Tag: Artificial Intelligence

Generative AI Update: Comparing ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini while Researching the Metaverse Characteristics of Social VR Platforms

NOTICE: In this blogpost, I go into sometimes great detail about how these three generative AI tools work, comparing them in two ways:

– comparing how these tools work with the exact same text prompt; and
– comparing how they worked in August 2025 versus February 2026.

There’s an executive summary (Section 4) at the very bottom of this long, loooong blog post if you just want to skip to the highlights, and ranking.

If you need an introduction or a refresher, you might want to read this blogpost first: An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in General, and Generative AI in Particular, which includes slides from lectures I gave on the topic in November and December of 2025.

SECTION 1: Introduction

In his 2024 book Co-Intelligence (still my go-to layperson’s guide to generative AI), Ethan Mollick says that one of the best ways to determine how well a particular generative AI tool works is to ask it questions about a subject that you already are an expert in. Why? Because it will be much easier for you, the human expert in the topic, to find errors and hallucinations in the answers.

Since last summer, I have been typing the exact same prompt into the “big three” general-purpose GenAI tools Ethan recommends: OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Anthropic’s Claude, and Google Gemini. I have been meaning to write a blogpost about my experiences with this first round of testing since September, but I have been too occupied with my paying job as an academic librarian to find an opportunity to do so—until now. (Please note that I have been using an em-dash, correctly, for many years before generative AI came along!)

So, today I decided to redo my original text prompt, using the latest versions of these three GenAI tools as outlined by Ethan in the latest edition of his AI Guide, which has posted to his Substack newsletter on Feb. 17th, 2026 (here’s a link).

I consider his advice to be quite valuable, as he seems to spend a lot of time working with the most popular and powerful GenAI tools, and keeping on top of the changes and advances in the technology. In this newest edition of his AI Guide, he discusses the shift from chatbots (where you have a conversation with the tool) to agents (where you give a specific, defined task with instructions to the tool, and it goes away and does the task and returns with results).

In all cases, the initial text prompt is the following:

What are some characteristics common to all metaverse platforms? How do these characteristics apply to social VR platforms? Please give me a chart comparing these characteristics for the most popular social VR platforms.

Please note that I have deliberately given the task of defining “popular,” and picking the social VR platforms, over to the generative AI tool (and I got some rather interesting results back!). Because I consider myself an expert on social VR and the metaverse, I should be able to spot inaccuracies, errors, or outright hallucinations in the responses I get back from these GenAI tools. In the next section (section 2), I compare and contrast the results I received from the above text prompt from:

  • Claude by Anthropic
  • ChatGPT by OpenAI
  • Gemini by Google

All three of these tools come with different versions. In all cases, I will use the most powerful version recommended by Ethan Mollick in his latest AI Guide I linked to above (but please note that in at least one case, I had made a mistake and not selected the correct option, as you will see below with Claude in Sections 2 and 3):

  • Claude Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking
  • ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking
  • Gemini 3.0 Pro Deep Research

In addition, in section 3 of this long blogpost, I will very briefly compare and contrast the results I received when I first ran this text prompt through all three GenAI tools on August 7th, 2025, with what I received when I ran them again on Feb. 18th, 2026.

All comparison charts in the February 2026 results in sections 2 and 3 will include some quick stats in a small table under each generative AI tool discussed, namely:

  • the number of characteristics common to all metaverse platforms (and their names); and
  • the number of social VR platforms in the comparison chart (and their names).

Section 4, the final section, contains my overall thoughts after spending a day working with these tools, and a ranking of how well I think these GenAI tools accomplished the given task.

SECTION 2: Comparing Searches Done Feb. 18th, 2026

Feb. 18th, 2026: Claude Opus 4.6 (and Cowork)

First up is Claude. I did this prompt two ways: once via the chatbot interface on the Claude website, and a second time using the Claude app and the new Cowork agent feature. (I was prompted to download and install the Claude app on my Mac, and authenticate using my email address.) First, the chatbot version:

This first report I got back compared eight metaverse characteristics between eight platforms:

8 Metaverse Characteristics8 Social VR Platforms
Persistent Virtual Environments
Real-Time Interactivity
User Identity/Avatars
Social Presence & Co-Experience
User-Generated Content
Virtual Economy
Cross-Platform Accessibility
Interoperability		VRChat
Rec Room
Meta Horizon Worlds
Resonite
Second Life
Spatial
ChilloutVR
NeosVR

Well, right off the bat, I see some problems. First, Second Life is not social VR. Second, it included both Resonite and NeosVR (although Claude told me, “I included both since NeosVR still has historical relevance, but noted it as legacy since the core team transitioned to Resonite”). However, that isn’t a good enough reason to include it in the table.

Then, I turned to the Claude app (which was suggested to me when I did the first text prompt above, so I downloaded and installed it on my MacBook Pro). Then I selected the Cowork (agent) tab along the top three tabs as suggested by Ethan, and I entered the exact same text ptompt:

After beavering away for a few minutes, it gave me the following result:

And when I click on the Open in Firefox button, I get this neatly formatted table (I’m not crazy about the chosen colour scheme, but that’s a minor quibble). It looks good at first:

However, the output, which might look impressive at first, is only as good as the quality of the sources used in its research. If the good information is locked behind a paywall (and therefore, not able to be scraped to add to its knowledge base), then the GenAI tool will use freely-available sources on the web, which can vary quite a bit in quality! There is an acronym in computer science called GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out, and I am reminded of this when I decide to take a closer, more critical look at the six sources listed.

All of them were non-academic sources, mostly generic market overviews from websites that I had never heard of before. The six sources included my own list of metaverse platforms on this blog (which is just a list, and doesn’t give any details about the platforms). While I’m flattered they included me, I expected something…more. And I absolutely hated that they mentioned cryptocurrencies, blockchain, DAOs, and NFTs, and included Somnium Space and Decentraland in the resulting table. While Somnium Space is social VR, Decentraland in absolutely not, and I have made my opinions on blockchain-based metaverse platforms very clear in the past on this blog.

8 Metaverse Characteristics6 Social VR Platforms
Persistence
Immersion & Presence
User-Generated Content
Built-In Economy
Social Interaction
Interoperability
Digital Ownership
Decentralized Governance		VRChat
Meta Horizon Worlds
Rec Room
Engage VR
Decentraland
Somnium Space

In fact, I was so dissatisfied with this report that I went back into the Claude Cowork app, and added a qualifier, and made sure that I had turned on Extended Thinking! (I’m almost positive I did that the first time around, but maybe I forgot, and unfortunately, once you’ve done your prompt, the results don’t tell you what modes you used in asking the original question.)

Only to get pretty much the same result: a pretty table with only six websites listed as sources! So much for being more specific and asking for Extended Thinking.

10 Metaverse Characteristics6 Social VR Platforms
Persistence
Immersive 3D Environments
User Identity & Avatars
Real-Time Social Interaction
User-Generated Content
Economy & Monetization
Cross-Platform Access
Scalability & Concurrency
Safety & Moderation
Interoperability		VRChat
Rec Room
Meta Horizon Worlds
Resonite
ChilloutVR
Engage VR

While better thatn the previous round, I am actually disappointed in the results I received from Claude Cowork. But read on; in section 3, I have an update on what I think went wrong here!

Feb. 18th, 2026: ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking

Next, I turned to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, using the ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking mode suggested by Ethan:

And I got back the following table. comparing six social VR platforms on ten metaverse characteristics:

While the resulting table might not be as pretty as the one produced by Claude Opus 4.6 Cowork, I appreciate that there are actual citations which you can hover over and click through to actually see the source material behind the comparison chart entries (and not just a list of websites checked, tacked on to the end). Also, ChatGPT seems to have checked a lot more sources than Claude, and made some sort of attempt to find authoritative sources (often, from the metaverse product’s own online documentation, as shown in this example).

10 Metaverse Characteristics6 Social VR Platforms
Shared Multi-User Spaces
Avatars/Embodied Identity
Real-Time Voice/”Hangout” Core Loop
Persistence (Account, Inventory)
User-Generated Worlds
In-World Creation Tools
Scripting
Economy & Monetization
Cross-Platform Access
Safety Governance
VRChat
Rec Room
Meta Horizon Worlds
Bigscreen Beta
Spatial
Resonite

Overall, I think that ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking gave me a better answer than Claude…but as we will see later on, it doesn’t compare to the best results I got from my day of testing and retesting. Let’s move on to the third of Ethan Mollick’s recommended, general-purpose GenAI tools, Google’s Gemini:

Feb. 18th, 2026: Gemini 3 Pro (first without, and then with, Deep Research)

The first go-round, I selected Gemini 3 Pro mode, as Ethan suggested:

And I got a resulting table comparing three social VR platforms across seven characteristics:

7 Metaverse Characteristics3 Social VR Platforms
Core Philosophy
Visual Style
Creation Tools
Hardware Access
Target Audience
Economy
“Metaverse” Strength (?!)		VRChat
Rec Rooom
Meta Horizon Worlds

I was so unhappy with this first Gemini result that I redid the prompt, this time making sure that I turned on the Deep Thinking mode, just to see if I would get better results, or even some actual citations to sources used:

Wow, what a difference!!

This time around, the task took a lot longer than either Claude or ChatGPT, and it included what appears to be extremely detailed feedback on what was happening behind the scenes (this seems to be turned on by default, and I’m not certain if this mode could have been enabled on Claude or ChatGPT):

And the report I got back was worth the longer wait:

And, at the end, not one but three comparison charts!

Here’s the quick stats, from all three tables in the final report (and notice how technical many of these “metaverse characteristics” are, compared to the other results!):

12 Metaverse Characteristics5 Social VR Platforms
Engine Core
Scripting Language
Persistence Type
Asset Pipeline
Audio Engine
Economic Model
Currency
Identity System
Tracking Support
Instance Cap
Network Model
Culling Tech		VRChat
Rec Room
Roblox
Meta Horizon Worlds
Resonite (only mentioned in one table)

SECTION 3: Comparing August 2025 Prompt Results with the February 2026 Ones

I also wanted to compare the results I when I did the testing last year (August 7th, 2025) with the results I got today (Feb. 18th, 2026) with all three GenAI tools. This was very enlightening.

Then Versus Now: Claude

You will understand why I was so disappointed with today’s results, when you see what the results were when I did the same prompt last year (dated August 7th, 2025):

The report I got back was extremely detailed, with actual citations to sources! I still don’t understand why I got such dramatically different—and worse—results. The difference is so astounding to me that I began to wonder if I had done something wrong this time around.

It was then that I realized that I had literally forgotten to turn on Research mode in the left-hand drop-down menu (previously, I had only had Web Search mode turned on):

So I went to check the Claude app, to see if there was that option available, and, of course, it was there—but under the Chat tab, not the Cowork tab!! So perhaps Cowork still has some user interface bugs to work out. Perhaps sending everything to an agent isn’t the better option; certainly, not in this case!!

Once I had selected both Research and Web Search from the left drop-down menu, and Opus 4.6 Extended from the right drop-down menu, I hit send and waited…until I got a message that I had used up all my credits on my $20-a-month plan!!!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAARGH!!!!

By this point, I was so frustrated with Claude that I simply exited the app. I had had enough frustration for one day.

The next morning, February 19th, 2026, after my daily credits reset at 6:00 pm, I once again tried my prompt with Claude Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking, with both Research and Web Search turned on (using the Gemini app I had installed on my Mac, as opposed to the web version; they appear to be identical in terms of features).

Right off the bat, I got a better response (and Claude even remembered that I was going to working on an OER about the metaverse!):

Again, similar to Google Gemini, I had a bit of wait while Claude did its thing. I actually preferred that Gemini actually gave better descriptions of what it was doing while it was going about its task, as opposed to…well, no updates from Claude other than me sitting and staring at an animated cursor!

Ten minutes later, I got the detailed report I wanted in the first place, and which Claude Cowork stubbornly refused to give me:

The response back included a concise summary taken from the sources examined:

The final report included citations to the academic literature (which I could hover over and click on to go to the source, see the red arrow below), and it cited experts in the field such as Matthew Ball and Tim Sweeney. It’s pretty much all I wanted, and it compares quite favourably to the similarly detailed report from Google Gemini, in the previous section. I am happy.

And this was the only report which had a listing of metaverse characteristics, separate from the ones used in the social VR platforms comparison chart:

Here’s the quick stats from the comparison chart. As you can see, there are some problems here, with the inclusion of platforms which are clearly not social VR (e.g. Second Life) and platforms that no longer exist (Altspace shut down on March 10th, 2023). These sort of mistakes make we wonder about the accuracy and currency of the report overall.

9 Metaverse Characteristics9 Social VR Platforms
Persistence
Synchronous Real-Time
Massive Scale/Concurrency
Cross-Platform Access
Virtual Economy
User-Generated Content
Interoperability
Avatar/Identity Systems
Immersive 3D/Spatial Computing
Open Standards/Decentralization
Spanning Physical-Digital
Ethical Goivernance/Accessibility		VRChat
Horizon Worlds (note: old name used)
Rec Room
Resonite
ChilloutVR
AlspaceVR (was shut down)
Second Life (not social VR!)
Roblox
Fortnite (not social VR!)

Then Versus Now: ChatGPT

An interesting difference between the August 2025 report from ChatGPT and today’s report is this: in last year’s report, for whatever reason, the tool asked me a follow-up question to clarify what was wanted (I did use the Deep Research feature in the 2025 report, as well):

Based on that clarification prompted by ChatGPT, I actually think I preferred the 2025 report format over this new one. So why didn’t ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking ask me any follow-up questions this time around? And that’s part of the frustration with tese tools; the way that they operate is still very much a black box, where you don’t understand how the tool is processing what you ask of it.

Then Versus Now: Gemini

The last comparison is between the Google Gemini report I produced on August 7th, 2025, and today’s report. One thing I noticed about the Aug. 7th report is how hard it tried to shoehorn in an overarching narrative into the final result, in a way that seemed a bit hamfisted, frankly. But the result was still a very detailed report with an extensive list of citations, comparable to today’s report. I prefer today’s version.

SECTION 4: Executive Summary and Ranking

This is going to be concise, I promise! Five points.

First, while we might be entering what Ethan Mollick calls “the agentic era,” my experience today shows that simply handing something off to an agent, as opposed to the back-and-forth conversation with a chatbot interface, does not always give the best result. In particular, Claude Cowork gave me terrible results, and eventually, I ran out of daily use credits to actually run the report I wanted in the first place.

Second, the user interface for these GenAI tools is awful and NON-intuitive. Hiding critical options like Deep Research under drop-down menus, and not making it clear what options have been selected when you do a text prompt, is a major problem. All three companies need to hire some good user interface/user experience staff. If I, with decades of computer experience and a goddamn computer science degree, can’t figure this shit out, God help the average non-technical user—and isn’t that what the point of generative AI is supposed to be, to make it easier for the user to do things??

Third, when these tools work, they are astoundingly good (the Gemini 3.0 Pro report with Deep Research turned on, and the Claude Opus 4.6 report with Research, Web Search, and Extended Thinking turned on). But when they don’t, they can still fail spectacularly (Claude Cowork). So you still have to be the human in the loop here, to figure out when you get a good result versus a bad one. What is frustrating is that all these GenAI tools operate in a black box, with only Gemini making some attempt at explaining what it was doing, as it was doing it.

Fourth, as Ethan himself said in his latest AI Guide:

The top models are remarkably close in overall capability and are generally “smarter” and make fewer errors than ever. But, if you want to use an advanced AI seriously, you’ll need to pay at least $20 a month (though some areas of the world have alternate plans that charge less). Those $20 get you two things: a choice of which model to use and the ability to use the more advanced frontier models and apps. I wish I could tell you the free models currently available are as good as the paid models, but they are not.

In other words, you get what you pay for. And sometimes, even the $20-a-month level isn’t enough, as seen with my experience on Feb. 18th with Claude (and yes, using the cutting-edge features does eat into your usage limits pretty quickly, as I learned to my chagrin).

Finally, I have found that the one of the best ways to see where the strengths and weaknesses of these GenAI tools is to enter the exact same text prompt into each of them, and then compare and contrast the results you get back. However, that approach is gonna cost you at least US$60 a month, so it might not be worth it to you. (And will I be doing this forever? No; at some point, I will just pick one or perhaps two tools and cancel my subscriptions to the rest of them.)

So, in this current round of testing, I would rank the results as follows (separating the results from Claude into the chatbot-generated report and the Cowork report):

  1. Google Gemini 3.0 Pro (with Deep Research turned on) provided me with a very detailed report with citations, as well as giving me a detailed play-by-play on how it was answering my query, which I really appreciated.
  2. Claude Opus 4.6 report (with Research, Web Search, and Extended Thinking turned on) also gave me a detailed report with citations, but several errors in the comparison chart made me question the overall quality and currency of the report. I also really hated how I had to futz around to get the results I really wanted!
  3. ChatGPT 5.2 Thinking is in a clear third place, in my opinion. Not bad, but not as detailed a result as Gemini and Claude provided.
  4. Claude Opus 4.6 Cowork, with perhaps the prettiest output but easly the least substantial result, using lower-quality sources of information, clearly failed at this task. For those reasons, I ranked it in last place. Ethan’s “Agentic Era” might be true for some applications, but certainly not this one!

I have found these little excursions into generative AI to be quite enlightening, and they have definitely given me some new ideas of topics to explore when I begin my research and study leave to write an OER about the metaverse. Hopefully, you found it enlightening, too. Please go subscribe to Ethan Mollick’s free Substack newsletter; he tends to update his AI Guide recommendations fairly regularly, and it’s really the best way too stay on top of a rapidly changing and evolving field!

An Introduction to Artificial Intelligence in General, and Generative AI in Particular

I have already written at length about my neck and shoulder pain, for which I am working with my doctor, a physiotherapist, and a massage therapist to treat. I’ve also had an ergonomist come and do an assessment and adjustment of my workstations at my employer, the University of Manitoba (I’m still waiting for his final report, with a shopping list of equipment which will be purchased to help me get through an eight-hour workday without pain). I am still very much in the process of learning which actions are detrimental to the couple of deteriorating cervical joints in my spine, and which are more beneficial!

For example, you would think that having the extra weight of a virtual reality headset on my noggin would make things worse. However, I have been astonished to discover that my neck does not become as sore, as quickly, when I am using the Mac Virtual Display feature on my Apple Vision Pro, along with my MacBook Pro at work!

Therefore, I have been working 3 to 4 hours a day like this, as opposed to just using my MacBook Pro with an external monitor attached. The ergonomist did set me up with a temporary notebook riser, adjusted so that I am not hunched over the keyboard, and aligned so the top of both the MacBook Pro screen and the external monitor are both at eye level. I find that working like this, without my AVP, my neck and shoulders still start to ache after about two hours, and I have to stop, take a break, go for a walk, and do some of my physiotherapy exercises. As I mentioned earlier, this is a learning process.

On Wednesday, at lunchtime, I got up from my MacBook Pro, unplugged my Apple Vision Pro from its battery charging cable (I tend to leave it plugged in when I am working seated) and, while still wearing my AVP, went to the washroom. My coworkers in the library are already well-used to seeing this strange person wandering around with a VR headset on, and my vision while wearing it is almost as good as it is when I wear my glasses, so I often do this if I have to make a short walk to the printer, or in this case, the washroom.

However, on my way back from the washroom, disaster struck. I accidentally got the cord between my Apple Vision Pro (on my head) and its battery (sitting in the front left pocket of my pants) caught in a metal part of the door to my office cubicle space when I was coming back in from the washroom. My AVP is okay, but I wrenched my already-painful neck badly, and as a result, made a bad situation even worse. (Lesson learned; you need to take that damn power cord into account when moving around!)

As a result, I have been off sick from work for two and half days this week, spending a lot of my time either lying in bed or lying on the sofa. On top of that, we have had not one, but two Alberta Clippers roar through Winnipeg on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, so I have been apartment-bound as well as largely bed-bound. I just find it ironic that the very thing that seems to make my pain more bearable (the Apple Vision Pro) can also make it more severe! This has just not been my week.

Anyway, this is my usual off-topic preamble to the real purpose of today’s blogpost. I had promised that I would share with you, my blog readers, the artificial intelligence presentation I had been researching since this summer, which I have recently delivered to three separate audiences: University of Manitoba graduate students, graduate student advisors, and the professors and instructors in the Faculty of Agriculture and Food Sciences (the latter group for whom I am the liaison librarian, and from where the original request to create and give this talk was made by the chair of the agriculture library committee, many months ago). And while this talk was overall very well-received by my audiences, I did receive some negative feedback, and I wanted to talk a little bit about that as well. AI is a divisive topic in an already-divisive age.

I’m going to share an edited version of my PowerPoint slide presentation, with some University of Manitoba-specific bits removed, as well as any contact information removed (sorry, the UM faculty, staff, and students have the right to call on me with questions after my presentation, as I am their liaison librarian; you don’t 😉 ).

Also, I will be transparent about how I used generative AI tools in creating this PowerPoint presentation. I currently have paid-for (US$17-20 a month) accounts on three general-purpose generative AI tools: OpenAI’s ChatGPT; Anthropic’s Claude; and Google’s Gemini. These are the “top three” general-purpose generative AI tools currently recommended by Ethan Mollick (more on him later in this post). Do I plan to keep paying for all three? No. But I have found it highly instructive to enter the exact same text prompt into all three tools, and then compare the results!

In addition to conducting my own research into artificial intelligence in general and generative AI in particular, I used both ChatGPT and Claude to do additional research into this topic, some of which made it into this presentation. I also had a lot of text-heavy slides in the first draft of my PowerPoint presentation, so I asked Google Gemini to provide suggestions on how to reformat my slide presentation to have fewer bullet points per slide (which I think it did a pretty good job at).

I also did try to ask both ChatGPT and Gemini to redesign the theme and design aspects of my PowerPoint slides, but I was extremely unsatisfied with the results, despite several attempts, and I finally gave up on using AI for that task. So please keep in mind that generative AI (which I will refer to as GenAI from here on out) can still fail miserably at some tasks you put it to work on!

Here is my PowerPoint slide presentation, complete with my speaker notes, for you to download and use as you wish, with some stipulations. I am using the Creative Commons licence CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, which gives the following rights and restrictions):

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International

This license requires that reusers give credit to the creator. It allows reusers to distribute, remix, adapt, and build upon the material in any medium or format, for noncommercial purposes only. If others modify or adapt the material, they must license the modified material under identical terms.

BY: Credit must be given to you, the creator.

NC: Only noncommercial use of your work is permitted. Noncommercial means not primarily intended for or directed towards commercial advantage or monetary compensation.

SA: Adaptations must be shared under the same terms.

(The tool I used to determine the appropriate Creative Commons licence can be found here: https://creativecommons.org/chooser/.)

So, with all that said, here is my PowerPoint presentation (please click on the Download link under the picture, not the picture):

Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI Presentation Ryan Schultz blog version 19 Dec 2025Download

In addition to sharing my slide presentation with you, I wanted to highlight a few resources which I discussed within it, which you might find useful. These are books and websites which I used as I worked my way up the learning curve associated with AI in general, and the new wave of GenAI tools in particular.

I start off with a bigger-picture look at the whole forest of artificial intelligence, later narrowing my focus to look at GenAI tools, a new subset of greater AI. First, a really good layperson’s guide to GenAI is a 2024 book by Ethan Mollick, titled Co-Intelligence (see image, right). One thing I want people to remember is that the new wave of GenAI tools only dates back to 2022, when the capabilities of these new tools (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc.) first captured the general public’s imagination, and stoked their fears. There are lots of published books about AI, but if they were published before 2022, they won’t cover the part of AI that is making the most noise right now. Also, keep in mind that any print/published book will soon be outdated, because the field of GenAI is evolving so rapidly!

Ethan does a good job of covering the territory, and I share with you his four rules of AI:

•Principle 1: Always invite GenAI to the table. You should try inviting AI to help you in everything you do, barring any legal or ethical issues, to learn its capabilities and failures.

•Principle 2: Be the human in the loop. GenAI works best with human help; always double-check its work.

•Principle 3: Treat GenAI like a person (but tell it what kind of person it is). Give it a specific persona, context, and constraints for better results. For example, you’ll get better results from the detailed prompt “Act as a witty comedian and generate some slogans for my product that will make people laugh” instead of the more generic prompt “Generate some slogans for my product.”

•Principle 4: Assume that this is the worst GenAI tool you will ever use. Generative AI tools are advancing and evolving rapidly.

Second, I want to share with you an online course from Anthropic, the makers of the GenAI tool Claude. This course, which I worked through this summer, is called AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations, and you do not need to use Claude to work through the exercises—you can use any GenAI tool you wish. The focus of this 14-lecture course is to learn how to collaborate with GenAI systems effectively, efficiently, ethically, and safely.

One of the concepts taught in the AI Fluency course is what Anthropic calls the four D’s: the four key competencies of AI fluency (they seem to be big on alliteration!).

•Delegation: deciding what work should be done by humans, what work should be done by AI, and how to distribute tasks between them.

•Description: effectively communicating with AI tools, including clearly defining outputs, guiding AI processes, and specifying desired AI behaviours and interactions.

•Discernment: thoughtfully and critically evaluating AI outputs, processes, behaviours, and interactions (assessing quality, accuracy, appropriateness, and areas for improvement).

•Diligence: using AI responsibly and ethically (maintaining transparency and taking accountability for AI-assisted work; an example of this is when I described in detail which GenAI tools I used, and how I used them, in creating the PowerPoint slide presentation, earlier in this post.)

Finally, I share with you what I found to be a very helpful guide prepared by a librarian, Nicole Hennig, about how to stay on top of the rapidly evolving and accelerating field of GenAI. You can obtain a copy of her 2025 guide here. This is as good a place as any to start working your way up the learning curve (as I first did, with the 2024 edition of her guide). Nicole offers a bounty of valuable tips, tricks, suggestions of people to follow, and advice on how best to keep up with the roiling sea of change which is currently taking place in GenAI!

Finally, I wanted to talk a bit about the divisive nature of GenAI. AI/GenAI seems to be a very polarizing topic, especially in the field of higher education! While I did try to present a balanced viewpoint on generative AI tools, talking about both the good and the bad, I did receive some feedback from a few people who felt that my presentation was too…positive? And that, despite the warnings in my talk about some very serious problems with GenAI tools, I had neglected to portray GenAI’s more negative aspects in a more forceful way.

For example, one agriculture professor, in an email after my talk, said this about the Anthropic online course in AI Fluency, a learning resource which I had mentioned in the previous section of this blogpost, as well as in my slide presentation:

…I know you were recommending the AI class that was created by Anthropic, and how it is agnostic to the AI used, and just a good introduction to use. I’ll admit that I have not taken the course  (I am now intrigued and will try to), but I couldn’t help thinking when you introduced it, of courses on appropriate opioid prescribing practices made by Purdue pharma.

Ouch. Fair point, but painful comparison (and I say that as someone who is now actually suffering from physical pain, as I stated up top). So I wanted to end this blogpost with a brief discussion about how some intelligent but more skeptical observers are responding to the tidal wave of GenAI tools washing over society as a whole, and share links to some criticism, as part of providing a larger perspective. I will be the first to admit that I am not an expert in this field, despite what I have learned since this summer! I am a librarian with a computer science degree, which made it easier for me to comprehend some of the more technical aspects of what I was reading, but not as good at the philosophical part of the discussion about GenAI.

The professor who commented on the Anthropic course above shared with me a couple of links to recent critical articles which I, in turn, will share with you. The first link is an Open Letter by 17 scholars, warning about blindly accepting GenAI tools in higher education (post-secondary education, i.e. colleges and universities, although obviously many of the same arguments could also be made about K-12 schooling):

Guest, O., Suarez, M., Müller, B., van Meerkerk, E., Oude Groote Beverborg, A., de Haan, R., Reyes Elizondo, A., Blokpoel, M., Scharfenberg, N., Kleinherenbrink, A., Camerino, I., Woensdregt, M., Monett, D., Brown, J., Avraamidou, L., Alenda-Demoutiez, J., Hermans, F., & van Rooij, I. (2025). Against the Uncritical Adoption of ‘AI’ Technologies in Academia. Zenodo. Retrieved Dec. 19th, 2025 from https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17065099

Abstract: Under the banner of progress, products have been uncritically adopted or even imposed on users — in past centuries with tobacco and combustion engines, and in the 21st with social media. For these collective blunders, we now regret our involvement or apathy as scientists, and society struggles to put the genie back in the bottle. Currently, we are similarly entangled with artificial intelligence (AI) technology. For example, software updates are rolled out seamlessly and non-consensually, Microsoft Office is bundled with chatbots, and we, our students, and our employers have had no say, as it is not considered a valid position to reject AI technologies in our teaching and research. This is why in June 2025, we co-authored an Open Letter calling on our employers to reverse and rethink their stance on uncritically adopting AI technologies. In this position piece, we expound on why universities must take their role seriously to a) counter the technology industry’s marketing, hype, and harm; and to b) safeguard higher education, critical thinking, expertise, academic freedom, and scientific integrity. We include pointers to relevant work to further inform our colleagues.

The second link is the text of a recent talk by the well-known intellectual, author, speaker, and gadfly Cory Doctorow, who gave his university audience a foretaste of his book on AI, which will be published in 2026:

Doctorow, C. (2025). Pluralistic: The Reverse-Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI. Retrieved Dec. 19th, 2025 from https://pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/pop-that-bubble/#u-washington

Over the summer I wrote a book about what I think about AI, which is really about what I think about AI criticism, and more specifically, how to be a good AI critic. By which I mean: “How to be a critic whose criticism inflicts maximum damage on the parts of AI that are doing the most harm.” I titled the book The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI, and Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish it in June, 2026.

But you don’t have to wait until then because I am going to break down the entire book’s thesis for you tonight, over the next 40 minutes. I am going to talk fast.

And both Cory Doctorow, and Olivia Guest et al., make some seriously valid points about the negative consequences of a heedless, thoughtless, headlong rush into adopting GenAI tools. Now, you can decide, after reading all this, that you will have absolutely nothing to do with AI and GenAI, and that’s a valid position to take. But will it change the fact that GenAI is already being incorporated into software we use every day? Can the genie be pushed back into the bottle? Doubtful.

So what I am saying is: learn how the enemy (if you see it as “the enemy”) works. Spend a bit of time to become familiar with the GenAI tools, try them out on certain tasks, and see for yourself where and how it succeeds at a particular task, and (more importantly) where and how it fails. I have had some amazing results from using GenAI tools over the past eight months, but I have also experienced situations where I walked away thinking, “this is garbage.” But may I gently suggest that the only way to gain the experience which informs your opinions is to actually use the tools, and not to stick your head in the sand, and refuse to have anything to do with them.

Are we the unwitting and unwilling beta-testers for these products, as they are rolled out and embedded stealthily in products we already know and use? Absolutely. Will there be negative consequences, some foreseen, and others unexpected and unanticipated? Absolutely. Will there be some tasks which GenAI does and does well? Also, yes, absolutely (and it is already happening based on my own experience). All three things can be true at the same time. Like all technology throughout human history, artificial intelligence is a double-edged sword. It can harm as well as heal.

I still think that the best stance on GenAI is to be a skeptical but informed user of the tools (even if you limit yourself to the lesser-powered, free versions). Also, you owe it to yourself to read a variety of viewpoints on the technology, from a range of sources (start with my fellow librarian Nicole Hennig’s excellent guide which I mentioned above, plus my skeptical professor’s two links, and work out from there).

Above all, even with how divisive AI can be as a topic, now is not the time to be locked into either a rigid AI-is-bad or AI-is-good perspective, because both are true at times, and we need to hold space for that unsettling and upsetting fact. And we need to brace ourselves, both personally and as a society, because (as I have stated before on this blog), things are about to get deeply, deeply weird before all this is over.

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Editorial: Changing Gears, Letting Go, and Embracing Change

Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash

NOTICE: Except where explicitly stated in this blogpost, I have not used AI to write this editorial. This is me, Ryan, writing (and yes, I have been using em-dashes long, long before ChatGPT was a thing—and I will continue to do so!). See what I just did there? 😉

While my continuing neck and shoulder pain unfortunately limits the amount of time that I can spend sitting in front of a desktop computer (both at work and at home), I wanted to set aside some of my precious “good neck” time to talk a little bit about this past twelve months, and where I am planning on taking this blog in the future. Because, yes, I do have plans moving forward. (Update: as it turns out, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I had to split up the writing of this post over a couple of days, rather than one hours-long marathon sesssion.)

As many of you know, I took a lengthy hiatus from blogging, starting late last year, up until very recently. Part of the reason was that I was juggling a lot of responsibilities at work, notably being part of a virtual reality lab which was being set up in one of the libraries of the university library system in which I have been working for the past 30-odd years (yes, it’s really been that long; I started in 1992!).

I am happy to report that, although I am no longer involved with that particular project, the virtual reality lab at my university library system has already had a successful soft opening, with a dedicated staff person hired to manage it (not me; as I said, I already have my hands full being a liaison librarian for both the faculty of agricultural and food sciences and the computer science department at my university!). In fact, I have been so busy at work that I haven’t even had time to sit down and use any of the equipment in the new lab, although I have chatted a few times with the new manager. Everything is moving along fine without me.

As part of my responsibilities as agriculture librarian, I had volunteered to give a presentation to an upcoming faculty council meeting about artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular. I have only myself to blame for getting myself into this situation! You see, the Faculty of Agricultural and Food Sciences at the University of Manitoba still has an active library committee, and at a recent in-person meeting, I was talking about how I have had to add a few slides to the PowerPoint presentation which I give to students about how to use the U of M Libraries, talking about AI. One thing led to another, and lo and behold, yesterday afternoon, I gave a half-hour presentation on artificial intelligence in general, and generative AI in particular, to a room full of agriculture and food science professors!

I spent a significant chunk of my summer reading through books and websites, working through online courses, and essentially getting myself up to speed (it helps that this librarian has an undergraduate degree in computer science!). And I had the good fortune to be able to give a version of my presentation to a class of graduate student advisors, and to a class of graduate students, as part of a series of special courses targeted to U of M grad students, before yesterday afternoon’s talk. Both times it was well received, as it was yesterday. (I have already shared my slides and notes with my fellow librarians and agriculture professors, and I might decide to also share a version of them with you, my faithful blog readers, as I have done in the past with presentations about virtual reality in higher education, and the virtual world of Second Life. But I think I will make that a separate blogpost, perhaps my next one.)

At this point, I will draw your attention to the tagline of my blog in the upper left-hand corner of the screen if you are looking at this page on a desktop computer. You might notice that it has changed.

It used to read, pretty much since I began this blog in 2017:

News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse

As of yesterday, it now says:

News and Views on Social VR, Virtual Worlds, and the Metaverse, plus Artificial Intelligence and Generative AI’s Impact on the Metaverse

Now, that’s rather a mouthful (and yes, I might need to edit it a bit), but essentially, it’s all a part of the “embracing change” which I mentioned in the title of this blogpost.

As a matter of fact, I was having a bit of a brain fart coming up with a suitable title, so to assist me with the wording of the title of this blog post (and only that), I pulled up Anthropic’s generative AI tool, Claude, for a little chat, asking it:

I need a way of saying “to add something new” to contrast with the opposite idea of “letting go of something.” What are some ways that I could say that?

And here are screen captures of the resulting conversation:

Now, could I have done this without generative AI? Absolutely; thesaurus websites have been around since the earliest days of the World Wide Web (trust me, I was around then!). But I doubt I could have actually had a back-and-forth conversation with a tool that presented the information in such a helpful, tabular way, prior to November 2022, when the first public version of ChapGPT was unleashed upon an unsuspecting public. I could pose my question in dozens of different ways, asking for countless ways of expressing the concept of “letting go of something,” and the Claude GenAI (generative AI) tool never gets bored or impatient or irritated with me.

Simply put, I will now be writing about artificial intelligence in general, and the new wave of generative AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude in particular, as part of the RyanSchultz.com blog. In particular, I will talk about how these fast-developing and evolving tools will inevitably impact the metaverse.

I will give two quick examples of how GenAI is already impacting the metaverse. First, in my recent write-up of virtual sessions I attended as part of the Berlin-based Immersive X metaverse conference i attended a couple of weeks ago, there was a proof-of-concept working demonstration of a generative-AI-driven virtual diabetes counselor in a virtual world platform called Foretell Reality.

Second, were you aware that there is already a website called MeshZEUS, which will create a three-dimensional object for you from a text description, in a format ready to be uploaded to Second Life and sold on the SL Marketplace or an in-world store?

The MeshZEUS website

Yes, that’s right! You may choose, if you wish, to no longer work your way up the rather steep learning curve of Blender or Maya or 3Ds Max to painstakingly create an object from scratch; instead, all you have to do is describe your desired 3D object in enough detail, and hey presto, it gets delivered to you! (Provided you buy enough credits, and have enough patience to go through multiple iterations of text prompting, that is. But we’ll also leave that discussion, plus the whole enchilada of issues that using a GenAI tool like this raises, for another day, shall we? Trust, there’s lots to talk about.)

It’s now pretty obvious to me that the current hype cycle of artificial intelligence, which was ignited by startling new leaps forward in the capabilities of AI tools since 2022, is going to have an impact on the metaverse. And, unlike the previous short-lived hype cycle of the metaverse itself (which, hello, I was around for—beginning, middle, and end!— documented on this very blog), this new, AI-powered hype cycle might actually have a more direct impact on society than the still-somewhat-nebulous concept of the metaverse, sooner than any of us might have expected. Buckle up, folks, I predict that things are about to get deeply, deeply weird.

So, I have talked about changing gears for the RyanSchultz.com blog, returning to blogging, and also about embracing change, i.e., adding the topic of AI and GenAI to the subjects I will write about. Now I come to the part where I talk about letting something go.

Unfortunately, because of my neck and shoulder pain, I regret that I must conserve the time that I can spend productively sitting in front of a desktop PC. Obviously, first priority goes to the paying job, which keeps the lights on, the internet bill paid, and puts food in my belly and gas in my car. Second priority will likely be writing this blog, now that I have decided to keep blogging. Between these two, that probably is the limit of what I can reasonably accomplish.

What I am choosing to let go of is writing aboutt the virtual world of Second Life on this blog (in particular, reporting on fashionista freebies and bargains). I have made a similar announcement on Primfeed, which over the past year is where I have usually posted my freebie fashionista finds rather than on my blog. Because my Primfeed account is deliberately set to private (i.e., you need to have a Second Life account to join Primfeed, follow me, and read what I post there), I have done a screen capture of that particular post, plus a transcription:

Every December, I try to juggle four tasks (not very successfully, mind you):

1, Drag my small army of alts through a curated selection of Advent and 12 Days of Christmas calendars to vacuum up some fabulous gifts, every day from December 1st to December 25th;

2. Do the same thing at the annual Holiday Shop and Hop event;

3. Pick up free heads and skins during the LeLutka December event; and

4. Navigate real-life Christmas events, shopping, and other obligations. (My family, God bless them, finds #1-3 above to be very amusing, and last Christmas, they all chipped in to give me a cash-filled envelope marked “L$”, since they couldn’t actually buy me a gift card to buy Linden dollars. (Second Life, you need to look into this! There’s an untapped market here.)

I’m sure some of you here on Primfeed can relate to this! Often I ask myself: why am I doing this? But I still do get a great deal of personal satisfaction and fulfillment from designing a complete avatar look from head to toe, looking great while doing it as inexpensively as possible. And in order to do that, you need to acquire the knowledge and expertise to sniff out freebies and bargains (which I have often shared with you, either here on Primfeed or via my blog). I’ve loved doing it for years!

But, as I said, something has to give. I can no longer spend extended hours sitting in front of a desktop PC without significant, and sometimes severe, neck and shoulder pain. Therefore, in addition to NOT doing as much of numbers 1 through 3 as in previous years, I have made the difficult decision to cut back on telling all of you about the great deals I find. It’s not a decision I take lightly, but I do need to listen to my body, and my body is telling me to rest. And I need to pay attention.

So if you don’t see me post as often here, that’s why. ❤️ I’m just trying to rebalance my life a little better, that’s all. I’ll still be around, reading, scrolling, liking posts, following people and stores, but not posting so much. Thanks for understanding.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not leaving Second Life! In fact, I need SL as a sort of counter-balance to deal with all the batshit-craziness happening in my real life. Second Life is my temporary escape from the hamster-wheel of worry, anxiety, and despair inside my head, where I can reliably get into a pleasant flow state for an hour or two, and escape from the real world (where I have little to no control over what is happening).

In fact, one of the reasons I love SL so much is that it is such a vast, three-dimensional creative canvas over which I have so much control over what happens, where I choose to go, who I choose to interact with, and even what I look like to others! I still derive an inordinate amount of personal satisfaction from styling a complete avatar look from head to toe, as inexpensively as possible while still looking fabulous, darling! I call it “digital drag” 💅 (and yes, I do have a drag queen alt, whom I have written about numerous times on my blog, and who is about to embark on various antics, drama, and misadventures in a roleplaying region based on the U.S. Deep South). To my friends and acquiantances in Second Life: I am not going anywhere. I’m just not going to write about it here any more, that’s all. (I’m also cutting back on my Primfeed posting, but I’ll still be there, too.)

So, to sum up:

Yes, I am back.

Yes I will be blogging about the metaverse in all its forms and manifestations again, but with the added wrinkle of AI/GenAI and its potential impact.

No, I will no longer be writing about Second Life, although yes, I still will be playing it.

Stick around, folks, this should be both entertaining and educational! As RuPaul herself said:

Entering the RadyVerse: A Look at Five VR and AI Projects for Training Healthcare Workers at the University of Manitoba’s Rady Faculty of Health Sciences

One of the virtual reality labs being used to train nursing students in the College of Nursing at the University of Manitoba

As many of my readers already well know, I am the computer science and agriculture librarian at the Jim Peebles Science and Technology Library at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada, and I have been writing about “news and views on social VR, virtual worlds, and the metaverse” (as the tagline of the RyanSchultz.com blog states) since July 31st, 2017. I have now been actively and avidly reporting on this space on my blog for almost seven years, sharing news and events in the rapidly-evolving metaverse!

So it was that I had already written on my blog (albeit somewhat in passing) about the University of Manitoba’s College of Nursing, which has been training new nursing students using the UbiSim software since the Fall 2022 term. Here’s a one-minute YouTube video about that work:

However, today I wanted to give you all an update on some newer innovations in the use of VR (and AI!) in healthcare education at my employer, the University of Manitoba.

Yes, the RadyVerse launch even had a cake! Carbs take priority, people!!! 😉

One month ago, on Friday, March 15th, 2024, I attended a special afternoon event located at the University of Manitoba’s Bannatyne Campus (the downtown, health-sciences-focused campus, next door to Winnipeg’s main hospital complex, the Health Sciences Centre). This event was the official launch of a new initiative of the Max Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, called the RadyVerse. According to the announcement:

The RadyVerse is an exciting initiative of the Rady Faculty of Health Sciences that combines virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence and machine learning to create immersive and controlled simulations for students, educators and clinicians. The integration aims to empower an interprofessional community, promote collaboration and enhance skill development in a risk-free setting.

Dr. Nicole Harder speaking at the RadyVerse launch event (with Dr. Lawrence Gillman, seated)

In an article published in UM Today, the University of Manitoba’s online newspaper, one of the speakers at the launch described the purpose of the event, and the benefits of using VR in the College of Nursing programs:

Dr. Nicole Harder, associate dean, undergraduate programs and professor in the College of Nursing,  and Mindermar Professor in Human Simulation, Rady Faculty of Health Sciences, described the launch event as a “technology fair” that will give faculty, staff and students the opportunity to participate in interactive demonstrations.

“People will be able to try on the VR headsets and step into the immersive world. We’ll also have monitors where we can screencast and show others what they see in the VR, and how this will be used as an educational tool,” Harder said.

“VR has been used in other universities for some time, but not to the same extent. In the College of Nursing, it is embedded into our curriculum.”

The college recently expanded its VR simulation training to its programming in The Pas and Thompson through a partnership with the University College of the North. This allows students from different parts of the province to work together on a simulated clinical case in one virtual room.

As more disciplines become involved, interprofessional teams will not even need to be in the same physical space when collaborating, Harder said.

“VR is a great tool for learning clinical decision-making, problem solving, empathy and communication.”

One of my Libraries colleagues tries out the UbiSim nursing simulation software
Kimberly Workum of the College of Nursing, at the Bodyswaps demonstration workstation

The launch event had five stations intended to showcase how the faculty is using virtual reality and artificial intelligence to educate and train the next generation of healthcare professionals: doctors, nurses, pharmacists, rehabilitation therapists, etc. U of M faculty, staff, students, reporters, and the general public were invited to try out the technology for themselves, and get a taste of how it works. The five stations were:

  • The previously mentioned UbiSim VR software, used for training nurses in simulated but realistic nursing scenarios, where students can practice their skills within a safe and controlled environment;
  • Bodyswaps, another initiative of the College of Nursing, which provides experiential, soft-skills training (e.g. how to talk with patients and family members in various scenarios);
  • An artificial intelligence (AI) tool called OSCE GPT, which uses a specially-trained large language model (LLM) to simulate patients, in order to allow healthcare professionals to practice their patient interview skills, and give them feedback on how to improve it;
  • Lumeto, social-VR-based roleplay software for up to 4 users at once, used to train healthcare workers in interprofessional collaboration skills; and
  • Acadicus (a VR program for education which I had written about in 2019 on my blog), which is being used by Dr. Lawrence Gillman. According to the UM Today article:
People could try out the Acadeicus software, being used by Dr. Gillman’s team to train doctors

One of the stations will be led by Dr. Lawrence Gillman, associate professor of surgery at the Max Rady College of Medicine and director of the Clinical Learning and Simulation Program at Bannatyne campus.

Gillman has a crisis-based simulation and trauma resuscitation program in development that he will soon be using to teach his residents. At the launch, he’ll demonstrate what trainers and learners will be able to do.

“This VR program is basically a playground where you can create your own sim lab in a virtual environment. You can create whatever scenarios or places you want, and people can participate together in person, or even from a distance,” Gillman said.

“Basically, we create medical crises that people can practice in and then make mistakes in simulation rather than real life.”

A user tries out Lumeto

I visited all five workstations, and had an ample opportunity to test out most of these applications first-hand, and speak to my U of M coworkers about these projects. In fact, you can even catch a glimpse of me standing behind Dr. Gillman as he guides a user through the Acadicus software, in the video attached to this CTV News report of the RadyVerse event (see the red arrow in the screen capture I took from that video):

(I didn’t even know about this until a friend who watched CTV News told me!)

There’s just so much exciting stuff going on right now! There are so many VR initiatives taking place on campus, oftentimes in isolation, which is a shame. For example, I wonder how many of the healthcare professionals at the RadyVerse launch were aware that the UM Libraries is working on setting up a VR lab for faculty, staff, and student use (an initiative which is now well underway). And that the Department of Computer Science also has plans to set up a VR lab for its students. And I believe that the university’s Centre for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning is also working on something to do with VR…like I said, there’s a lot going on.

Therefore, I hope to be able to use some of my own “soft skills” and abilities to help set up improved communication channels and venues at the university, so we can all learn from each other as we beaver away on our separate projects and programs! I believe that there is much so in-house expertise and experience which we can share with each other. I know that I would benefit from this, and I suspect others would as well. We can all learn from each other.

The RadyVerse event was a fantastic opportunity to learn more about some of the other virtual reality and artifical intelligence work taking place at the University of Manitoba, and I hope to report on future developments in this exciting edtech as it rolls out across campus. These are exciting times to be a VR and AI enthusiast at the University of Manitoba!