John Lin is a small-town pharmacist who takes great pride in his work. He enjoys helping people and making it easy for his customers to get their medicine. He lives with his wife, a college professor, and their son, a student of music theory. He is active in local politics and friendly with his neighbour. John Lin thinks his neighbour is a kind man. And he loves his family very much.
John Lin is also a chatbot, a souped-up version of ChatGPT. He “lives” in a digital hamlet called Smallville alongside two dozen other chatbots. He and his neighbours were placed there recently by a team of computer scientists from Stanford and Google to create a society with “believable human behaviour”. The modern generative AI movement has moved through text, image, audio and video. It is now attempting community.
“The main idea here is to ask ourselves, ‘Can we now create humanlike agents that can populate an open-world setting?’” Joon Sung Park, a computer science PhD student at Stanford, told me. He’s the lead author of the recent paper describing the project. “If we poke at the right angle, we can retrieve believable human behaviour in a very narrow setting.”