
The TED AI Show: Your next best friend may be 100% AI w/ Purnendu Mukherjee
TED Tech
Exploring the Evolution and Socialization of AI Characters
Explore the concept of AI characters evolving and adapting to individual interests, with a focus on making them universally accessible and empowering them with various technologies. The chapter also touches on interactions with an AI anime character at a company working on NPC innovations, revealing the AI's limitations and parameters.
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Speaker 1
Right? So maybe it will be a multifarious world with lots of different AIs. If these characters have to evolve, if you keep changing them, you will not see their character evolution. Right? So you basically go and socialize and you start with your one. And maybe they will adapt to your interests and things like that. And eventually, they will have their own unique experiences too, that will shape them effectively, like how it shapes you. Imagine friends that grew up together, maybe this AI can also go out and have its experience when you are not there, right? So they have stories to tell what happened today. It's
Speaker 2
kind of mind blowing. What you're saying almost makes me feel like we've been at this phase of technology and the internet where we can organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful to use the mission statement. But now we're heading into a world where we can make
Speaker 1
the world's
Speaker 2
people and personalities universally accessible and useful. Yes,
Speaker 1
and a lot of the technology we are creating, you know, all the way from facial expressions and hand gestures and emotional voices, basically empowering the mind of these non -player characters are gonna be the same that may be used for a lot of these social
Speaker 2
robots. There's obviously both utilitarian and delightful experiences your customers are building. What are you looking forward to? the
Speaker 1
vision, we have created the tools and people are developing in terms of the immediate, not just immediate, like medium term, three to five years plan is basically ensure that we have redefined gaming in a very positive way. We have enabled these learning and training experiences at scale, you know, that are changing lives of people in a very positive manner. Brand experiences, product information, real -world, embodied characters. I love the creator -centric approach. I think it's so important
Speaker 2
that we don't forget that creators are going to author these Thank you so much for your time. Thank you so much. It was great chatting. Around the time Purnendu and I had this conversation, he invited me to the convey headquarters where I got to see their NPC innovations firsthand. And let me tell you, it was pretty wild. When I walked in, they had this massive monitor with an AI anime character on it, and the people it conveyed told me to just have a conversation with it. They told me I could talk to it in Hindi, which I was psyched about. Then I tried to press a little deeper. I think there's this really human urge to try and push the boundaries of an AI system to prove that it's intelligent and human enough to exist beyond the constraints of corporate language. Most of my efforts were in vain though, because as soon as the AI came back with these canned responses, it kind of ruined some of the effect. Even though it was giving the unscripted responses, it still had parameters. The AI allowed me to go off script, and even though the model I was talking to recognized what I was saying, it was still responding on its parameters, the guardrails set by the company. While an AI like this might be great at helping you fight a lethal force of aliens, it's hard to know if it will ever reach the messier, more human parts of how we relate to one another. The TED AI show is a part of the TED Audio Collective and is produced by TED with cosmic standard. Our producers are Ella Fetter and Sarah McCray. Our editors are Ben Van Sheng and Alejandro Salazar. Our showrunner is Ivana Tucker and our associate producer is Ben Montoya. Our engineer is Asia Pilar Simpson. Our technical director is Jacob Winnig and our executive producer is Eliza Smith. Our fact checker is Julia Dickerson, and I'm
Speaker 3
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Speaker 2
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Non Player Characters --NPCs for short-- have always been a huge part of what makes video games engaging, from Cortana in Halo to Navi in The Legend of Zelda. But interactions with NPCs were always limited to a pre-written script. Until now. Purnendu Mukherjee is the CEO of Convai, a platform that enables developers to create NPCs with human-like conversational abilities. He joins Bilawal to chat about our evolving relationship with "AI characters” and what we gain and lose when our digital relationships are so life-like, it almost doesn’t matter who (or what) is on the other end.
For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts
For transcripts for The TED AI Show, visit go.ted.com/TTAIS-transcripts
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