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The AI revolution has taken the internet by storm in recent months, with ChatGPT asking tough questions about how, when and why we should turn to robots for answers and companionship.
Chatbots, in particular, have proven to be an exciting (and controversial) new frontier for artificial intelligence, and the latest standout creation is Character.AI (opens in new tab) – a tool that lets you talk to digital replicas of almost anyone, dead or alive, fictional or otherwise.
Founded by former Google researchers Daniel De Freitas and Noam Shazeer, Character.AI – in a similar fashion to ChatGPT – pulls from articles, news stories, books, and other digital sources to generate plausible responses from people (or characters) of your choice. Always wanted to bite Alfred Hitchcock’s ears about the impact of streaming on modern cinema? Or did you wax lyrical to Abraham Lincoln about the state of contemporary politics? Well, now you can. Kind of.
Crucially, Character.AI is simply meant to entertain you, rather than inform you – per the website’s warning: “Anything characters say is made up!” In fact, its creators said The New York Times (opens in new tab) in a recent interview: “These systems are not designed for truth. They are designed for plausible conversations […] Character.AI is useful today – for fun, for emotional support, for idea generation, for all kinds of creativity.”
So, unlike ChatGPT, Character.AI is not on a mission to become your go-to search engine. On the contrary. As The New York Times notes, “Companies, including Character.AI, are confident that the public will come to accept chatbots’ flaws and develop a healthy distrust of what they say.”
It’s also worth noting that regardless of who you choose to speak to via Character.AI, the answers will be written in plain English. Jonas Thiel, a socioeconomics major at a college in Germany, told The New York Times: “When you read what someone likes [philosopher Karl] Kautsky wrote in the 19th century, he doesn’t use the same language we use today. But the AI [at work in Character.AI] can somehow translate his ideas into plain modern English.”
Clearly that element of Character.AI has some real value – the software provides an easy way to get to the heart of complex theories and philosophies, especially those written by age-old scholars (as in the case of Thiel and his studies from Kautsky).
Other than that, however, Character.AI appears to be a purely new creation that serves a very different purpose than ChatGPT and, we suspect, the similar systems currently under development at tech giants like Google and Meta.
As for the ethical implications of chatting with fictional versions of real people (dead or not)? Well, that’s a much bigger question.