An AI's mission to 'teach' itself Pokemon Red is going as well as you think - after escaping Cerulean City after tens of hours, it went right on back

It's easy to worry that AI will one day take all our jobs, but that day certainly isn't today, as a large language model is absolutely botching its attempt at beating a Pokemon game.

ClaudePlaysPokemon is a Twitch channel where you can tune in to watch the LLM Claude play Pokemon Red and Blue, badly. It's like TwitchPlaysPokemon but worse. I will admit the set up is rather interesting, as Claude spits out reasoning for each decision it makes on the screen as it plays. Unfortunately, its reasoning is atrocious.

After defeating Misty and visiting Bill, you need to get out of Cerulean City and go South to Vermillion. To do this, you need to go through a house and down a path on the right. Claude has spent dozens of hours trying to do this, and after finally getting through the house it decided to jump down a ledge and trap itself in the city once again.

Claude (plays Pokémon) jumps back to Cerulean City, right when it found its way out after being stuck in it for tens of hours. from r/LivestreamFail

The reason being was it wanted to interact with an NPC right outside the gym. It's almost certainly spoken to this person before if it's been in the city for hours on end, so this was a complete waste of time and, at the time of writing, it's still stuck, this time in a back garden to the West of the city.

Since the LLM is using a screenshot reader to "see" what's going on, it might be trapped in this garden for some time, as there's no visual indication of where the exit is. A human would at least get frustrated and defiantly try to walk through walls, which in this instance would actually work as the exit is in the back of the houses, but an AI may never attempt that.

At one point while I was writing this, it stood right next to the exit of the garden and after a few moments of processing decided to go West, becoming stuck at the barrier between the garden and the river. Even fish can play Pokemon and discover new bugs. After watching this, I'm really not worried about ChatGPT or any other LLM taking my job any time soon.

If you're keen for more Pokemon news, check out everything we know about Pokemon Legends Z-A.