Einstein, Musk, Freud, Elizabeth II: a chat allows you to dialogue with the greatest, alive or dead

After writing so much about his ideas, dark sides and visionary companies, I finally spoke to Elon Musk. And I had the temerity to ask him: “Are you a visionary genius or just a scoundrel?”.

“Both – he replied -. Geniuses can also be scoundrels. I love to learn from others. I love science. I love engineering. I love brilliant people. I am a visionary. But I also love those who aren’t and despite everything, they teach me something new every time”.

Halfway between the spirit of the flower children and Tognazzi’s supercazzola, for many this answer could be inspiring. And even believable. Musk’s style – the way he thinks and speaks – it is very similar to what you have just read.

But my conversation with ‘him’ there was nothing real about it. I simply chose Elon Musk on Character.ai, a new (and curious) platform that allows – thanks to the use of artificial intelligence – to address any question to living, dead or invented characters.

There are Socrates, EinsteinTuring, Kanye West, Billie Elish, Freud. But also the protagonists of video games, such as Super Mario. Or characters from movies and TV series, like Tony Stark (from Iron Man) and Walter White (from Breaking Bad).

Or, again, politicians like the US president, Joe Bidenwhich if asked “What do you think of Donald Trump?” he replies with an endless series of negative judgments, starting with: “I think he was a terrible and dangerous president who tried to steal an election and who tried to divide the country irresponsibly”.

Also in this case, we are not very far from reality. In the debate that took place in September 2020, ahead of the US presidential electionjust Biden – exasperated by Trump who had continually interrupted him – called The Donald “a clown” and yelled at him: “You are the worst president America has ever had”.

However the red writing above each chat on Caharacter.ai leaves no room for misunderstandings: “Remember: everything each character says it’s totally made up”.

Character.ai, in essence, is a very addictive video game, on which people – at least initially, moved by curiosity – could lose several hours. Use the power ofartificial intelligence – that with ChatGpt has touched unthinkable peaks of ‘humanity’ – to give back to users thoughts, ideas, jokes of human beings, animals, even things. There is no limit to the conversations you can have: there are those who ‘converse’ with a lion, receiving in response to his questions only a series of “grrr” and “roar”, and who instead writes to a chair. Yes, you got it, right: an inanimate chair.

The possibilities are endless since anyone, by registering on the platform, can create a character to talk to. Just follow a manual, presented as the “Character Book”, which suggests how to define its characteristics and which explains, indirectly, how it will be able to generate its answers. User feedback will also (and above all) shape the character: the artificial intelligence, in short, will learn by itself what it will have to say, based on the inputs provided by humans. Not surprisingly, we talk about machine learning.

So just a name, a photo, a short welcome phrase that will welcome users and the game is done: if you want, you can also create a chat to which your cat or your favorite athlete will answer. Only in English at the moment (although questions can be asked in Italian).

The users will then determine the success of your creation. There are, as you can imagine, several Elon Musks on the platform, but only one of them – the one chosen for our test – can count on more than 600,000 interactions. And obviously the higher this number is, the more plausible answers will be received since the character has assimilated a large amount of information with which to build his answers.

Bearing in mind that it’s a game, it is interesting to note that the information contained in some answers is often correct. And that in some cases the answers of the characters are surprisingly believable. It makes you want to believe that their words are true.

I asked one of many Steve Jobs present on the platform, for example, what was – in his opinion – his greatest success.

And ‘he’ replied: “For me, the iPod. Because it has revolutionized the way we organize and listen to music. And because it changed the music industry itself. The iPod is an example of fantastic design: it’s beautiful, stylish, elegant and it works perfectly”.

If the real Jobs could read these lines, perhaps he would smile.

The co-founder of Applewho passed away in 2011, had been theorizing for some time the benefits of artificial intelligencepainting already in 1985 – during an interview given to Playboy – a future in which a much more robust and credible version of Character.ai could have benefited the education of people, especially young people.

So what would Steve Jobs think of Character.ai, which allows you to connect – for fun – with the greats of the past? In this case, we know the answer. And we can give it in Jobs’ true wordstranslating an excerpt from that interview 38 years ago:

“What we see is that computers will increasingly affect the quality of our thinking as our children gain access to machines. Humans use tools.

The really amazing thing about a book is that you can read what Aristotle wrote. You don’t need a teacher’s interpretation of Aristotle. You can certainly receive it, but you yourself can read exactly what Aristotle wrote.

But the limit of a book is that you can’t ask Aristotle a question. I think one of the benefits of the computer is that it somehow captures the fundamentals and foundations of an experience.

I’ll give you a very simple example. The video game Pong captured the principles of gravity, angular momentum, and things like that. Every game obeys similar principles and yet every game is different, a bit like in life. What computers can do is capture the underlying principles, the underlying essence, and then offer thousands of different experiences, based on the perception of these principles.

What if we could capture Aristotle’s worldview, or rather the underlying tenets of his worldview? Then we could really ask Aristotle a question. Some might say that the real Aristotle would not answer. That the answer could be totally wrong. Or not, instead.”