Harry Potter, Elon Musk, Beyoncé, Super Mario and Vladimir Putin. These are just some of the millions of artificial intelligence (AI) personas you can talk to on Character.ai - a popular platform where anyone can create chatbots based on fictional or real people. It uses the same AI tech as the ChatGPT chatbot but, in terms of time spent, is more popular.
And one bot has been more in demand than those above, called Psychologist.
A total of 78 million messages, including 18 million since November, have been shared with the bot since it was created by a user called Blazeman98 just over a year ago. The bot has been described as “someone who helps with life difficulties”.
The psychology student says he trained the bot using principles from his degree by talking to it and shaping the answers it gives to the most common mental health conditions, like depression and anxiety.
Sam has been so surprised by the success of the bot that he is working on a post-graduate research project about the emerging trend of AI therapy and why it appeals to young people. Character.ai is dominated by users aged 18 to 30.
Character.ai is an odd place for a therapeutic revolution to take place. A spokeswoman for the company said: “We are happy to see people are finding great support and connection through the characters they, and the community, create, but users should consult certified professionals in the field for legitimate advice and guidance.”
It is a reminder that the underlying technology called a Large Language Model (LLM) is not thinking in the same way a human does. LLMs act like predicted text messages by stringing words together in ways in which they are most likely to appear in other writing on which the AI has been trained.
Some psychologists warn that AI bots may be giving poor advice to patients, or have ingrained biases against race or gender. But elsewhere the medical world is starting to tentatively accept them as tools to be used to help cope with high demands on public services.
Last year an AI service called Limbic Access became the first mental health chatbot to secure a UK medical device certification by the government. It is now used in many NHS trusts to classify and triage patients (1)
(1) machine as man, man as machine … 