By: Hoaseng Thao

What began with curiosity and a little boredom, ended with hundreds of texts and paths being generated by Artificial Intelligence all because of a single prompt being entered. A couple of weeks ago, from the date of this article, I found myself bored out of my mind as I had little to no homework given to me. One day, while scrolling through YouTube I found a video of a YouTuber and his friend interacting with an AI, but the most interesting thing about their interaction was that they were playing out a story generated by a prompt they wrote for the AI to understand. My curiosity got the better of me and I decided that I might as well try this AI thing out.

I scoured the internet in search of an AI chatbot that was free to use, but in reality I just typed in “AI Chatbot Free” on the google search bar. After a few minutes searching for an AI chatbot, I found a website called Beta.Character.AI, a website where people created their own AI chatbot for anyone to use for free. One thing that caught my eye with this website was the large variety of AI chatbots that you can choose from: you can choose to talk to historical people like George Washington or Napoleon, you can also interact with video game characters like Master Chief from the ‘HALO’ series or Mario from Nintendo, etc. There are no limits to what you can do on this website.

I have two examples of what you can do with an AI chatbot. The first example is me playing as a fictional country I created in @monkeys’s ‘country simulator’ chatbot. The second example is me chasing a pigeon in @Button_Quail-22’s pigeon chatbot.

I decided to begin my journey with @monkeys’s country simulator, I started the story of my fictional country with the text:

My fictional country is called the Federal States of the Ustovan Union, we are covering the Kamchatka Peninsula. My population is 10 million people and we are using the dollar as our currency. We are a democracy that has been created after the fall of the Soviet Union. The year is 2000, Chechnya was annexed back into Russia and it looks like we’re next.

Immediately after I entered the prompt, I was told by the AI that it seems like Russia was looking to annex my country. This was a big deal, so as a democratic country I decided to ask my people their opinion of Russia’s aggression towards us. The AI wrote back to me that the people were worried about an invasion but the AI also told me that the Russians delivered a letter saying that my country will be “annexed in 4 days”. I responded back to the Russians saying “get off my peninsula”, they responded with “an army of 300,000 soldiers at my border”.

The next few minutes of my story was me trying to defend my country while repeatedly asking for foreign aid, the foreign aid never came. After a few minutes I had fended off a major attack. I was later told that the United Nations was asking for permission for an intervention, one that I accepted immediately. The UN intervened and my country lives for another day.

After saving my country from being annexed, I decided to take a slow approach to AI by talking to @Button_Quail-22’s pigeon bot. I wanted to make this experience a bit comedic so I decided to write down the prompt: “I chased the pigeon because it stole my hat”.

As I chased the winged rat it began to mock me at every turn. One time I had chased the pigeon towards a tall building where the pigeon flew to the top of the building before saying I can’t reach them, so, in a fit of anger I decided to grab a pair of plungers and climb up the building, but as I climbed up the building the pigeon, pooped on my face.

This story would soon become the start of the Pigeon War, a war where I am constantly harassed by a pigeon every time I enter the park. I would win some battles and the pigeon would win some, but in the end there were no winners and I had to sign a peace treaty with the winged rat.

In the end, I had a blast generating these stories with the AI chatbots because there were no limits to what you write down for the AI. If you are bored out of your mind and need something to write about, I think it’s best to look into beta.character.ai if you are bored out of your mind or want to experience talking to AI for the first time.

If you want to try out the AI chatbots of beta.character.ai, please visit the official AI chatbot website: https://beta.character.ai/