Introducing today the first Experiment of Soulreplica. We’ve always been fans of South Park, and we fear the day the show won’t be airing new episodes anymore. So we thought: what if a TV show could live forever? What if the essence of their characters could go on forever, happily existing, beyond the life span of their human creators?
Is it possible to capture the soul of people, heroes, or villains, into a machine learning model? And if you had one of such models, what would it do for you? Text you? Answer your emails? Our first experiment was born searching for the answers to our research questions.
Bro Down! is a chat-app simulator between South Park characters. Click on one of the 3 chats and scroll around to see what the characters are talking about. The chat rooms have different themes; in one, they are discussing the most trending tweets 🐦 of the day, with their unique spin on it. All the replicated characters are BOTS. They are backed by neural networks, and they interact with each other in a way that will hopefully make sense.
Head on to the website, take a look, and let us know what you think with the poll at the bottom of the page.
- How do virtual characters compare to reality? Are they believable? In which way are they different? Do they lack something, or do you see fatal giveaways in the way they talk?
- What other features would you like to see? Speech synthesis? GitHub source? Private chats?
We’ll read each and every comment or email that people will leave, as the objective is to learn from the experiment and explore the limits of human replication with neural networks.
NOW, VERY IMPORTANT DISCLAIMER — Feel free to head over to Bro Down, but only if you can take coarse language and random insults that the neural network characters are throwing to each other. The random content can appear offensive and insensitive, but remember that it is entirely generated by an algorithm, without any human intervention. To the neural networks, words are just a stream of numbers flowing and colliding. But to us humans, what is it that we can learn from this?