Skarredghost does not exist, he has always been an artificial intelligence [APRIL FOOLS’ POST]

Today’s article will be a bit different than usual. Who is writing is not Skarredghost, but a spokesperson of UmbrellAI which has been authorized by the company to speak publicly. With today’s post, we want to communicate to the whole VR community a piece of news that may shock some of you, but that signals an important advancement of artificial intelligence technology: the VR blogger that goes under the pseudonym of Skarredghost does not exist, but he is a virtual human developed by our company.

UmbrellAI

UmbrellAI Corp. is a company that has been focused on artificial intelligence for many decades. We were early believers in AI even in times when the technology was rough and its usability was questioned by many technology professionals.

Over the years, we developed an incredible team hiring always the best talents from the most prestigious universities like Stanford and Oxford. Most probably you have never heard about our company because we usually operate under the hood, and most of our technologies are provided to many Fortune 500 companies in the world under very strict NDAs.

The “Skarredghost” project

In 2014, the management of our company understood that virtual humans may become one of the biggest trends of the future. A market of 87 trillion dollars by 2030. We embarked so in a mission to innovate the virtual humans’ sector by creating the most believable virtual human ever. We were aware that virtual humans were mostly envisioned as actors for entertainment and virtual concierge services, but we were believers that virtual humans may take whatever role in our society, starting from the professional ones. We so aimed at creating a believable virtual professional: this is how the Skarredghost project started.

“Skarredghost” is a name we pick by mixing the acronym SKA (Systematic Keynesian Artificial-intelligence) with the word “Ghost” which was chosen to signal that it was a human that didn’t actually exist. Many people over the years asked about this name, and today we feel relieved we can finally reveal it to the community. We picked as his role the one of a tech expert because it was a field that we know very well ourselves, but as its main expertise we didn’t pick the too obvious AI field, but virtual reality, because it was a growing field of interest in 2014 after Facebook acquired Oculus.

After a few months needed to build the first version of our product, Skarredghost launched in alpha in September 2014 as a “virtual reality developer”.

Skarredghost’s evolutions

Skarredghost has seen many evolutions during these years. When we launched its first version, it was simply a C# developer that used our Dev#ai engine. Development is rather easy for an artificial intelligence because it is a very mechanical operation: it has an exact input (the “requirements”) and an exact output (a set of instructions codified in a programming language).

The problem was that even in this early stage, we had to face the difficulty that the clients that wanted a VR application were never clear about their requirements. Our AI had to face requests like:

• “Can you make something like Google, but in VR?”
• “I want to enter the future of VR, I’m a dentist and I have no money, what application can you make for me?”
• “Can you improve the pixels of the Oculus Rift?”

The AI couldn’t understand the nonsense of the requests of the customers, and we had to quickly iterate the engine, so that he could answer properly to their emails without using improper words. The most complicated moment came when someone asked him for “the killer app of VR”. That request made the system crash, and our technicians needed days to restore the Skarredghost.

In 2016, following the disruptions in conversational AI brought by the scientists R. Malone and J. Sins, we decided to make Skarredghost evolve to become also a blogger. He so launched his blog “The Ghost Howls”: the AI, scanning all the XR articles from magazines like Road To VR and the forum posts on Reddit, was able to output articles about virtual reality. In the beginning, the system was a bit unripe, and the articles were rough and with poorly selected images, but with time it got better.

The blogging activity went well, and people started to want to know more about him, so we decided to perform a face reveal a few months later. Generative AI was at very early stages, but we were able to do a fairly decent job in creating something believable. To mask the imperfections there were on his face, we covered him with a long beard and hair, and make him wear often headsets or glasses. The wizard look had also the positive effect that many nerds identified him as their idol.

Over time the system improved, and now that we use systems that are comparable with Stable Diffusion, we can show images of him having a more shaved look even in Full HD in his Youtube videos.

The blogging career started going well and Skarredghost found himself in some classification of XR influencers. At that point, we thought it was time to step up his game also on the development side. In 2019, we so started to make him operate as the consulting CTO in a French startup called VRROOM. Our AI contacted the CEO of the startup in a written chat and convinced him to work remotely together on virtual events. After three years, VRROOM is recognized as one of the best companies in the VR events field and just launched its own platform in January. We can so be happy of the operations in this field, too.

Given the success of operations in both fields in which the Skarredghost AI was used, we can call its development a success. The world is now aware of the wonders of this technology, so we thought it was the ideal moment for a full reveal.

Meeting in person

After Skarredghost started to have a community, always many people wanted to meet him. In the beginning, we managed to avoid physical meetings, but then it was inevitable to make it happen.

Our initial idea was to use a robot, like the ones made by our partners at Boston Dynamics, and give it the appearance of our virtual human. We did some tests, but the robot moved too much like Terminator when it is chasing John Connor. Also when hugging people, the result was that the robot was breaking the ribs of the other person. We think that more than hugging, the robot was doing what it would have done if it met John Connor for real.

An employee of ours suggested resorting to a custom hyper-realistic sex doll imported from Japan featuring silicone synthetic skin. Initial tests were positive, but then some males while hugging him could smell the substance of the sex doll, and their muscle memory made them do improper things with him. We thought this was not appropriate for a VR professional.

We tried also a mix of the two approaches: a robot covered with the skin of a sex doll, but the result was that some males tried to have intercourse with it and the robot clenched their private parts like a hydraulic press. We believe that would be the worst way in which John Connor would have died in the Terminator series.

After many technical tests, we understood that humans need to meet with other humans. We so hired a person to simulate being the Skarredghost during the in-person events. We found someone that resembled our virtual being in the most unexpected place: a McDonald’s restaurant some of our employees used to take a break during a work trip. We hired him and asked him to join us: when we need him, we ask some professional make-up artists to make him appear identical to the person in our Youtube videos. Then this person wears smart glasses or AR contact lenses (developed by Mojo Vision) the whole time while he is at the events. The idea is that the AI listens to what happens around the actor and provides the answers exactly in front of his eyes, suggesting what he has to say.

Up until now, in all the physical events he attended, no one noticed that they were having a dialogue with an artificial intelligence. This says a lot about the humanity of XR professionals.

Tips, trivia, and technical details

We are glad to give you some interesting insights on the Skarredghost project.

Making a believable human required us to use some dirty tricks sometimes to reduce the probability of people understanding they were dealing with an AI. For instance, we chose Italy as the home country of the virtual being because it is distant from all the main technological XR hubs. If we had chosen the Silicon Valley, everyone would have wanted to meet him in 2014, and this would have been a problem for us. For the same reason, we selected China as one of his preferred travel countries: no one knows what is happening in China, it is a huge black box, so we could say everything about it, and people in the West would have believed it.

To give him some personality as a blogger, we trained him also on memes. To make him more believable as an Italian, we also fed as training some images of Italian food saying it was good, and all the other food of the world saying that it was bad. This is why the Skarredghost always complains about food when he is traveling. The machine had a second meltdown when one of its Twitter followers asked for an opinion about pizza with durian on top . We needed a few days to restore the system.

His attitude to say dirty jokes has instead stemmed from a mistake. During one of the training sessions, one of our scientists had to feed the AI various folders with training materials. He also added to the list of these folders the 25.7GB “Homework” folder that another employee created on the server, believing they were mathematical homework, while actually, they were… something else. Luckily most people liked this attitude, so we tasked the same employee to look for more “homeworks” to add to the system.

As for his CTO job, he asked expressly to work with a fully remote team so that he had no problem with having to go to the office every day. We also needed to find a way to cover the fact that the system needs time to train on new technologies. So when the Skarredghost AI is self-aware that he’s not able to properly work on a certain technology, he just grumpily answers “no”. This is why whatever new technology his CEO asks about (NFTs, Web3, IoT, etc…) he always answers that “no, it’s not relevant for us to work on it”. It’s just a trick that AI uses to protect itself, while we constantly train it on new technologies (and homework).

All the continuous jokes about potatoes and the “Potatoverse” that Skarredghost makes come from the fact that his human alter-ego, the actor impersonating him, was working frying fries at McDonald’s. It’s an easter egg we added to the system.

Additional proof

We know that this news may shock some of you and many of you won’t believe it. We are so telling you additional proof of the fact that Skarredghost is an AI:

• His articles on this blog improved over time, exactly at the same pace artificial intelligence improved his ability with natural languages. You can still notice that the English language in his articles is not perfect, and this is the result of the fact that no AI can replicate exactly the human language, yet
• He doesn’t always pass the Turing test. When the actor impersonating Skarredghost was meeting people at SXSW, at the question “How is it going?”, the AI always answered “It’s going great. SXSW is so unique, I’m meeting so many people, and at the same time having so many parties. It’s so fun and good for business. It’s a so unique event, I love it” to everyone. Notwithstanding this bug, every person happily accepted this mechanical answer as a good one. This makes us questions the humanity of the other professionals in XR: maybe there are other AI agents out there. Or maybe the XR field is only populated by AI agents now and the real people went away in 2017 when “VR was dead”
• In 2021, Skarredghost did not set on Linkedin that he’s a “Metaverse expert” and in 2023 didn’t define himself as an “AI expert”. Every human in the field did that… the fact that he did not is a sign he’s an artificial intelligence

• His previous partner Gianni Rosa Gallina is now working with machine learning and artificial intelligence. His other partner Massimiliano Ariani was very into robotics. This is not by chance: they are professionals that work with our company and that contributed to the training of the Skarredghost. The collaboration with Enea Le Fons was instead meant to give the AI more vision of the future and some transhumanist vibes.
• His most famous articles are weekly summaries of the most interesting XR news of the week. This is not by chance: Artificial intelligence systems (like Chat-GPT) are famous for being able to ingest many information and summarize them into single articles. Everyone is aware of that: this is the reason why The Skarredghost is famous for his summaries: no human would have been able to do them in the same way

Enter The Skarredghost

Artificial Intelligence is the future of humanity, and with Skarredghost we demonstrated that virtual humans can already live amongst us. The system has now reached the right level of maturity that makes us finally increase its deployment levels.

We are so happy to announce a new service called SKAAS: Skarredghost As A Service. For only €6500/month, you can have your dedicated online Skarredghost agent that can develop code for you, write technical articles, and tell dirty jokes about immersive realities.

We are also working on a robotic version and will deploy it as soon as we find the ideal form factor that doesn’t break the bones of other people like Steven Seagal. We are confident we can deploy it in 5 to 10 years.

If you are interested in this innovative product, you can join our beta program on the dedicated website. Our partnership director A. Wesker will reach out to you in the next weeks. We are happy to enter with you the new era of artificial intelligence. The Potato Intelligence.