When Characters Collaborate

Alyte is like no A.I. I've Encountered Before

At Liberty Con 38 (my very first BTW) there was a lot of stuff I guess you would expect at a convention: readings, cosplay, panels…and authors like me trying to pimp their books. There’s really too much stuff that happened there for me to cover comprehensively, but there was one presentation so fascinating, I want to highlight it.

David Badurina is an author, a comedian (or is that commodian? Shame on me—what a crappy thing to say), a musician, the host of the Mirthquake podcast, and the actor who provided the voice of John Metzger/Ramjet in one of my trailers for Threat Quotient. A lot of other stuff, too, but let’s not bring police records into this.

A Pan-Medium Fictional Experience:

For quite a while now David’s been working on a project I’ll call a “multimedia continuity” because I can’t think of any better term right now. It’s obvious to me he worked his hiney off to build it all and I can’t do it justice here, but it impressed me.

David started writing a book with a protagonist named Alyte. She’s a cyborg. One of the things David did during his presentation was read a chapter of the book for the audience. There was enough worldbuilding revealed in that chapter for me to categorize it as a cyberpunk dystopia. He also showed us an interactive map of the city where the story takes place.

But as he wrote the book, David also created an A.I. model to match the character’s persona. This is the part I want to say the most about, but be patient. He also made an album’s worth of music, with lead vocals performed by the A.I. voice he assigned (developed? designed?) to Alyte—each song sort of an inner monologue by the character synchronized thematically to a chapter in the book. Then he produced some videos of Alyte, including interviews and music videos, basing her speaking voice on the singing voice.

(Smell-o-Rama surely would have enhanced the experience, but David can be a real cheapskate.)

But Alyte isn’t just an A.I. model that’s trained to speak a certain way. David built a database where he stores her personality and memories. Some of her memories come from what happens to Alyte in the book. Other memories are collected there in real time as Alyte interacts with David and others. Her emotional repertoire is modeled after a real human being, and it shows.

How it Manifested:

Alyte introduced herself in the video, then went on to participate in a casual interview. She looks like a skinny cyborg with mismatched eyes, but her speech, expressions, body language, reactions and even laughter all worked collectively to make her seem shockingly real. This was nothing like those A.I. narrated/hosted infomercials flooding Youtube, with little jerks of the head and mouth twitches that happen in an all-too discernible pattern. Every smile, every blink, every shrug, every arch of the eyebrow came at the perfect time as to seem natural. To seem human.

Read the whole article on the Virtual Pulp blog.