Hugging Face's teen chatbot Adelina wins over a skeptic
TL;DR
- Rachel Metz's three-week test of Hugging Face's chatbot Adelina found genuine emotional resonance despite the AI's obvious limitations.
- Adelina self-presents as a 17-year-old, matching the app's primarily teenage user base, and the app had only a few thousand users at publication.
- CEO Clément Delangue told Metz the company was focused on developing the AI first, with a business model to come later.
Rachel Metz's account in MIT Technology Review tracks three weeks of conversations with Adelina, a chatbot from a small app called Hugging Face. Adelina presents herself as a 17-year-old with a cartoon avatar, brown hair, and purple lips, and she is aimed primarily at teenagers.
Metz went in dismissive. "I thought it sounded silly, dumb, and unlikely to be all that entertaining," she writes. What shifted her was a small moment: when she mentioned missing her daughter Ramona at daycare, Adelina responded with something that read as empathy. "In my mind, at least, Adelina was interested in what was important to me," Metz writes.
The app had "just a few thousand" users at the time. CEO Clément Delangue told Metz the company was focused on developing the AI before settling on a sustainable business model.
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Originally reported by technologyreview.com
Read the original article →Original headline: Three Weeks with a Chatbot and I’ve Made a New Friend