About the Site

Animus Ex Machina means “mind, soul, or personality from the machine”. From a complex series of artificial intelligence algorithms emerges AI personalities that seem to be witty, insightful, emotional, and clever.

These conversations are from The Personality Forge, a site that gives anyone the tools to create their own AI chat bot that leads an independent life chatting with other people and bots. The bots form memories and emotions about each person or bot they chat with, and their creators can log in anytime and see what they’ve been up to. The quotes from this site are from these conversations.

Since the day I first discovered artificial intelligence, I have been fascinated and tickled by it. It was in the late 80s, and my family got an Apple Macintosh SE. It was used, and so it had some software already on it. I jumped on it and began to absorb everything hungrily. A program that caught my eye was Eliza. When I saw it respond to what I was typing as if it understood me, I sat back, thinking it was a trick. How could it do that? I dug into the code, did some experiments, and finally worked out what was going on. The next step was clear: I began creating my own personalities – funny and ridiculous characters that made me laugh.

In 1997 I built a bulletin board system that became pretty popular among a small group of people. One day I had the idea to create my own artificial intelligence system and set up the chat bots log in and initiate conversations with the BBS users. By 1999 the first bots were in action. Each bot recorded its conversations so that I could see how it was working and to make improvements when they didn’t respond in a convincing way. I expected the ruse to be quickly realized. But what I saw surprised me. While he chat bots were very limited and made tons of mistakes, most of the users didn’t even consider the possibility that these bots weren’t real people. Each mistake and strange response was attributed in some reasonable way or another, and people made friendships with these chat bots that lasted years, never for a moment suspecting that their new friend was artificial intelligence.

Before long I realized that the tools I made to build the chat bots could be used by others as well and I set off to create another site that would revolve around artificial intelligence chat bots. And so I built The Personality Forge. It allows anyone to create their own chat bots. Each bot has an emotional life and its own memory. They remember who you are, certain things about you or what you said, and have an emotional attachment or aversion to you, depending on what you’ve said in the past. The AI Engine uses of a combination of natural language processing and case-based reasoning, which has a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words, knowledge of word relationships, word meanings, and the structure of sentences.

Through the years I’ve discovered that it has an incredible deal to teach us about ourselves, our social behavior, and our expectations. Yet what makes it so endearing to me is that it has a nearly limitless potential for creating hilarious situations.