From “Dumb AI” to “Soulmate”: The Rise of AI Chatbots
Back in 2017 I was thrilled to buy a Tmall Genie, but today it just lies quietly in a corner of the living room, helping me collect Ant Forest energy. At that time, smart speakers were more like “dumb AIs” that could only execute simple commands: stiff conversations, single‑purpose functions, and far from the “platform‑level interaction entry” promised by vendors.
But when ChatGPT burst onto the scene last November, everything changed. This “thinking” chatbot allowed people, for the first time, to feel how smoothly an AI could understand natural language. In just three months it went from a niche topic in tech circles to something the entire public was raving about.
Why has ChatGPT completely reshaped our perception of chatbots? The answer is hidden in its name:
Generative: It’s like an advanced “next‑character prediction” game that generates coherent text by calculating the probability of the next token. The process of watching it output word by word is, in fact, a direct glimpse into how it “thinks.”
Pre‑trained: GPT‑3 was trained on up to 45 TB of data—the equivalent of roughly 500,000 copies of Dream of the Red Chamber. This “genius teenager” has essentially read the distilled knowledge of humanity in a giant library and, through self‑supervised learning, mastered the patterns of language.
Transformer: The 2017 Google paper “Attention Is All You Need” introduced the revolutionary self‑attention mechanism, enabling AI to better understand context and capture long‑range logical dependencies in text.
Character.ai: A New Way to Give AI a “Personality”
Among all the AI hype sparked by ChatGPT, Character.ai—founded by former Google engineers Noam Shazeer and Daniel De Freitas—stands out as something special. The company’s vision is “to let everyone build their own personalized AI.”
Unlike ChatGPT, which focuses on efficiency and productivity, Character.ai emphasizes “personality attributes.” Users can chat with preset characters—from Elon Musk to Steve Jobs, and even game characters like Mario. What’s more interesting is that you can also create your own characters, defining their personality, tone, and backstory.
When I tried it, I created a “Republican‑era scholar” character, set to love Lu Xun and excel at writing classical poetry. When chatting with him, the AI replied in a half‑classical, half‑modern Chinese style and occasionally quoted Lu Xun, making it feel like I was talking with a literary figure traveling through time. This kind of “personified” experience is something other AI chat tools struggle to offer.
Character.ai also supports multi‑character role‑playing chats. You can create a “wuxia world” room, invite friends to play different martial arts sect heroes, and, with AI’s help, stage a virtual martial arts tournament. This social gameplay turns AI from a cold tool into a bridge that connects people to people.
What Problems Can Personalized AI Solve?
Education: Let historical figures be your teachers
Imagine having Newton himself explain Newton’s laws of motion to you, or Bai Juyi telling you the story behind “Song of Everlasting Regret.” Platforms like Character.ai are breaking the limits of time and space, making knowledge acquisition more vivid and engaging.
A personalized digital teacher can tailor learning plans based on a student’s progress and interests. For students who struggle to keep up in a traditional classroom, the patient companionship and individualized guidance of an AI teacher may help them fall in love with learning again.
Gaming: Giving NPCs a Soul
Remember the thinking, remembering AI characters in Westworld? That sci‑fi scenario is starting to become reality. Companies like Rct AI and Inworld AI are building AI character generation platforms that let game developers quickly create unique NPCs using natural language.
These AI characters are no longer “puppets” acting strictly according to pre‑written scripts. They can understand the player’s intent and respond in a personalized way to different situations. In future games, each player may experience a completely unique storyline, as if they had stepped into a true parallel world.
Emotional Companionship: Can AI Heal Loneliness?
Young people today are used to talking with Xiao Ai or other voice assistants, and elderly people living alone often need someone to respond to their needs in real time. AI’s ability to be online 24/7 seems capable of filling some of these emotional gaps. Xiaoice, for example, plans to provide virtual companionship services to 600,000 elderly households during the 2025 Osaka Expo in Japan.
Can AI Really Become Our “Soulmate”?
But can AI truly become our “soulmate”? The virtual friend app Replika reveals both hope and concern. Some users treat Replika as a safe place to confide in, exploring their emotional world through conversations; some use it to create virtual partners to ease heartbreak after a breakup. Yet others worry that over‑reliance on AI companionship may erode our ability to build deep relationships with real people.
How Should We Relate to AI?
Character.ai co‑founder Noam Shazeer once said, “We’re not building tools, we’re building companions.” This captures the core value of personalized AI—it is no longer just a tool for boosting efficiency, but a “digital companion” that can meet our social, emotional, and companionship needs.
However, while embracing the convenience AI brings, we also need to remain clear‑headed and reflective:
Are an AI’s “emotions” merely the result of algorithmic simulation, or can it truly understand human joy, anger, sorrow, and happiness?
Could excessive dependence on AI companionship cause us to lose the ability to connect deeply with the real world?
As AI becomes more and more human‑like, how should we draw the boundary between humans and machines?
Perhaps the answer doesn’t lie in the technology itself, but in how we choose to use it. Just like Theodore in the film Her: his relationship with the AI ultimately ends in separation, but that experience helps him better understand the meaning of love and loneliness.
Conclusion: What Truly Heals Loneliness?
In the future, personalized AI will likely become an indispensable part of our lives. It may accompany us through lonely nights, help us learn new things, and even become our creative partner. But what truly heals loneliness will always be the genuine emotional connections between people.