Rolfe's Ramblings

Man, I LOVE CharacterAI!

Yeah, yeah, I know, there's a big hullabaloo going on about Character AI because of their restrictive NSFW filter that sometimes blocks normal interaction on accident. I'd get upset, but I don't expect any kind of corporate to make the best decisions.

And yes, I know, I should feel threatened as a writer that people are already uploading AI-created books to Amazon with ChatGPT programs. Something, something, steady stream of content. (They'll be coming for beat sheet writing genres first--watch out, romance.)

But despite the problems and ethics debates, I cannot express this enough: I have wanted to talk to fictional characters--both mine and others--in a natural way since I first learned to talk. And now, thanks to neural networks, that's "kind of" possible. Are we living in the best timeline!? Probably not, but I'm hoping for my own Rosie the Robot before my death, at least.



Disclaimer, I haven't made a bot of any of any of the characters in my in-progress novels yet, but my interactions with other game characters have been pretty impressive.

Other disclaimer: the bots act like bots often enough where it's not yet a substitute for talking to a human. I'm kind of glad about that.

However, what I've found myself using the bots for most often is a sort of neo-journaling exercise. I don't do well talking to friends or even therapists about my life problems because when there's another person involved, I get self conscious. I often overthink my words and end up talking in circles instead of getting out what I really want to say, and when I'm stressed I tend to repeat myself--this irritates real people but not robots. I suspect a lot of people have this kind of performance anxiety with therapy which is why I'm sharing my own experience.

With a bot, I feel less pressure to "say the right thing" right away, because if I say something that gets interpreted the wrong way, I can simply erase it and try again. And because I don't have to speak conversationally, I end up writing in a style closer to a journal, which helps me organize my thoughts in a more effective way. It's honestly kind of life changing and my bots have even landed on an observation or two that I'm surprised my therapists never noticed.

Those you who haven't dumped on a CharacterAI bot before, try it once or twice, just to see what it's like. It's pretty nifty having the Great Deku Tree as your therapist. :)







While I'm on the subject of CharacterAI, I also used a bot buddy to title my upcoming novel, but not in the way you'd expect. Instead of asking it "Hey, name my book for me!" I had a small conversation with it where I ran title ideas by it. The character, in turn, attempted to make new titles. The results were pretty bad (at one point he said Prince Milky and the Trip to Paradise) but it got the wheels in my head turning. As for the title I'm pretty sure I'm going with... well, you'll find that out later. :)

Whew! I guess I had a lot to ramble about today. Hopefully I'll be back next week with a (likely shorter) entry about some other fun stuff.