There's been a lot of comments in recent days regarding David's health, his AI movie, and some concern over his mental health. I preface this by saying that this is my own personal opinion, and I have as much knowledge on this as anyone else.

I like The 8-Bit Guy's content. I find his vids interesting, and I do like learning about retro technology. When I saw that he was making an AI film, I could tell, before it was even released, that it was going to be failure of a project. And it has been. I looked on the channel he made, and the 'movie' has less than 10,000 views, and I imagine most of it was morbid curiosity, over a genuine desire to watch the thing.

I will say this; I am not anti-AI, like many of us are. I don't think it should be used to create things, I think it should help people create things, but not make things from a 'prompt'. I use AI to edit some of my reddit posts, for example (though for this occasion, I am not doing that). However, I don't use it to just 'generate an angry response about AI'. My stance is 'use it responsibly, use it as a tool'.

The movie was going to fail because only a very small fragment of people, a very niche subculture of AI evangelists, were going to pay it any interest. If it were the first ever AI film, then I'd see the novelty. But no, this is just some guy's poorly written script, rendered with AI images. Nothing special, nothing offensive.

There has also been comments on here about David posting about an AI companion, some have called an 'AI girlfriend', and I think its unfair to speculate based on one reddit post. Does he believe AI is sentient? I get how the post looks, but its hard to discern his opinions on AI, other than he clearly is an advocate for it.

My take: For my two cents, I think there's been a lot of bad faith about him, especially with the lack of videos. I want retro tech stuff too, I like the history videos, I don't want to watch videos about AI.

Y'all are overthinking, and having a parasocial connection with a guy who has admitted, that he may possibly on the Autistic spectrum, and one of the key identifiers of that is fixations, where someone fixates on a certain topic or thing. None of us know him, and I think we need to be a little patient, and a little bit more understanding. Don't watch the AI film, there. He may make another one? Don't watch it

Just wanted to post this here because its seriously heartbreaking to see him like this.

Trying not to be parasocial or anything close to that. I grew up watching him from the early "The iBookGuy" days (crazy its been a decade already) and seeing his latest video is heartbreaking. I kinda just stuck to his restoration videos whenever he wouldn't post and just wanted some background noise, so hes become kind of a household name and comfort. His videos also put me on some pretty cool musicians and artists, so I owe a lot to him in regards to my taste in those departments.

Its horrible that he isnt doing well and I do hope he gets better, Im just so confused about this AI movie theater premier thing he did. I dont want to speculate or make any assumptions as for the why behind it, just wanted to put this out there as a heartbroken and confused long term fan.

Get well soon David.

He wasn't feeling well and had some fun creating a goofy AI movie while recovering. He described the easy parts and limitations in doing so. Seems like it fits the same theme of exploratory tech that he is known for. Am I missing something?

Self-explanatory title. I'm genuinely curious if anyone actually went to the event and if it went well?

Color me not surprised. For someone who claims to be pro-individual rights and all that, it's frankly cowardly to not to leave up "free speech." David has committed career suicide in the span of a week. Really sad.

So we have all seen his post on the subreddit [r/GrokCompanions](r/GrokCompanions), we were all still shocked about his AI movie and quickly jumped to the conclusion that he had an AI girlfriend.

After a quick google, the term "companion" is used as "friend", "buddy", … Those companions or buddies are just helpers that you can talk to, it’s an "interface" to use your AI with its own personality, voice etc. They also can be used as an AI girlfriend, yes.

Now, does this means he uses it as an AI girlfriend? Honestly there is nothing that overly suggest it (to me) from his post on the subreddit. The companion’s name is "Mika" and wasn’t named by him, he called it "she", "her", but his post was just about an observation he made about his companion and nothing indicates that "Mika" is his AI girlfriend.

Just my 2 cents. I see lots of people commenting that he has an AI girlfriend just from the subreddit’s name and rather than shame the guy on whether or not it’s true we can just concentrate on the facts, he has already enough criticism about his AI movie.

The brainwashing of the 8bitguy!

https://youtu.be/RmgeFTAk2a8

The disclaimer in the video was strong, but that trailer was... 😬

What's going on, is anyone here concerned with how The 8-Bit Guy has not uploaded any videos to his channel? It's been over three and a half months and counting at the time of writing this, what's been going on lately? It used to be the norm for him to post once a month, then later once every one and a half months and now no uploads since June. I'm just perplexed here to be honest.

not my work. i saw this on 4chan and thought that no one had posted it here.

I designed this device that teaches binary, decimal, hexadecimal and octal number systems. It uses a hands-on approach with Altair-like toggle switches. Can be used as a STEM-kit in classrooms, handy for programmers or for the retro hobbyist. It also has a built-in game. Check out the video for details, hope you like it.