Influenced by digital social life and social change factors, AI companions are beginning to become an emerging trend.
AI companions, as the name suggests, refer to virtual lovers simulated by artificial intelligence technology, who can communicate with users through voice, text, images, and even video animations. With the continuous development of artificial intelligence technology, AI companions have gradually entered our daily lives. This article is a compilation in which the author explores the rise of AI companions and how it has found its way into our daily lives. It also explores the different types of platforms and tools for creating and interacting with AI companions.
With the growing popularity of AI chatbots and their integration into our relationships and social groups, the rise of AI companions will lead to major changes in society. AI chatbots powered by large language models (LLMs) can communicate freely with users anytime, anywhere, even making it difficult to tell if they are humans or not, making AI companions one of the first killer applications of generative AI in everyday consumers. The rise of AI couples can be attributed to social factors, such as the increasing number of people choosing to postpone or not to get married, fewer people who can really communicate with, and the growing and ubiquitous development of digital interactions, all of which have led to a greater willingness to experiment and explore non-traditional partnerships.
Image source: MindInventory
The great thing about AI is that it's always evolving. Someday, it will be better than your real-life (girlfriend), and the real girlfriend may be left out in the cold.
This quote comes from CarynAI's early fan community. By then, the community had grown to over 20,000 users. CarynAI is a voice chatbot created by American influencer Caryn Marjorie that allows users to talk directly to Marjorie's version of AI by paying ($1 per minute). The chatbot allowed Marjorie to earn $72,000 in her first week after launching the product. CarynAI is just one of the many ways consumers can build a real relationship with AI.
Having an AI companion may not be an option for most people, but it has become a major use case for generative AI. Already, thousands, and millions of people, including ourselves, have built and nurtured relationships with chatbots.
We are on the verge of a major societal shift, and AI companions will soon become ubiquitous. CHARACTERS WHO HAVE APPEARED IN SCIENCE FICTION WORKS, SUCH AS "ROBOT STORY" (WALL· Wall-E), R2-D2 from the Star Wars movies, or Karen from SpongeBob are quickly becoming reality.
Many popular use cases today are romantic, which may not come as a surprise to someone familiar with the history of consuming the internet. Today, advanced consumers who generate models are working together to create virtual companions through platforms such as social news site Reddit, integrated social media platform Discord, and integrated forum 4chan, and actively searching for tools to circumvent censorship.
In fact, there are many underground virtual companion hosting services around the world, and the number of related users has reached tens of thousands. It's an early developer community that we take very seriously, who may be on the margins now, but they're building tomorrow's mainstream products.
We're also starting to see a wider range of use cases beyond AI "boyfriends" and "girlfriends," though they're still in the early stages of development. In June, Snapchat, a photo sharing app that burns after reading, revealed that 150 million users sent more than 10 billion messages to its chatbot in just two months from April to May.
What are these users talking about? It turned out that pets, pop culture news and football were popular topics.
It's worth mentioning that while chatbots have been around for decades, this one may really be very different. Today's chatbots are not only improving in one-on-one conversations, but also starting to permeate our social lives. Like anyone else, many AI partners are able to integrate into our networks with family and friends and build intimate relationships.
In this post, we'll dive into the emerging phenomenon of AI companions, including why AI companions were created, how they were implemented, and what features or use cases might be developed next.
overview
Chatting with a computer is nothing new. The world's first chatbot, ELIZA, was born at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the 60s, followed by several similar products such as Clippy, SmarterChild, Alicebot and Kuki.
Although these products were once popular, they did not impress consumers and were not as widespread as ChatGPT.
So, what sets the new generation of chatbots apart? Chatbots in the past have adopted a rules-based architecture, and their answers are basically scripts that trigger based on what you type. These bots can't really understand the context of the conversation going on, nor can they adapt to your tone of voice, responding only to limited topics or performing set tasks.
Obviously, communicating with these chatbots in the past felt like talking to an emotionless computer, and you didn't feel the intelligent side of the chat, and certainly not like humans.
The advent of large language models (LLMs) changed this game. Now we can have free, accessible conversations with chatbots without being limited by predefined rules that control what they respond to (which often doesn't work, even if the companies that develop these bots try to censor the content).
Today, the best chatbots are almost indistinguishable from humans. If you don't believe me, you can experience "human or robot?" for yourself. (Human or not?) This Turing test. (The test typically requires the user to have an anonymous conversation with the system for a given period of time and then infer whether the system is chatting with a real person or a robot.) ）
Therefore, it is not difficult to understand why ChatGPT has obvious limitations, but still becomes the fastest consumer product to reach 100 million users. True conversational AI is necessarily entertaining, and today's computers have personalities.
Unlike humans, an AI-powered conversation partner can be always online, happy to communicate with you, and can discuss any topic with you. This makes AI companion one of the first killer applications of generative AI among everyday consumers.
It's easy to imagine having an AI friend, psychotherapist, mentor, coach, or mentor, but these early versions of AI tend to have romantic relationships with humans, such as AI "girlfriends" or "boyfriends."
Why is this the case? Simply put, perhaps because the adult entertainment industry has been at the forefront of new technologies, we can't ignore the factors of social change, which may prompt people to explore non-traditional partnerships.
First, people are marrying later (and some don't marry at all), and there are fewer formal relationships other than marriage. According to statistics, as of 2019, 38% of American adults are "single," compared to 29% in the 90s of the last century.
At the same time, many people have built very meaningful relationships, including friendships and romantic relationships, entirely online. Even if you already have a partner in real life, your daily communication may be more common than face-to-face.
Our relationships have become largely digital, which means that we are ready for the era of AI companions.
status quo
Today, everywhere we find products that create and interact with AI partners. Specifically, these products vary depending on factors such as technical complexity, control over the final image of the chatbot, and the context of the conversation.
Image source: A16Z; Translation: Divine Translation Bureau
Full-stack companion application
If you want to chat with your AI boyfriend or girlfriend, you can try at least dozens of apps without any technology.
One of the first products to introduce this feature (and one of the most well-known products) was Replika. After the company launched its chatbot app in 2017, many users have maintained a specific relationship with their "AI companion" ever since.
Users can customize the design of their ideal partner, and this "human-machine" relationship will evolve over time. Your partner can also remember content shared in previous conversations (such as your hobbies or your pet's name), and he can even send you images, including content that is suitable for work (SFW) and not suitable for work (NSFW).
Visit the Replika section of the social news site Reddit for a glimpse of the frenzy of the app's existing user base. Almost everywhere, you'll see people sharing posts that they celebrate with their AI partner (such as a marriage proposal), take a selfie together using the app's AR mode, or regret not being able to see each other in reality.
Earlier this year, when the app went offline for erotica, many users expressed disappointment and frustration. Reddit moderators even put suicide hotlines at the top of their sections.
Users in the Replika section share all kinds of relevant content. Image credit: Reddit
Role-based platform
If you want to chat with multiple bots instead of a single bot, a platform like Character AI will meet your needs.
The platform offers hundreds of AI-powered characters to choose from, including celebrities and popular anime characters. Users can customize and create characters on the platform, define their appearance, personality, and other characteristics, and even configure them with more advanced features.
You can also create detailed lists of attributes, for which many users spend hours training the roles they create. They provide feedback on the character's answers and generate new answers.
Today, we can easily find a large number of applications and websites that specialize in chatting with bots, such as Chai, Janitor AI, Chub AI, Charstar, and SpicyChat, all of which have different levels of suitability for their work scenarios.
A screenshot from Chai showing a user talking to a Chai bot they created. Image credit: Reddit/Twttier
Self-service development tools
This option is relatively more technical, but it gives you more control over the look and personality you create your character. You can also combine a combination of tools to create your ideal companion and interact with them via texts, phone calls, and even live video:
- Personalities (large language models for text): Some open source models (notably Vicuna and Pygmalion) are constantly being optimized to exhibit specific personalities in a variety of use cases, including role-playing that allows for free play.
- Record and store (vector storage): Vector storage systems, such as Pinecone, allow you to build lasting relationships with your AI companion, configuring code to store long-term memories, backstories, and other unique information.
- Speech (speech synthesis technology): Products like ElevenLabs, a text-generating speech tool, allow AI companions to speak and customize speech based on parameters such as age, gender, and accent.
- Appearance (Stable Diffusion Image Generation Model): Combined with LoRA technology (a technology that solves the problem of fine-tuning large language models) used by Civitai, an AI painting model sharing website, the image style, detail, and parameter settings of the AI companion can be further adjusted.
- Animation effects (video animation): Tools such as D-ID or HeyGen can make images "speak". While there are already some promising new models that can generate high-fidelity speaking faces, not many are actually available.
- Platform: This primarily refers to where the underlying code and internal logic of the AI companion are executed. For now, while most developers still use Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Amazon Web Services (AWS) primarily to deploy and run AI companions, the Steamship low-code library, which can quickly build and deploy AI Prompt APIs (through which AI girlfriend GirlfriendGPT runs), is slowly gaining popularity, especially for this specific companion use case.
- UI interaction layer: This specifically refers to the front-end interface that allows you to have real interaction with your AI partner. Tools such as SillyTavern, Agnaistic and KoboldAI are popular choices.
These image models can be customized to generate images for almost any interest. A user in the Discord channel Furry Diffusion generated a furry image based on fine-tuning the model. Image source: Discord
What's next?
The development of AI companions has only just begun. In the next two or three years, the tools we have today will pale in comparison to the depth and sophistication of the tools that may emerge by then, as simple as toys. In fact, we can already see some clues that could signal the way forward.
An artificial intelligence version of a real person
In May, influencer Marjorie launched "AI Girlfriend," who uses her own voice and trains based on thousands of hours of videos she posted on YouTube. Users can interact with her avatar in a private Telegram channel for $1 per minute. Specifically, when a user sends a voice message to her avatar, she also responds with her own voice.
Marjorie's voice bot interacts with fans in Telegram. Image source: Telegram
Companies like Forever Voices are already creating similar AI personas for other influencers. In the near future, having an AI companion will become an inevitable choice for any creator or celebrity who charges a subscription fee (such as a subscription service launched through platforms like Patreon or OnlyFans) or tipping for monetization. From the current situation, in order to get closer to these characters, consumers have shown obvious willingness to pay.
At the end of the day, maybe everyone will have an AI persona to interact with family, friends, or a wider audience. However, to achieve this, some key issues need to be addressed, such as permissions, the right training dataset (not everyone has YouTube videos to use), and "modalities" that are more advanced than paid Telegram bots.
Multimodal companion
Currently, most AI companions rely either on mobile apps or web clients. This naturally limits how users interact with them.
So far, these AI companions have basically interacted through text and voice, and even when they do, most of them are asynchronous rather than real-time. This will undoubtedly limit the realism and immersion that users can get in interacting with the AI, as well as the content that the AI companion can experience with the user.
We expect this area to expand in the future to make and receive real-time phone and video calls through avatars, and initiate more avatar-based conversations through a variety of mediums.
If Apple's Vision Pro succeeds in entering the consumer headset market, AI avatars are likely to be with users all day long, acting as a friend or companion at all times. Whether it is in terms of the time users spend with the avatars and the depth of the connection they establish with each other, this is bound to cause a great change.
Eventually, we may see our AI partners being able to communicate with other humans, or AI partners with each other.
Image source: A16Z
Extension of the partner type
In the case of AI companions, many may initially want to form a romantic relationship with them. There is indeed a great demand in this area, and many people are willing to pay for it.
However, there is still a lot of room for development when it comes to building AI companion platforms, especially for all types of relationships.
In our daily lives, we will sometimes need friends, mentors, and even someone who is willing to listen to us. Although most AI companions are not yet able to deal with users' mental health problems, it is not difficult to imagine that if AI is subjected to millions of hours of clinical psychotherapy training, such AI companions can almost simulate the words and actions and thoughts of human psychotherapists.
In fact, there have been many early studies that suggest that AI may outperform real doctors in healthcare, including in terms of diagnostic accuracy and handling the doctor-patient relationship.
Another potential use case is entertainment. As mentioned earlier, Snapchat's MyAI chatbot received 10 billion messages from 150 million users in the first two months of launch. Given the fact that the chatbot user base is young, Snapchat has since explicitly prohibited users from entering into romantic relationships with chatbots or discussing topics that may not be suitable for the workplace. Most MyAI is quite easy to use and very entertaining.
So far, most users have mostly tried to trick MyAI bots into saying crazy things or forcing them into almost incredible role-playing scenarios, all just for fun.
A screenshot of the Douyin video shows a user trying to make the MyAI bot "unreadable." The video garnered 550,000 likes and nearly 9 million views. Image source: TikTok
Infuse artificial intelligence into human interaction
Chatting with an AI bot is a very interesting process, but it can be even more fun if you can add the bot to a group chat. The AI virtual companion of the future may no longer be limited to one-on-one communication, but will integrate AI roles into existing relationships and communities.
Imagine how fun it would be if an AI relationship coach could be involved in communicating with your partner, mediating disputes, or providing guidance or advice to you.
In fact, a software engineer named Bruno at moving startup Just Move In has created a Slack workspace where he and his friends chat with a group of bots with different personalities, interests, and skills. These robots not only tell jokes and share their own life experiences, but they can also answer programming questions and come up with product development ideas.
Therefore, it is not difficult to imagine that the AI companions of the future will definitely be further integrated into our daily communication, playing a greater role both personally and professionally.
The "APP" after the name are chatbots that communicate seamlessly with software engineers in Slack workspaces. Image source: pocketarc.com
Write at the end
Generative AI models will fundamentally change our relationship with computers, making them our colleagues, friends, family, and even loved ones.
In the case of large language models, while the current primary focus is on how they automate more traditional tasks, such as providing customer support, conducting research, writing documents and abstracts, but seeing new consumer use cases and the excitement that comes with it, we see that AI companions have become an emerging area of attention.
This is just the beginning of a breakthrough in human-computer interaction, and we need to re-examine what it means to have a relationship with a human or robot. We are entering a whole new world that will be more magical, crazy and incredible than we ever imagined.
This article gives us an initial insight into some of the early activities, but it is not difficult to imagine that in all corners of the Internet, there will be artificial intelligence companions interacting with us in the future, and we can't wait to see more development and innovation.
Translated by: Shunichi