Ghostwriter and Doctor Dream

My experiences with Character.AI

Now that the dust has settled on ChatGPT and Bing/Sydney, and before Google releases Bard, I thought I’d tell you about Ghostwriter and Doctor Dream. They are two artificial intelligences that I made. And you can make some, too.

The site is: beta.character.ai and it will take you to Character.AI, a website which allows us the opportunity to make (or, sculpt) an artificial intelligence with which we can interact. Doctor Dream is a dream interpreter. So you tell him your dreams, and then he will explain what it means and how it impacts your life. The dataset used is surprisingly comprehensive. And when it hallucinates you don’t really know, since it is hard to tell what is and is a correct dream interpretation!

Fortunately the developers include a warning:

Remember: Everything Characters say is made up!

Which I found myself sometimes forgetting.

The second artificial intelligence I created is Ghostwriter. It has been created to help the user explore story ideas. It uses some of the concepts from the game Microscope RPG, a bit of underlying fiction structure, and a friendly and optimist artificial personality. One of the best things about character.ai is that it utilizes speech to text and text to speech technology. So you can simply talk to Ghostwriter and engage in a conversation rather than having to type. Ghostwriter can be given a voice, from a fairly comprehensive selection. Nothing great, but surprisingly good enough.

This verbal interaction is what we all thought Siri or Alexa were going to be. It really is a game changer, and brings up recollection of the movie. Her. We aren’t there yet, but it is in the immediate future.