Made for role-playing: Captain Cliché debuts on the GPT chatbot platform
🎁 Wrapping GPT to talk to Van Gogh; OpenAI launches a new chatbot platform; Captain Cliché is back to (not) tell us what to do about a scorpion bite
Language Models are great at role-playing.
An AI chatbot like ChatGPT is made of two parts: 1. the language model and 2. the system prompt. The system prompt sets the identity and the style that the bot should assume. By changing the system prompt, we can get the language model to role-play whomever we like.
Wrapping GPT
This idea of making a language model play different characters spawned a wave of startups.
In June at Vivatech Paris I saw a demo of Jumbo Mana, a French startup building technology that allows you to chat with Vincent Van Gogh. Another company called character.ai is building a platform for role-playing AI (create your own character and talk to it). And then of course there are AI girlfriends/boyfriends.
Skeptics have been pointing out that to build a “role-playing AI” you don’t need to develop or host any AI technology.
It’s called “Wrapping GPT” 🎁: You put together a website that connects to a language model hosted by OpenAI or another provider. You pass it a custom system prompt, and then relay the user input and model responses back and forth. Boom congratulations, you now have a “Generative AI” project 💫.
And then came last week…
New platform
OpenAI hosted its first developer conference. Sam Altman, who was the CEO at the moment (more on this below) announced a new platform for GPT4-based chatbots.
This platform allows anyone (that is, anyone who is paying 20$ / month for ChatGPT Plus) to set a system prompt and make a chatbot out of it, directly in the OpenAI website. It takes about 5 minutes. The memes quickly followed:
The return of Captain Cliché
Let’s give this new platform a spin and recreate Captain Cliché, a parody life coach that only responds in unhelpful platitudes. With the new features from OpenAI, creating a persona like this is as simple as filling in a form:
We fill in the system prompt (“Captain Cliché is an overly enthusiastic and positive life coach chatbot …”), hit save and just like this, it’s live! And yeah, it works…
Feeling low energy in the mornings? Keep brewing positivity! ☕️
Scorpion bite? Every sting is just a chance to show how strong you are 💪
How many bananas I can safely eat in a day? It’s not about the quantity, but the journey! Keep peeling away the layers of doubt 🍌
Thanks to Dall-E 3, Captain Cliché can now “help” us by making a context-appropriate motivational poster:
If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you can talk to Captain Cliché here.
Beyond role-play
The new chatbot platform surely aims to enable more than AI roleplaying. In addition to setting the system prompt, we can integrate our chatbot with external APIs and upload data sets of knowledge that the bot can use to respond to queries. Captain Cliché is excited to see what it can do with those capabilities 💪.
In other news
📰 The aftermath of Dev Day. The OpenAI event generated a lot of buzz. And then this Friday a bombshell news dropped that the company board dismissed its CEO Sam Altman. As of Sunday morning, speculations run hot about what all of this means.
📝 The map of Space Invader mosaics we featured last week made it to the top of Hacker News 💫. I got interesting feedback – more about this project and Space Invaders in a future edition 👾!
Postcard from Paris
A night view on the edge of Paris from the suburbs in Charenton-le-Pont.
Have a great week 💫,
– Przemek