Friendly reminder that your predictive text, while very compelling, is not alive.
It’s not a mind.
I don’t think most people will care, so long as their NPC interaction ends up compelling. We’ve been reading stories about people who don’t exist for centuries, and that’s stopped no one from sympathizing with them - and now there’s a chance you could have an open conversation with them.
Like, I think alot of us assume that we care about the authors who write the character dialogs but I think most people actually choose not to know who is behind their favorite NPCs to preserve some sense that the NPC personality isn’t manufactured.
Combine that with everyone becoming steadily more lonely over the years, and I think AI-generated NPC interactions are going to take escapism to another level.
Cyberpunk 2077 sorta explores this a bit.
There’s a vending machine that has a personality and talks to people walking by it. The quest chain basically has you and the vending machine chatting a bit and even giving the vending machine some advice on a person he has a crush on. You eventually become friends with this vending machine.
When it seems like it’s becoming more apparent it’s an AI and is developing sentience, it turns out the vending machine just has a really well-coded socializing program. He even admits as much when he’s about to be deactivated.
So, to reiterate what you said: predictive text and LLMs are not alive nor a mind.
Pretty sure the first minds to be controlled by generative AI work on the floor at the stock exchange.
