The AI revolution raises tough questions about how, when and why we should turn to robots for answers and friendships, with examples like ChatGPT, and such services have taken the internet by storm in the past few months.
Chatbots in particular have proven to be an exciting (and controversial) new frontier for AI, and the latest product, Character. AI is the most interesting example of this. This tool allows you to chat with digital copies of almost anyone. They can be dead or alive, or even non-existent, fictional characters.
- The most popular topic of recent days: What is ChatGPT? How to use ChatGPT?
Founded by former Google researchers Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, Character.AI draws information from articles, news, books, and other digital sources to generate sensible responses from the people (or characters) you choose, similar to ChatGPT. Would you like to ask Alfred Hitchcock the impact of streaming services on modern cinema? Or would you like to have a discussion with Abraham Lincoln about the state of contemporary politics? Now you can do this with this tool.
Character.AI is a tool developed to entertain, not inform. There is already a warning on the website: “Everything the characters say is fabrication!”
“These systems were not developed to explain the truth,” the creators of the app said in a recent interview. They are programmed to create an acceptable chat environment. The aim is fun, emotional support, increasing creativity by helping to generate new ideas,” they said.
Unlike ChatGPT, Character.AI did not set out to be a search engine. It works the opposite of that. According to a review published in the New York Times, “Companies using Character.AI want society to acknowledge the shortcomings of chatbots and develop a healthy sense of distrust towards them.”
By the way, no matter who you’re talking to, the responses on Character.AI are always in English. For example, the writings of Karl Kautsky, a 19th-century sociologist, may be difficult to understand today, but his responses on Character.AI are read in clear, plain, and modern English.
Obviously, apps like Character.AI also have some real-world value. The software provides an easy way to get to the core of complex theories and philosophies, especially those written by centuries-old scholars (as in his work on Thiel and Kautsky).
Beyond that, Character. AI appears to be an entirely new service that serves a completely different purpose than ChatGPT and sets it apart from similar systems currently being developed at tech giants like Google and Meta.
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