GoKawiilSmack dab in the middle of this year's SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, there was a huge dirt hole in the ground, blocks wide, where there used to be a convention center. The festival's events continued around it in hotels, but the building's absence was like a lurking symbol. Of chaos, of disruption. Of the world in 2026, dealing with AI and everything else.
I have no idea what the rest of 2026 will bring, but the vibe I felt at a vibe-filled show made me question how AI can work with our lives, our art and our existence. Instead of fighting it, the conference awkwardly embraced it and challenged it. I saw pockets of work all over the place and wondered about it. Conversations. And how to escape it.
Everyone's trying to handle a world that's suddenly way too overloaded with AI, generating documents, images, deepfakes and music, injecting assistant agents into our operating systems, even launching entire unleashed and interconnected agent systems all talking to each other on their own social networks. Job-threatening, constantly shifting, training on our data and aiming for our faces. Do we run from it, try to destroy it, or use art to question and challenge it?
SXSW gave me a lot of the latter, in different slices.
Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking is a VR game with characters that use generative AI to chat via Claude. It's a lot funnier and more successful than I imagined it would be. Scott Stein/CNET
AI seeping into our gaming chats, for better and worse
In a VR headset in a hotel ballroom, I chatted with cartoon fantasy characters in a whimsical game called Fabula Rasa: Dead Man Talking, made by game studio Arvore. I could make any request or beg as much as I wanted from my cage, where I was held prisoner for offending the King and kept dangling over a monster's mouth for execution. Could I plead my case to them? The cartoonish VR characters responded, but via generative AI improvising off a script from a writing team, using Claude.
The chats were fun, ridiculous. I made myself an irresponsible magician and leaned into improv with the characters who approached me. None of them disappointed, which is a surprise for dialogue that's somewhat AI-generated. Most interactions felt frazzled and absurd, but it worked for the style and the humor of it all. There was a bit of a delay for responses to kick in, though, standard-issue for a lot of AI conversations.
This was the best use of AI I saw. But what could it mean for future games, like RPGs? It's an unsettling thought if you're a writer…or, exciting. Indie games could end up finding ways to branch out responsive dialogue in ways that still feel custom-written and crafted. I don't know.
On the less successful end was Love Bird, an interactive game show experience directed by Cameron Kostopoulos. I was wowed by the initial onboarding, where the "producers" called me on my phone to interview me. The producer was actually an AI chatbot with a surprisingly rapid response time. I convinced the AI to be a participant, and then was led into a room where I spoke via Xbox controller and headset microphone with a PC game on a monitor, where I was competing with others while carnivorous bird-people threatened to eat us. I'm not sure why, exactly. And I don't know how it all ended, because my chats with the host and participants fell into broken loops that made us have to quit out early.
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