Shubhankar Chaudhary, Author at Dot On Target

I discovered this AMAZING website that completely baffled me. It allowed me to have a conversation with Socrates and Elon Musk. With Socrates- I debated morality, ethics and potential improvements to the idea of democracy. Then Elon and I chatted about the Twitter acquisition, and the bot problem. He told me about his kid X Æ A-Xii, and in a weak moment, also confessed that he misses his ex-girlfriend Grimes. My question at the end was: Does it REALLY matter if I was talking to their AI characters, if they seemed so genuine and real? The site I'm talking about is called Character AI. It's got hundreds of different 'characters' that they have created to whom you can talk to. And they are HIGHLY realistic. From popular kids cartoon Pikachu, to a Greek philosopher that has been dead for close to 2400 years- they've got multiple 'characters'. How Does Character AI Work? Character AI is basically a neural language model which has been given a lot of data to parse on the 'characters' it is supposed to emulate. Due to this, the model is then able to predict what a particular 'character' would say in a particular context and then it recreates that in conversation with the users. For example- the model would probably have been fed all interview transcripts and tweets ever generated by Elon Musk, in order to come to a decent estimation of his 'character'. This is why my conversation with him was so... freaky. I posted the full conversation on LinkedIn- which you can check out here. How To Use Character AI? You simply go to the website character.ai - sign up and start choose a character to start talking to. I found Socrates to be far too agreeable to whatever I said so it wasn't hyper-realistic. Elon was way more realistic- he even pushed back on a few of my opinions! I guess that's more because the model has far more data for some characters than others- and that is what makes some more realistic than others. Why Should YOU Care About Character AI? Simply put- the implications of Character AI are huge. From personalized chatbots, to AI therapists, AI coaches for ANY field, and even AI companions (like the Oscar winning movie 'Her')- the field is wide open and character.ai is just the first step in this next evolution. This also has a lot of data and privacy implications (I believe). Because these models constantly require a lot of data in order to be personalized to the user, the amount of data being tracked of each individual person is likely to go up. Let's hope I am wrong though. And in the meanwhile- play around on Character AI, because it's really fun! I'm not going to lie- I spent the better part of my day on the site when I went on it last- it was that engrosssing.