The AI revolution has taken the internet by storm in recent months, with groups like ChatGPT asking some pretty tough questions about how, when, and why we should turn to bots for answers and companionship.
Chatbots, in particular, have proven to be an exciting (and controversial) new frontier for AI, and the latest hot creation is Character.AI (opens in a new tab), a tool that lets you chat with reference numbers. from practically anyone. , whether alive or dead, fake or not.
Founded by former Google researchers Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, Character.AI, like ChatGPT, draws on articles, news, books, and other digital sources to produce plausible responses from people (or characters) of your choosing. Ever wanted to bite Alfred Hitchcock's ear on the impact of streaming on modern cinema? Or lyrically address Abraham Lincoln about the state of modern politics? Well now you can. Kind of.
Basically, Character.AI is only meant to entertain you rather than inform you, according to the website's disclaimer: "Everything the characters claim is made up!" Indeed, their authors told The New York Times (opens in a new tab) in a recent interview: “These systems are not designed for the truth. They are designed for plausible talk. Character.AI is useful today: for fun, for sensitive support, for brainstorming, for all sorts of inventiveness.
Unlike ChatGPT, Character.AI is not intended to become your go-to search engine. Quite the opposite, in fact. As the New York Times notes, "companies, including Character.AI, hope that the public will learn to admit the flaws of chatbots and develop a healthy lack of trust in what they claim."
It's also worth noting that regardless of who you choose to speak to via Character.AI, responses will be written in easy English. Jonas Thiel, a socioeconomics student at a German university, told the New York Times: "If you read what someone likes, Kautsky wrote in the XNUMXth century, he doesn't use exactly the same language that we use today. But AI somehow you can translate your ideas into easy modern English.
Clearly, this element of Character.AI has some value in the real world: the software provides a simple way to get to the heart of complex theories and philosophies, especially those written by centuries-old scholars (as in the case of Thiel and his studies of Kautsky).
Beyond that, though, Character.AI appears to be a pure new creation serving an entirely different purpose than ChatGPT and, we suspect, related systems currently in development at tech giants like Google and Meta.
As for the moral implications of chatting with fake versions of real people (deceased or not)? Well, that's a much bigger question.