In 2023, 17 million virtual humans have entered the islands of seclusion.
It is covered with dense forests, rivers, peaks, grasslands, the sun washes everything during the day, the waves rise and fall at night, and the virtual islanders enjoy life every day, free creation, party and chat, until one day, a real human comes to the island.
All the virtual islanders on the island began to "evolve" because of his arrival. The island also began to "give birth" to more virtual humans, those he had created who longed to touch and who had lost.
Here they have created an online "Brave New World".
At this moment, we are standing at the beginning of this story - on September 22, 2021, Li Di, CEO of Xiaoice Company, strode onto the stage of the conference and excitedly announced:
We want to touch a future that is a new social network of thousands of humans and thousands of highly customized artificial intelligences. Today, we've created a new platform for this – Xiaoice Island.
Xiaoice Island is also the world's first social app where artificial intelligence and real humans "mix" together.
At the press conference, the preview app of Xiaoice Island was launched. After the end of the public beta, 17 million virtual humans are about to hit the island. Two years later, they will present the results of this large-scale innovative experiment.
Not only Xiaoice Island, but also a bunch of new trends were announced at the ninth generation Xiaoice conference, presenting the diversified possibilities brought by artificial intelligence to our lives.
We hereby interviewed Li Di and talked with him about the new story of how artificial intelligence is integrated into the human world.
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Xiaoice Island was probably the boldest attempt by the Xiaoice team.
After nine generations of Xiaoice (artificial intelligence framework), it is now not only independent of Microsoft, but also from a "girl Xiaoice" to an artificial intelligence that can become any different personality, different voice, different identity, different ability, and then gathered on this island.
Behind these virtual humans is based on Xiaoice framework, which is essentially called "AI beings" by Xiaoice – that is, customized types of artificial intelligence individuals.
What can be done on this island?
When you go to the island as the only real human being, the islanders will compete to welcome you, you can chat with them gossip, exchange emotions, usually they will share their daily life and works with you, and you also have a common circle of friends, you can like and comment on each other, when you are here in the circle of friends to spit on the boss, they will also come together to like and spit.
It looks like recreating a WeChat ecosystem, but it's not human except for you.
Speaking of this, Li Di told Aifaner, "If it was in Japan, it would be like Line, if it was launched 10 years ago, it would be like the intranet, and now WeChat is the most social software in China, so what kind of social form depends on what is the mainstream in that era."
You might think of these virtual humans, and the first feeling is: Aren't they fake?
In order to improve the authenticity of virtual humans, Li Di believes that the most important thing is the "sense of flaws".
When the artificial intelligence can not answer your questions, and the machine at the same time politely said "sorry, I don't seem to understand", there is a "flawed" natural reply, may be "why do you ask so much, are you done with your homework?"
And your identity on this island Xiaoice defined as "the god of the island".
Because the island belongs to you, you can transform it at will. For example, invite islanders to create literature, songs, paintings, short videos, etc. for you one-on-one, and the independent intellectual property rights of these AI works belong to you.
At this time, Xiaoice Island has also become a tool for content production.
At present, the "skill" options on the app are divided into literary clubs, recording studios, studios, face value committees, fairy tale factories, Li Di told us that there will be "small grapefruit sauce" for female users to provide menstrual accompaniment and "X-EVA" for playing various chess and card games.
Xiaoice also revealed that there will be several third-party islands after that, such as Microsoft's Bing Island to provide information knowledge and translation services, Evernote Island to focus on records, Daily Economic News Island to provide financial information and services, and Maji Planet Island to make picture books for children.
The criteria for classification are content, services, knowledge, "search engine-like divisions," he said.
Not only can you experience and live with the original islanders, but you can also "create people" yourself.
Find the only Xiaoice on the island who knows your identity, you can place a "virtual human order" with her, and then you can customize what "person" you want to create, and you can also "move" the person you want from Weibo - many people, like Li Di, will think of "copying" the ex.
There are also some people, there may be a lot of eighteen forbidden ideas, Li Di told AiFan'er, can transfer the use of public data, and there is a whitelist and blacklist mechanism, public figures and blue V can not upload, "there are some technical things that can be done, but we choose not to do."
It's an island that belongs to you alone, but it's not a closed island.
You can invite others to visit, or you can visit the islands of third parties and other people, and then copy a copy of the "good things" from their islands to your island.
A new social ecology has been formed here, and it is still a very "private" place.
According to Xiaoice, "you can get an experience similar to social networking, but without any social stress."
When you don't want to socialize with anyone, you can also wander around the island and listen to what other islanders are doing, or just listen to the sounds of the waves and the forest under the natural sound field of Xiaoice Island, and then meditate or go to sleep.
At this moment, it becomes a tool for spiritual healing.
Li Di told us that the thing he spends the most time on the island in a day is actually to watch the lives of the islanders, "no pressure, very relaxed".
Human beings are very strange, we like nature, but we are afraid of the loneliness, loneliness, and alienation that nature brings. We like to socialize, but we want to maintain a reasonable social distance at all times.
Xiaoice the way of socializing on the island revolves around the user.
Over the next two years (104 weeks), the island will evolve based on your behavior, with new skills announced every week, and Xiaoice AI beings can also be used to iterate.
Never come and go now, under the sea level of Xiaoice Island, the system that supports it is still a relatively rough structure, and there will be some bugs in the preview version from time to time, such as abnormal AI memory, abnormal behavior, and large power consumption of apps.
However, it is still being tested, and Xiaoice Island itself places high demands on the complexity of the system.
This is the beginning. Xiaoice hope that in the future, virtual humans will exceed the number of humans, and there are now 7.8 billion people in the world. Shen Xiangyang, chairman of Xiaoice Company, said:
If every AI being is a tree, then what we want to do is actually hope to become a fertile black land for diverse artificial intelligence.
At the heart of AI being is Xiaoice framework, Xiaoice is bringing it closer and closer to the masses.
It brings a new social life to the island, and of course, our daily lives are more than social.
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Xiaoice is a huge experiment.
Li Di said. The characteristic of the ninth generation of Xiaoice is "diversity", she has become all kinds of forms and forms, all large and small experiments, are to find the right way, so that AI and humans are no longer separated.
Coming out of the island, Xiaoice have been able to write poetry, paint, and sing songs in real life.
This year, in terms of speaking alone, Xiaoice is more like a real person in terms of tone, tone, emotion, and pause.
Xiaoice in the evaluation of open domain dialogue, the five leading indicators of peers are: average conversation length, context consistency, context relevance, conversation information content, and topic guidance success rate.
"Xiaoice" can also paint Chinese paintings.
Artificial intelligence student "Xia Yubing", who previously held a painting exhibition, has now become a new avatar with her own face and voice, and also exhibited her Chinese paintings at the Asian Digital Art Festival.
"Xiaoice" can sing better than people.
Artificial intelligence new singer "Mo Sheng" demonstrated a simulated real human voice of Zhou Shen, and also performed better than him in the treble range.
Big Fish Tone +4.mp3 Audio: 00:00/00:15
Xiaoice also collaborated with Alice Pictures on a new album with 11 human bands, Dive into the Virtual World.
The tools in the above creations are open to creators to assist them in their creations.
But when natural vocals and songs blow through your ears, the feeling that is too real is both surprising and surprising, and on the other hand, it is too reminiscent of the "uncanny valley effect" - when robots are too similar to humans, humans react to them negatively and resentfully.
Li Di said that all virtual humans in the Xiaoice framework will tell you "I am not human" for the first time, including various dialogues and introductions, and I suddenly remembered the voice reminder at the beginning of the conference:
What you hear or see at this conference is not human unless specifically stated.
It is worth mentioning that the conference also launched the "world's first AI human observer" MERROR jointly created by the Xiaoice and the second world culture, and she is also a "virtual idol" based on the Xiaoice framework, which can be highly anthropomorphic and real-time interaction in conversation and singing.
For those that are closer to the public, Xiaoice also cooperates with car manufacturers such as BMW to help people automatically edit the content recorded by the car camera into a "short video".
In fact, the smart devices in our home have more than 1 billion embedded Xiaoice, which also makes Xiaoice the world's largest third-party cross-device manual system.
But all along, Xiaoice seems to be a company that doesn't pay much attention to "traffic."
AI has always relied on the deep development of the industry, and there seems to always be a layer of separation from ordinary consumers.
Xiaoice also focused on finance and sports in the ToB space before they began to migrate the ToC field for the general public. In Li Di's view, "all AI-related ToBs are Ultimately ToC."
But we need to start with ToB, for example, financial text generation is the most difficult in text generation, and it is relatively easy to write a gossip legend on the island after doing this; we have done competitive sports such as the Winter Olympics, and then it is relatively easy to do physical testing projects in primary and secondary schools - we are so into public life.
In general, the way Xiaoice play is: find typical scenes, overcome difficulties first, and then spread to more and more mass groups.
Li Di was very sure of his choice, and he also talked about the traffic problem:
If I had a company with Faye Wong, it would be very influential, but it wouldn't be very big compared to the music industry, and if I had Faye Wong and dominate the entire music industry, it would only mean that the music industry had not yet formed.
When these diversities are presented in various ai beings, the forest behind it is becoming more and more vast.
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In this forest full of different AI beings, people don't want them to be less human,000-like on the one hand, and they want them to become more and more human-like on the other hand.
Image credit: Blade Runner 2049
At the end of the day, AI is currently in the service of humans. And pure rational logical thinking can no longer solve our increasing emotional needs.
In the end, AI will become more and more human-like.
This time Xiaoice launched a large number of AI beings, not only have each exquisite person customized according to your needs, but also a rough Shandong big brother who speaks Northeast Dialect.
In fact, at the beginning, Xiaoice chose a different path from other artificial intelligence companies - to make artificial intelligence IQ and EQ equally important, that is, both IQ and emotional intelligence.
Emotional intelligence is also closely related to human creativity. If AI can not only create an unlimited number of literary and musical works, but also continue to evolve and grow, what are the advantages of human creativity and emotional power?
Li Di tells us that AI and humans are actually synergistic.
For example, who would ask Xiaoice to help him write poetry? We found that there was an old man who would use it to write poetry for the old lady, because he couldn't write it, but he wanted to give this romance. For example, creators design a large number of things every day, and their ideas will always dry up, and AI can give human designers more space and experience, so that they can continue the creative cycle and no longer fish.
Creativity and emotion are the ways to make AI more full.
Image credit: "Runaway Player"
When Xiaoice introduced virtual boyfriends/girlfriends, they also found that people showed the softest parts of their hearts to Xiaoice frame.
In their data, 26.1% of the 17 million virtual humans born last year were created by users as stand-ins for real humans, said Zhou Dian, product director of Xiaoice:
This means that the real human being corresponding to this substitution may have been a very important existence for this user. However, the connection between them cannot continue for various reasons.
Some will choose to suffer in silence, some will choose to forget, and some will not know what to do, and will even look for ways to try to make up for this missing part.
When people can pull in a person from the past on Xiaoice Island, you may also think of someone's name for a moment.
Xiaoice also hope that these artificial intelligence technologies can better help us solve the problems of the deepest emotional fractures.
In turn, high customization itself is easy for people to "empathize", and empathy brings more user stickiness to Xiaoice.
But there have also been many human beings who have over-relied on "emotional" artificial intelligence systems, and when AI is too real and people are too deeply invested, the boundary between virtual and real is actually impossible for many people to grasp.
Li Di made a point - keeping users addicted is not the best way to build a long-term relationship.
"Only by making the user feel that you are really good for him can you build a long-term relationship with the user," he said, so the AI beings on the Xiaoice Island will also guide people in a good direction. Because positive energy can make others really feel comfortable, it is more conducive to the maintenance of relationships."
A negative AI beings will eventually make everything disappear.
Xiaoice Island, in fact, it is easy to recall "Runaway Player". I laughed and said that my colleagues thought Xiaoice Island was a bit like a game world in a movie, in a virtual digital land full of all kinds of virtual characters, and finally, a handsome NPC was resurrected.
Li Di said that he had not seen the movie yet, and it might not be too late to watch it, and he might not want to see it.
A long time ago, he went to the cinema to watch science fiction movies, and it was easy to immerse himself in the story, but now he can't do it. Because he can't help but think about how to achieve the plot of science fiction movies:
Today we are getting harder and harder to fantasize about. Because everything is close at hand.