So you’ve found the site, you’ve noticed the pen-pals on the front page and now your probably wondering what the heck this service is and what kind of Black Mirror episode you’ve managed to stumble your way onto. This page is here to answer both those very real and understandable questions and we at FQE think the best place to start is with what technologies are being used, how they are being used, and what you the user/consumer should have as expectations for interacting with this exciting new era of intelligent generative AI. This being said, there are several key technologies being used to bring these characters to life and in an effort to be totally transparent for the sake of climatizing the general public to the disruptive power of this AI and the impact it will have on reshaping the next decade.
As mentioned, there are a lot of different technologies working with one another to provide level of experience we provide when you interact with our pen-pals. In fact as other experience-adjacent technologies become available, we plan on leveraging our system to create more ways to bring these characters to life. We are truly striving to create a one-of-a-kind experience by rethinking the classic approach to pen-pals, using a low-tech approach to interact with a bleeding-edge technology. Most of the services used are completely open to the public and if you like what you see here, we implore you to follow those projects/technologies directly to see how they are shaking up and re-shaping the world. That being said, some technologies like the “Karma Engine” which was built by Alex Tkach – FQE, although inside the Microsoft Power Platform framework, the specifics and methods implemented to store, reference, or otherwise organize and provide the data to OpenAI is proprietary to us. This said, if you are looking to implement a similar solution, we are more than willing to talk and see how we can help you get started.
Now that you have a vague idea of what you’ve gotten yourself into, it’s time for my soap box. If you are a part of an under-represented group, culture, ethnicity, or otherwise connect to groups that typically don’t have the opportunity to have a voice, it is incredibly important that you and those that are in those same circles are part of the conversation, development, and deployment of these AI tools because they rely heavily on information being provided up-front for training purposes. Like many technologies, there will be bias to the data just due to the nature of human intervention, and AI of this nature is even further susceptible. To ensure true lived experience is brought into the conversation, especially through the multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, and multi-national lens we need to use in the world we live in today. Internet technologies rarely exist in a bubble, and it is important from the get-go that we shape AI in a global context, making sure AI works for everyone and does not become a tool for creating new layers of division.
OpenAI: GPT-3.5 Turbo | GPT-4
OpenAI is best described them on their website, as “an AI research and deployment company. Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity.” and one of the products that they provide to the public is their GPT technology to “Generative Pretrained Transformer” which is described as a program that has the ability to write like a human being by referencing petabytes of text, writing, online resources, and more, which in turn is used to produce text that is grammatically perfect, including punctuation, sentence structure, spelling, and other subtle nuances that have been beyond the programmatic AI we’ve become accustomed too. These are not your average chat bots and technology of this nature will have the potential to reshape every industry across the globe. This all being said, because we leverage the technology to interpret and produce the generative text that is provided to you, we are susceptible to any unforeseen downtime OpenAI may experience.
It is also important to point out that this technology as a new branch is still being explored and is currently undergoing rapid evolution being bolstered by the previous iterations of the intelligent generative AI before the current GPT models. For more information about their product, services, or specifics on their research please visit OpenAI.
Midjourney – Generative Image AI
Midjourney is best described by them, as “an independent research lab exploring new mediums of thought and expanding the imaginative powers of the human species” and they go on to say that they are “a small self-funded team focused on design, human infrastructure, and AI. We have 11 full-time staff and an incredible set of advisors”. What their services provide are prompt based – generative AI images, through whatever means they plug-into, but for those details you will need to learn more about them yourself. Simply put, you provide words or image creation context as instructions and the service will generate images to be used for whatever purposes that fall within the limitations of their licensing agreement and ownership rights. Now I want to preface that this is a divisive space at the moment and as someone looking back 15 years from a protectionist stance on the evaporation of front-end web developers with the advent of content management systems. The way that artform was designed, created, and implemented in the new world was disruptive to that industry and although at the time was frustrating for me, the ease of availability to services like WordPress, Joomla, SharePoint, and CMS provided a change that has made the web a better and more stable space then it was before them.
I’ll just leave it was I understand the division and hear both sides of what is very complicated conversation that falls outside the realm of this project. With that in mind, we use Midjourney services to create the visual components of our characters, both when interacting with our pen-pals and in any new media FQE/penpal.chat advertising. With this in mind, please keep in my that the images created and used for this project are the intellectual property of Alex Tkach – FQE and covered by the Fuzzy Qube Entertainment™️ as well as any extended to us through Midjourneys paid subscription commercial license. To learn more about them, the services they provide, and how they are helping to make the internet a more beautiful place, visit Midjourney.
Microsoft Power Platform: SaaS Automation
Microsoft PowerPlatform is a service they provide to automate or otherwise connect applications that don’t talk to one another through conventional means by putting a low-code, no-code solution in front of M365 users. This literally allows an infinite number of creative solutions to problems that previously would only be solvable by putting companies in a room and having them collaborate directly on connecting their services but with tools like PowerAutomate, IFTTT, and Zapier, the creative control is in the hands of the consumer.
Why this matters to pen-pal, is the service we provide rests within the M365 infrastructure and leverages PowerAutomate and other tools to curate, organize, collect, and present the experience you see as the end user when interacting with our characters. Services like these have been revolutionizing the internet for the last decade and are now being plugged into services like generative AI which further drives their potential, adoption, and creative opportunity. For more specifics visit Microsoft directly or contact a professional Technical Analyst Consultant like Alex Tkach – FQE, who specialize in the Microsoft product stack.
Our Terms of Use
Now for the boring important stuff that we need to make because unfortunately there will always be people that abuse the system for their own gain and ruin the fun for everyone else, for this I apologize in advance. For the nitty gritty details please visit our terms of use and privacy policy page but for the highlights that should answer the broad strokes of our expectations, see below or visit the page “Getting Started” and scroll to the bottom to see our section on Final Considerations which covers similar points we’ll be addressing below. So with that in mind, and with a 😔 about having to address to not-so-fun, see below.
The Characters, their likeness, personalities, and core story are owned by Alex Tkach – FQE and covered by Fuzzy Qube Entertainment™️. The exception comes with Midjourney’s general content access and distribution via there platform as an extension of using their services to provide our experiences. This being said, as a holder of a commercial license through their service, we retain general ownership of the works created. However, the conversations that you have, and the content generated by use of your prompts, belongs to you in a personal, non-commercial capacity. We want to ensure that the unique experiences created through engaging with your pen-pals are private and in doing so, we will not willingly share, use, or otherwise provide your conversations to the outside world, without your explicit consent unless in situations where we are complying with law-enforcement and/or other legal requirements
This all being said, we want to see our characters grow and interact with the world in new exciting ways so if you are interested in collaborating or otherwise wanting to use our pen-pals for some commercial creative purpose, contact us because we are always interested in partnering up to make the world a more interesting place!
I know it sounds like we are repeating ourselves, but generative AI is new and still has many generations of growth ahead of it. The information that is provided for training could be bias or incorrect, or otherwise be missing contextual pieces around the text that it is being drawn from so always be discerning and questioning around content and specifics. To that end, the models we are currently leveraging will not have an awareness past Sept. 2021, outside some outliers and specifically curated information updates. Although very smart, AI of this nature can still be wrong so treat it as you would any other resource (online or otherwise), and fact check before taking as absolute truth. At the end of the day this is a service designed for entertainment and information/support around available information, think of our pen-pals as very knowledgeable specialist within their area of expertise (along with anything else OpenAI can reference) but even specialists can be wrong so have fun and be discerning!
We want you to be able to access our services and your new friends as much as possible but as our footprint grows or during times where we are unable to access the services needed to power the Karma Engine, we may have downtime or otherwise may need to make put rails on how frequent our services can be accessed up-to and including putting restrictions on the amount of free interactions in a month although currently these limitations do not exist, go into this with the expectation that they may be applied at any time. Similarly, we reserve the right to delete, restart, or otherwise refresh the memory of our pen-pals and services. Although we will strive to do this only as a last resort, we are still in the development stages and unforeseen problems could arise that require the reset of our systems. Rember folks, this is being floated by the sheer audacity of one man and a group of friends for moral support so your experience with our pen-pals still costs someone money and currently that schmuck is me so please keep that in mind and if you’re an Angel Investor…well, let’s just say that I’m a hard working idea machine just looking for someone or some organization to believes in my dreams and a knack for keeping ahead of the emerging technology curve 😉😜😏
