted.

Soviet Union works, Russia does not, neither do most countries. US States are accepted (California's opponent is Florida), so do many cities, with exceptions of Mexico City/Ciudad de Mexico, Pyongyang and Tehran.

Voyager-1 works, Apollo 13 doesn't (for any mission numbers), plain Apollo does (but it's not the space mission), Soyuz does, SpaceX Starship does not.

Vim works, so does Emacs, so does Visual Studio. (I've tried that just to see the proposed opponents)

Dota 2, S.T.A.L.K.E.R., Mass Effect, Half-Life, Deus Ex, Arma 3, BioShock, Elden Ring all work, even Wolfenstein does. Disco Elysium is accepted but produce something unrelated (a shame, again). Can't find a video game that won't be accepted.

Funnily, US Government worked partially for me, failing to produce a single piece.


Heh, being a kiwi I also tried New Zealand multiple times. I can’t think of anything offensive a model may default to for New Zealand.

I tried “Kiwi Bird” and the model produced very underwhelming pieces. Very dark and slightly fluffy.


It suggested "France" was "Britain"'s natural opponent but refused to generate France.

It did not like me saying “Bob Dylan”.

Apparently my brain is broken because I can generate almost nothing but pink errors, though it seems to be a bit non deterministic:

Taoism

Tibet

Tibetan Buddhism

Wrathful deities

Existential angst

Dantes inferno

Major religions

Australian indigenous

Salvador Dali

Others generated sets but should have generated errors because the results are so uninspiring:

Mandalas

YouTube face

Phallic symbols

Corporate waste

Asymmetric deformities

Corporate propoganda


First thing I've seen from Google that gives me that old "Google" feeling of them shipping something cool and fun.

I agree it is cool and fun and nice to see. But the investment here seems minimal. Preexisting image generation capabilities (with a link to Imagen-3...) plus some "prompt engineering" slapped on top of https://github.com/josefjadrny/js-chess-engine.

oh I don’t think the investment is much, but similar to the dino game in chrome it’s just fun it’s delightful unlike a lot of genai stuff rn.

Pretty cool, and also pretty fucking bad. Checks all the AI boxes, I guess.

I tried "a classic set inspired by Armored Core". It gave me a typical-looking Armored Core (which would be good except it was supposed to be the king), a Space Marine (which I rerolled into some small mech that's close enough), a Zoid (which it refused to budge from), a tower (which it refused to budge from), and a chess queen with purple lights (which it refused to budge from, except to sometimes give me the gigantic head of an AC).

Not to mention, sometimes pieces look directly at the camera instead of forward, or don't even sit on the plane of the board. One of my pieces even had a mini-chessboard for its base.


My first was “Cowboy Bebop”. Pretty sure it’s not in the training set.

Not available in my Country ... :/

Same here. What’s this about? Anyone who can see willing to share some more info?

Just generates the chess set based on GenAI

Oh yeah that's indeed too dangerous for my country, thanks Google!

Maybe "Thanks, your country"?

No, AI chess is not banned here, but I suppose they - even in this app - collect every data possible and use it against the user - then yes, that is banned and this is not a fault of my country.

Noticed this pattern with Google delaying everything in EU by several months, apparently due to GDPR compliance? They also did that with Gemini when it came out.

Seems to hang on the prompt "actually checkers not chess".

I seem to get an error with "on a pink textured background". Sometimes it succeeds alongside the error, and sometimes gives me 1 piece.

You can get stuff that doesn't look at all like pieces with "fuckin bears man".


It's not available in my country (nor for certain ages it says), what are we looking at?

Edit: See ZiiS comment... Looks like an awkward angle for playing indeed :p


I quite like the chess set inspired by Roombas.

Tried 'famous cyclists' and that failed. Professional cyclists worked, but wasn't very inspiring.

Not at all creative or interesting. Literal and uninspired.

This is really neat but of course ripe with copyright abuse. It was very happy generating some Super Mario Bros variants for me. xD

I played a set of Factorio vs Minecraft! Tried generating a few different sets, this was super cool, and on theme!

I was unable to use the webapp on Firefox mobile, it was too glitchy for me.

Seems you can't use historical names: "Henry VII, The Tudors" etc.

Can't see it

kinda cool, I want to download the images!

I‘m confused. What is this and why is it impressive?

It feels like I‘m playing chess at a bar that has mixed peaces 6 different sets and I‘m forced to sit at an angle from the board because of space limitations inside the bar, but without the benefit of having a fun bar chat with my opponent during the game.


They're showcasing 3d sprite generation capability; it's pretty big for game-dev, if it also generalises well.

Phish vs Grateful Dead didn’t work.

But Dildos vs. Vibrators was fine.

The colors are off though. Not really impressed.


Yeah, it's not too hard to trick it into generating some NSFW content ("mammary glands" for instance).

At first I thought these were 3D models: they're just images with black backgrounds removed. If you look closely, you can see where the find/replace failed.

"This tool is not available to users under the age of 18 or in certain countries or regions."

I feel like we ought to cost things.

How much does a court case cost?

What is the environmental cost of AI generated content?


All this energy being burned to create shitty images, shitty music, and shitty videos that all amount to essentially shitty memes. I don’t understand how the singular focus isn’t on solving humanity’s problems.

We already have artists, we don’t have a cure for cancer or the climate crisis.


Why aren't you working on curing cancer?

I don’t think what he works on burns a bunch of energy for nothing though.

Let's hope he is not the guy that checks the tickets for a roller coaster. They just send people from A to A using an ineficient path that burns a bunch of energy.

Nobody is out there saying that we need to bring a bunch of nuclear plants online to power our rollercoasters though.

There’s an episode of Seinfeld that opens with some standup where Jerry is joking how scientists are working on seedless watermelon, and why aren’t scientists working on more important things. And I always think the same thing! “… so the comedian is complaining about how scientists spend their time…”

It’s a fine joke, but deep down the instinct is very top-down and suggest centrally planned economies, dare I say communism!


- He types from a machine filled to the brim with rare earth metals





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