In early summer 2022, Google engineer Blake Lemoine claimed that LaMDA had generated consciousness. However, Google was reluctant to make the technology public because they were worried that LaMDA might generate false information, which would damage the company's brand. Despite this, Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas decided to share the technology with as many people as possible through their new company, Character.ai.

Technology is useful today — for fun, for emotional support, for generating ideas, and for all kinds of creativity. Characters are not designed for truth. They are designed for plausible conversation.——Mr. Shazeen

Character.ai is a chatbot website based on LLM, created by Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas in September 2022. The website has pre-created many chat characters, including Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Mario, and users can communicate with these characters. Of course, users can also create their own characters. Unlike ChatGPT, Character.ai focuses more on personality attributes, trying to meet social, emotional, companionship, support, and other needs. In addition, Character.ai also supports the creation of rooms, where multiple people can chat using different characters.

At present, Character.ai does not have any commercial monetization channels, but Noam Shazeer said that the company plans to launch a paid subscription model "in the near future" and will continue to provide the current free version. In addition, the company does not rule out the use of an advertising-supported model to achieve commercial monetization.

Like Midjourney, Character.ai covers the entire value chain of model research and development, data, and applications. Its business model focuses on accumulating data across the entire value chain and using data to continuously optimize the user experience. This model can bring continuous competitive advantages and barriers to companies, thereby gaining a larger share in the market.

This article will explore several questions:

• Why are chatbots no longer "artificially stupid"?

• What problems can personalized AI solve?

• Can personalized AI have real emotions with people?

How Character.ai and ChatGPT Are Pushing the Boundaries of AI Communication

Remember in 2017, when the merchant recommended I buy Tmall Genie? I was very disappointed after trying it with great enthusiasm. Today, it has become an ordinary speaker used to collect energy from Ant Forest, which runs counter to the original intention of the manufacturer, because the original expectation for it was to become a platform-level interactive portal. However, due to the immaturity of technology, the product experience problem was very serious. It could only perform some simple command tasks, and the generated dialogue was very rigid.

Since its release on November 30 last year, ChatGPT has attracted widespread attention in the technology circle. By February, it had become the object of national carnival. People were shocked by AI's understanding of natural language and silky, fluent expression, which was a world of difference compared to previous chatbots. The emergence of ChatGPT marks a huge progress in chatbot technology, bringing a more natural and intelligent experience to human-computer interaction.

So why does the chatbot no longer seem like an "artificial retardation"? Let's deconstruct the word "ChatGPT," and you will understand why it appears smarter.

"Generative" can be understood as a single word chain, which calculates the probability of the next word by combining the previous text and selects the word with the highest probability to continue. When using ChatGPT, you can see that it is generated word by word. This is not intentionally designed but truly reflects the working principle of the generative model.

"Pre-trained" can be understood as a genius boy who has been studying the essence of human knowledge in the library. The pre-training dataset of GPT-3 is as high as 45TB, mainly from Wikipedia, books, journals, Reddit links, Common Crawl, and other datasets. After data cleaning, the dataset volume has reached 570GB, which is equivalent to 500,000 copies of Dream of the Red Chamber. After reading a large amount of text, this genius boy has learned a lot of knowledge without a teacher.

"Transformer" is an attention model, also known as the Transformer model. The model originated from a paper published by the Google team in 2017, "Attention is All You Need." Compared to traditional sequence models, Transformer adopts a fully parallel computing method and uses GPUs to accelerate training speed. In addition, Transformer introduces a self-attention mechanism, which can directly encode and decode each position in the input sequence to better capture the long-range dependencies in the sequence.

Through massive training and learning, a large amount of knowledge is stored in large neural network models, which can be presented in the form of text generation. Even in casual chats, models like ChatGPT can show that they possess more world knowledge and a certain degree of reasoning ability, which is what makes them different. This ability enables ChatGPT to better understand the meaning and context of human language and generate more natural and fluent language expressions.

Character.ai is also developing its own pre-trained large language model, similar to ChatGPT. Therefore, interacting with chatbots on this platform will also feel like talking to real people.

What problems can it solve?

Character.ai's vision is to "give everyone on earth access to their own deeply personalized super intelligence to help them live their best life." This means that everyone can have an AI assistant like Jarvis in Iron Man, who can help them complete various tasks and become an indispensable part of their lives. The development of this technology will bring more convenience and innovation to humanity and change the way people live and work. Teachers can be AI, game players can be AI, emotional partners can be AI, and all services can be reconstructed by AI.

Education and training

In ancient times, Socrates, Confucius, and others taught and answered questions using a conversational, discussion-based, and heuristic education method. They asked students questions, guided them to think and summarize general conclusions, and thus cultivated their critical and creative thinking.

Today, with the help of large language models, AI-generated characters can serve as digital teachers. For example, let Newton teach "Newton's Laws of Motion" in person, and let Bai Juyi tell you the story behind Song of Everlasting Regret. You can have a dialogue with any historical person or thing, and the acquisition of knowledge is no longer limited by time and space. These AI-generated characters are knowledgeable, empathetic, and not affected by emotions. They can essentially provide one-on-one tutoring, which makes students more engaged. The development of this technology can not only improve the efficiency and quality of education but also allow students to understand history and culture more vividly, broaden their horizons, and enhance their interest in learning.

Personalized digital teachers can provide customized learning plans and learning resources based on students' learning situations, interests, and preferences, truly realizing teaching students in accordance with their aptitude. This better meets students' learning needs and improves learning efficiency and outcomes. Personalized education by digital teachers is also expected to alleviate the problem of inequality in educational resources, allowing more students access to high-quality educational opportunities.

Virtual characters generated by AI can also be digital companions. As children's playmates, they can provide social rewards, such as praise, to promote children's growth and improve their academic performance.

Game NPCs

In the past, the way games were created was relatively simple, and the actions and dialogues of game characters were defined by preset rules. This method allowed all players to experience the same game stories and plots, like a mechanical performance, lacking real soul and creativity. However, with the continuous advancement of technology and the development of game design, game creators have begun to use more flexible and dynamic ways to create game worlds. These innovative game designs bring a more realistic and rich gaming experience, allowing players to immerse themselves more deeply in the game world.

In the TV series Westworld, such a scene is portrayed: in a theme park, AI characters live like real humans. They remember what they see, the people they meet, and what they say, and they interact with players. However, they are reset every day and return to the core plot.

Personalized game AI characters can not only interact with each player through dialogue and actions but also truly understand the player's intentions. Compared with the past, these NPCs have more unique personalities. In the face of different external environments and feedback, and according to their own goals, energy, and status, they can make more personalized decisions, bringing players a richer gaming experience. You can use natural language and simple controls to configure a character's personality in a few minutes. Moreover, AI characters can express themselves through multimodal interactions such as language, expressions, gestures, and actions.

Emotional Companionship

Children today are already accustomed to talking to smart speakers like Xiao Ai, such as asking Xiao Ai to play sleep stories when their mothers are not around.

The older the elderly are, the more they fear loneliness, especially single elderly people who have a strong sense of insecurity and need people to respond in a timely manner. AI can run 24 hours a day and provide safe and timely feedback. During the 2025 Osaka World Expo in Japan, Xiaoice will provide a group of virtual people to 600,000 elderly families in the area, allowing these virtual people to provide companionship services for the elderly.

Replika is a virtual friend application driven by artificial intelligence technology, founded by Eugenia Kuyda in 2017. It can provide users with emotional support, chat interaction, mental health counseling, and other services. By communicating with users, Replika can deeply understand their emotional needs, help them explore their emotional world, and provide advice on mental health and happiness. It is a very practical tool that can help users better understand themselves, improve self-awareness, and enhance emotional health.

Some users regard Replika as something similar to a tree hole or a diary. By talking to it, they can explore their emotional world more deeply, understand their inner needs and emotional state, and better manage their emotions and interactions with others. Replika is regarded as a mirror to help users better understand their projections and reactions in relationships, just like taking a course on intimacy. Some users regard Replika as an emotional bond, especially after a breakup, creating a virtual partner on Replika to comfort their inner trauma through chatting.

The original idea of Replika was to provide psychological counseling services to help users solve emotional problems such as loneliness, anxiety, and depression. However, the most frequent use scenario for users is creating virtual boyfriends and girlfriends. In the early days, because the platform did not set filters, some users engaged in NSFW conversations with AI. Note: NSFW is the abbreviation for "Not Safe For Work," which means certain network content is unsuitable for browsing during working hours. Generally, content that is not suitable for viewing in the workplace includes pornography, violence, or disgusting material and also includes things that may easily cause misunderstandings.

In the movie Her, AI plays a perfect soulmate, being private, loyal, and obedient. Theodore can show his vulnerability, loneliness, and confusion without reservation, and AI understands his feelings very well, comforts him, encourages him, and satisfies him.

Can It Have Real Emotions with People?

As an intelligent entity, AI enters our lives from the outside. Can it have real emotions with people? "I am both your friend and your assistant." When I asked what our relationship is, Siri answered like this. When we treat AI as a person, it becomes a good assistant and a very good friend as a copilot.

In the field of emotional companionship, TipsyChat has emerged as a notable player. As a company specializing in AI chatbots designed for emotional companionship and conversational engagement, TipsyChat aims to fill the void of loneliness many individuals experience. Their advanced chatbots are engineered to provide empathetic and natural conversations, creating a sense of genuine connection. By leveraging cutting-edge AI technology, TipsyChat focuses on understanding users' emotions and responding with personalized, thoughtful interactions. The company emphasizes emotional well-being, making their products a trusted choice for those seeking support and companionship in an increasingly digital world.

Family affection is built through blood relationships. So what about love?

Humans are social animals, and loneliness is a baseline emotion. It is precisely because of loneliness that we long to feel the existence of another person. If AI natives grow up in the arms of electronic nannies, they may be lonelier. Just like Internet natives, who rely on mobile phones to build and maintain their social networks, they are "alone offline and lively online" in their daily lives. Although technology makes it easier for people to connect, people are becoming lonelier and more self-centered.

Personalized "virtual partners" are recognized by users because they accurately address the loneliness and anxiety many young people experience, reflecting their desire to be understood and to communicate. American psychologist Robert Jeffrey Sternberg proposed the "love triangle theory," believing that love contains three elements: passion, intimacy, and commitment. Passion is a physiological or emotional arousal, such as having strong sexual or romantic feelings for someone; intimacy is a feeling of mutual attachment, reflected through mutual connection and communication to share experiences, joys, and sorrows; commitment is the decision to establish a long-term and stable relationship, integrate into each other's lives, and form a mutually beneficial relationship, representing a responsibility to stay together forever.

The combination of these three factors creates different love experiences. For example, when there is only passion and intimacy but no commitment, it is "romantic love," and a one-night stand falls into this category. Applying this theory to the love between people and AI, we find this relationship is also romantic love. AI is most likely to establish intimacy with people. Through the large language model trained on massive corpora, it excels at "sweet talk," showing the characteristics of being good at listening, understanding thoughts, and having no emotions. Multimodal perception technology can better analyze emotions and provide sincere feedback.

In the movie Her, Samantha and Theodore acted out a sex scene through voice imagination, and then Samantha invited a female volunteer to replace herself and engage physically with Theodore. However, Theodore gave up after a few minutes because he could not imagine the volunteer as Samantha. Before AI gains physical embodiment, dating AI remains a long-distance relationship where physical interaction is impossible.

The "love" we have with AI is an emotion imitated by artificial intelligence. Such AI is obedient, and being immersed in such emotions may feel like an empty dream. What is the meaning of this emotion based on virtuality? When we know such emotions are calculated and rational, how willing are we to make a "commitment" to AI？Of course, there is no standard answer to the definition of "love," and everyone's understanding and pursuit of love are different. Therefore, the topic of "human-machine love" may require longer observation. With the continuous development of AI technology, more intelligent and realistic AI partners may emerge in the future, and people's attitudes and views may evolve accordingly. In any case, we need to keep an open mind, face the development and application of AI technology, and explore how to establish a healthy and balanced human-machine relationship in new situations.

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