Character.AI
Article
Character.AI is a recurring organization in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between January 26, 2023 and September 18, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “Character.AI lets you simulate people directly”; “the youth have all fallen in love with AI girlfriends and boyfriends on character.ai”. It most often appears alongside Bostrom, Eliezer Yudkowsky, AIDER.
Metadata
- Category: Organizations
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: January 26, 2023
- Last seen: September 18, 2024
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Bostrom (2 shared issues)
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- Eliezer Yudkowsky (2 shared issues)
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- AIDER (1 shared issues)
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- Ajeya Cotra (1 shared issues)
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- Alan Turing (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaFold (1 shared issues)
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- AlphaGeometry (1 shared issues)
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- aphid (1 shared issues)
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- Buddha (1 shared issues)
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- ChatGPT (1 shared issues)
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- ChatGPT (1 shared issues)
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- Darth Vader (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
But the essay brings up another connotation: to simulate is to pretend to be something. A simulator wears many masks. If you ask GPT to complete a romance novel, it will simulate a romance author and try to write the text the way they would. Character.AI lets you simulate people directly, asking GPT to pretend to be George Washington or Darth Vader.
Inline links: Character.AI
GPT doesn’t really like me. And it’s not lying, saying it likes me when it really doesn’t. It’s simulating a character, deciding on the fly how the character would answer this question, and then answering it. If this were Character.AI and it was simulating Darth Vader, it would answer “No, I will destroy you with the power of the Dark Side!” Darth Vader and the-character-who-likes-me-here are two different masks of GPT-3.
All these milestones have fallen in the most ambiguous way possible. GPT-4 can create excellent art and passable poetry, but it’s just sort of blending all human art into component parts until it understands them, then doing its own thing based on them. AlphaGeometry can invent novel proofs, but only for specific types of questions in a specific field, and not really proofs that anyone is interested in. AlphaFold solved the difficult scientific problem of protein folding, but it was “just mechanical”, spitting out the conformations of proteins the same way a traditional computer program spits out the digits of pi. Apparently the youth have all fallen in love with AI girlfriends and boyfriends on character.ai, but this only proves that the youth are horny and gullible.