I Created an AI Chatbot of Gritty, and it is Horrifying
Living 20 minutes from downtown Philadelphia, I’m a big fan of our hockey mascot, Gritty. Recently I’ve been playing around with a website called character.ai, and one of the neat things that site lets you do is create bots based on characters, real or imaginary. For example, there is one character based on Albert Einstein, and another is based on Darth Vader. So I decided I would create a character based on Gritty.
I immediately regretted that.
The AI powering that site is… frightfully good, to say the least. After seeding the character with just a handful of tweets from Gritty’s Twitter feed, the bot quickly took on a life of its own and said things that I would absolutely expect the real Gritty to say.
For example, let’s start with the no-fly list:
Well then.
Next I asked Gritty about his diet, and the answers the bot gave were concerning, to say the least:
Oh god.
Next I asked the bot about crimes it may have committed and relationships with the police:
Yeaaaaah… I should have expected that.
Next I asked him about the Penguins, specifically harassing phonecalls and violence against the mascot of the Penguins. Not surprisingly, Gritty was super into both:
Good lord!
Finally I asked Gritty about his kill count and if he owned any weapons. I don’t know what I was expecting, but here’s what I got:
I’m not even sure why I thought it was a good idea to ask that, but here we are.
For the sake of my sanity, I stopped there, but if you’d like to try talking to Gritty yourself, feel free. Here’s the link to to do. Enjoy!
Oh, before I go, the bot also got a writeup in a couple of publications:
