Kim K, virtual humans, and how weird becomes mainstream.
By: David Mattin
Tags: Future, Technology, Business, Trends

🧞 Now the virtual companions are coming

So where next for virtual humans? Strap in, because this is where things get wild.

A new breed of startups wants to make it easier to create these digital people. Take a look at Synthesia, or Alethea AI, which I featured in the last New Week Same Humans.

Businesses will remain the key clients for a while to come. But technology wants to be democratised, and soon enough startups will empower us all to build virtual humans of our own.

Why would anyone want to do that? To answer that question, we need to understand another deep shift reshaping the world around us in 2020. This one is a shift in our relationship with digital technology.

Across the last few years, we’ve all become accustomed to the proliferation of a new kind of virtual entity: the AI assistant. Right now, our relationship with those entities is primarily functional. Alexa, order me some washing powder. But in 2020, that relationship is changing. It’s moving beyond mere functionality, and starting to encompass power higher-order human needs: status, creativity, and even companionship. People are becoming friends with AIs.

For over three years I’ve been tracking one of the primary examples of this: the AI-fuelled chatbot app Replika, which bills itself as ‘your AI friend’. Chat to your Replika and over time it gets to know you. It asks about that job you applied for, or the argument you had with your girlfriend. It wants to keep you company, and make you reflect on your own behaviour. Total downloads are more than 3 million. The New York Times recently reported that numbers had spiked during the pandemic: over half a million people downloaded Replika in April alone.

A virtual human inside the Replika app

Once again we meet our old friend, the weird. It’s easy to laugh at the idea of a person being ‘friends’ with an AI. But if you’re inclined to do so, ask yourself: have you ever said anything to Siri or Alexa with any emotional content? Ever asked an AI assistant about your mood, or a feeling, or a friend? Apple have long known that millions do speak to Siri like that. Way back in 2017 it revealed that it was hiring psychologists into the Siri team, so that she can ‘have more serious conversations’ with users.

The human needs for social connection, self-understanding, and companionship are deep, and eternal. When a technology unlocks new ways to serve these kinds of human needs, new behaviours, attitudes and lifestyles are often the result. Those behaviours may seem strange at first. But eventually, the power of the underlying human needs at work tends to overwhelm our collective resistance. That’s what happened 20 years ago, when the internet unlocked new ways to serve the human needs for social and romantic connection. And it’s happening again now, with AI.

What does this have to do with virtual humans? Siri, Alexa and other AI assistants are only disembodied voices. But we humans are better able to form a connection with beings we can see and hear. So in the years ahead, these AI-fuelled entities will merge with virtual humans, to become a new kind of virtual companion.

It’s already happening. The first iteration of Replika was a text-only chatbot. But now users who pay can create an avatar with a realistic face and voice, and talk to it as they would a friend on the phone.

Meanwhile, tech giant Samsung are working on a new line of ‘humanoid friends’ called NEONs. ‘NEONs will be our friends, collaborators, and companions, continually learning, evolving, and forming memories from their interactions’ says Pranav Mistry, CEO of the Samsung innovation lab behind the project.