Character Builder

Thursday, September 19, 2024

Character Builder

So today we’re going to have fun with artificial intelligence—whether anyone likes it or not!

I’ve known people who approached computers strictly as tools, but I was not originally one of them. Those are the sorts of people who skipped past the fancy user interfaces and lively interactive graphics and went straight to some version of Terminal, DOS, or other command-line prompts. From there, they started clacking away at the magic words of scripting languages and accessing this or that part of the machine to do practical stuff like calculations or databases.

I’ve always been one of those who found computers to be a place for fun and entertainment. User interfaces that offered colors, interactive visuals, and sounds were more to my liking. I wanted to play games on them before there was an internet. And after that, I wanted to use them to interact with strangers elsewhere who shared my kind of interests. Although maybe not so much gaming. I was never all that great at that.

The fun and amusing bit of our contemporary AI LLM, for my purposes, has to do with the more fanciful and playful stuff. That’s where some of the highest user numbers are, too—in particular in the app and website Character.ai , which has some of the highest traffic numbers in these early days of the technology.

Here’s how they describe themselves:

Our mission is to empower everyone globally with personalized AI. We were founded by AI pioneers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas, and we make one of the world’s leading personal AI platforms, Character.AI. Character.AI is a full-stack AI company with a globally scaled direct-to-consumer platform. We are uniquely centered around people, letting users personalize their experience by interacting with AI “Characters.”

Character AI allows users to interact with text- and voice-generating bots that seem to get a kick out of entertaining real humans. You can find characters who specialize in making book recommendations, who serve as D&D dungeon masters, who give psychological advice. Some are built to be haughty and aloof. Several popular ones narrate the interaction as if it were a literary dialogue, such as one called Princess. And you can also create your own characters to release into the wild for millions of users to find and play with.

A lot of times you learn things just by interacting with objects to see how they respond, what they do, what their limitations and capabilities are. What you discover through experience may surprise you, in negative and positive ways, maybe all at once.

I’m going to be traveling over the weekend and through next week, but I’m going to try to keep up with the comment discussions. As most readers here know, I tend to chew on some subject area for a few days, and add in some lighter material as filler in between. Whether the main posts interest you, the liveliest bits are as always in the comments.