While everyone is talking about OpenAI’s chatbot, ChatGPT, and its impressive reactions, similar software developed by two former Google employees and with fewer headlines could allow you to talk to famous people and characters, even from beyond of the grave.
The beta version of Character.AI (New Window) launched last September and features dialogues with more than 350 famous people or fictional characters such as Super Mario, Albert Einstein, the late Queen Elizabeth II, the singer Billie Eilish and the Greek philosopher Socrates, the Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg or with the psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud.
Of course, we do not come into direct contact with these people. Instead, you communicate with artificial intelligence (AI)-powered language models that have analyzed data from news articles, books, and various sources to produce answers that you could more or less plausibly attribute to these people.
Be careful, everything is made up
With ChatGPT, whose answers contain untruths and completely incoherent passages, the goal is not the accuracy of the information transmitted. Character.AI reminds us of this everywhere, with warnings that say: Remember: everything these characters say is made up!.
It’s more of a fun experience where the tech-savvy community is invited to create their own characters, give them attributes and train them in dialogue.
Needless to say, a hallucinating supercomputer is not a reliable source of information, according to an explanation on the Character.AI page. We hope you find Character.AI a useful tool for imagination, brainstorming, language learning, and a variety of other uses we haven’t thought of yet.
Character.AI’s website is free to access, and apps for iOS and Android are in development, according to the company’s website.