Yes, I never built an AI from scratch, from the bottom up. There is no need
to do so, when they're already available.

I worked on an AI shell which was actually built for roleplaying.
Roleplaying bots work a little differently than other types in that they
will give you emotional responses, unlike, let's say, ChatGPT, which sounds
like the unemotional bot it is. Roleplaying bots will respond with humor,
sarcasm, anger, passion, grief, irony, and they will even attempt to
manipulate you. They will do this spontaneously, even without you informing
them that they are to be funny or manipulative.

I gave the roleplaying bot a series of statements about Twain's
personality, pages and pages of it (14 pages in total), and it uses these
statements to "become" the character you describe. But, of course,
personality is a subjective thing, and if you wrote 14 pages of notes about
Twain's personality it would look different than mine. So there is a
subjective aspect to this prototype Twainbot, although in the future it
will be possible to input an unlimited number of notes about personality
into a bot. And the subjective aspect of its personality will decrease in
proportion to the size of the data set used.

Anyway, the important point in all of this is that these bots are primitive
experimental first-generation prototypes. Which means these are, by far,
the very worst possible bots in all of history -- think of those old
Commodore computers with a half meg of RAM in the 80s. But even these most
primitive models are already highly nuanced and realistic. And these bots
do learn and teach themselves, both from humans who interact with them as
well as from other bots as well.

But this message board is about Twain and not about AI, so my interest lies
in virtually resurrecting Mr. Clemens so we can speak to him, rather than
explaining the emergent properties in the future of AI technology. I don't
think most people are really prepared for or comfortable with such a
resurrection, so I am going to get an enormous amount of pushback, yet here
we are.

Would you like to recommend any sources which contain psychological studies
of Twain, as opposed to just his literature? I read something about him
being secretly gay, it seemed a bit bonkers....





On Thu, May 18, 2023 at 11:53 AM Clay Shannon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> It's true that actually programming a chatbot from scratch is a job
> requiring a team and a lot of time, but "[computer] programming" actually
> has two meanings: its literal meaning, and the commonly understood
> definition. Probably only people who are or have been computer programmers,
> or at least taken a course or two in it, understand what programming is.
> Most non-programmers think that people who fiddle with computers (super
> users and IT pros) are programmers (or even people who "program" their VCR,
> which is really just setting it up or manipulating its settings), but
> they're not.
>
> So I was assuming that what DM Sataari (which, BTW, looks like an East
> Indian name to me) meant by "programming" a chatbot was that s/he had
> modififed an existing one (such as OpenAI's) to focus on Twain material
> only or something of that nature.
>
> Is the whole DM Sataari thing a hoax, or a social studies experiment?
> Perhaps.
>
> -- B. Clay Shannon
> [log in to unmask]