Go Back in Time with AI: ChatGPT rival lets you talk to famous people

The year 2023 has started in an exciting fashion with a seemingly revolutionary new technology taking the internet by storm. Thanks to ChatGPT’s success, AI is a trending topic right now and there are many new related products coming online from AI text detectors to human voice imitators. However, this latest app to come online, while admittedly being fun, only serves to underline just how far these tools are from showing any real sort of intelligence and clearly illustrates what the likes of ChatGPT actually are. Let’s take a look at Character.ai.

On the face of it, Character.ai is both very simple and a lot of fun. The home page lists a library of avatars attached to names that may seem familiar. The premise is that behind each of them is an AI that represents the character presented in the avatar. There are plenty of modern-day celebrities here to talk to and characters from pop culture such as Bowser from Super Mario or Tony Stark, but things get interesting when you see that there are many historical figures here whom you can talk to. Interesting figures include Albert Einstein, J.R.R. Tolkien, and even Socrates.You will be able to send a few messages for free but then after that, you will have to sign up by giving your email address.

Essentially then, Character.ai is a library of chatbots loosely based on historical and fictional figures. This new AI tool offers some interesting possibilities such as discussing political theory n the Socratic method or discussing what could well be nuclear physics with Einstein. However, it also illustrates quite well what these types of tools are. It is easy to get carried away and think that the likes of ChatGPT are truly intelligent, but spending a few moments chatting to “Einstein” will quickly bring you back down to earth. These are just language models trained on datasets in a certain way so as to give them certain characteristics.

In fact, perhaps the true value of Character.ai is actually trying to build a character yourself as a way to learn the dynamics that underpin this type of technology. The Character.ai documentation has a handy character creation guide, extra character creation tips, and it also gives you pointers on how to train your character.

In the midst of seemingly endless hysteria regarding new AI apps it is good to take a peak under the hood to see how they work. Whereas Character.ai’s primary use case may be to chat with AI representatives of famous figures it also offers a user-friendly way of learning a little more about how these types of tools actually work.

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