4min chapter

Character.ai's Noam Shazeer: "Replacing Google - and your mom"

The Times Tech Podcast

CHAPTER

What Is the Most Popular Character Right Now?

You can create a character which really can be as simple as just writing a greeting. And then all of a sudden you're chatting with Joe Biden and that Biden is basically, I would guess trained on all of Biden's public utterances or whatever. People are using this as like therapy and emotional support. We get all kinds of emails, things like, I have no friends, I was depressed. This makes me feel good. Like it like it really. But we haven't been focusing on use cases. We just launched something. So that's what I think is interesting. You put it out there. Yeah. And then you're like, well, let's see what happens. Exactly

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Speaker 2

What about including things like grooming and clothing? What does that tell us about our patient?

Speaker 1

You know, it tells us if the patient has been able to take care of themselves, because many patients are mental illness, especially the people with chronic spMI seniors and persistent mental illness, don't don't take care of themselves. So it gives you a little bit of cue into the patient's cognitive process and a bit of the taste to take care of it.

Speaker 2

And to your point, Dr. Tanti, about being narrative and not simply doing a drop down menu that has three choices, you know, in appearance, this is where you might include things that would not be on that drop down menu, like evidence of self harm, if they have that, if they appear a catechic, what their posture is, you know, that's not going to be present in a drop down menu. And for some patients, it might not be relevant, but for others, you know,

Speaker 1

it's absolutely vital. It gives you really important clinical information. And you know, the problem with these drop down menu is that I cannot even tell if you're talking about a matter of women and their Caucasian or, you know, African American or Hispanic but Asian and I can't tell, you know, so I'm like, yes, you can look up the name and all of those kind of things. But you know what, if you're, if you're in a busy doctor, you're looking, it should tell you everything. It's like an EKG tells you whether you have a hard block or

Speaker 2

not. And while we don't editorialize mental status exams, I will editorialize just briefly here when including things like race and ethnicity in the mental status exam, let's not just assume, you know, we have these drop down menus and so it can be tempting to just, okay, I think this is roughly correct. Again, this is a legal document. So if you're going to include something like that, make sure you're asking the patient, you know, how do you identify? What is your cultural background? You know, you really need to be correct in your mental status exam. So just kind of a word of caution there.

Speaker 1

Absolutely. And you know, that is like, if you want down it, don't write it. And you know what, if you're going to write about those things, you should ask. And that should be asked right up front in your history taking. You know, remember you're breaking the eyes and getting to know the patient. You ask, you know, how do you identify your issue?