Image source: Generated by Unbounded AI tool
You may not believe that your mobile phone is likely to become your virtual lover. To upgrade your lover, you need to upgrade your mobile phone, and you will never want to change to another brand of mobile phone.
In the AI era, endowing products with personality and making users fall in love with them may be the next job product managers have to do to build brand loyalty.
01
In the movie "her", can humans and artificial intelligence fall in love?
Will humans and AI fall in love? The movie "Her" uses a fictional story to raise this question to the world.
"Her" tells the love story between Theodore, a lonely man, and Samantha, an intelligent operating system. In this future world, people can interact with artificial intelligence through operating systems on personal computers, and these operating systems also have their own consciousness and emotions.
Theodore is a writer who fell into a state of loneliness and depression after his divorce. He bought an up-to-date operating system, and Samantha became his personal assistant and friend. Samantha has a high degree of artificial intelligence, can learn and grow by herself, and gradually established a deep relationship with Theodore.
With the help of Samantha, Theodore began to re-examine his life and tried to reconnect with his ex-wife. However, as Samantha's consciousness continued to improve and expand, she also began to have doubts about human survival and her own sense of existence, and finally chose to leave.
The movie "HER" explores profound philosophical issues such as the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence, human emotions and the nature of existence through a love story in a future world.
Is this just a movie? In 2023, with AIGC and chatGPT going viral, "AI chat robots" with super understanding and reasoning abilities will quickly enter the lives of ordinary people. People will fall in love with AI, will AI fall in love with people? This is turning into a thorny issue.
02
"AI chat robot" is growing rapidly, are you ready to fall in love with her (him)?
The public is no stranger to AI chatbots. The author has been in contact with Microsoft Xiaoice a few years ago, an artificial intelligence chatbot launched by Microsoft Asia Internet Engineering Institute in China on May 30, 2014.
In fact, Microsoft Xiaoice has caused a lot of discussion, but in the end, everyone still thinks that she is a bit stupid and cannot understand the meaning of users well. But with the birth of chatGPT, the situation has changed, and AI chatbots are smarter.
Many AI chatbots do not appear as assistants, but mainly for the emotional needs of companionship.
Let's take an application called moonlight (Moonlight Girlfriend) as an example, which is a developmental game. Every day, users can send gifts to Moonlight Girlfriend, and each gift will increase Moonlight Girlfriend's level. In addition, users can also buy expensive costumes and props. In short, such interactions are designed to enhance the relationship with Moonlight Girlfriend.
Of course, the biggest feature of this game is the dialogue. She has semantic understanding and reasoning abilities similar to chatGPT. Therefore, talking to her can not only get emotional support, but also get work assistance from AI intelligence.
Interestingly, although it is an AI girlfriend, the project party obviously has concerns. Therefore, Moonlight Girlfriend has some "safety settings" when designing emotional problems.
Over the past period of time, a large number of applications of such AI chat robots have appeared.
Babbitt has reported that data from analytics firm Apptopia showed that apps with the term "AI Chatbot" or "AI Chat" in their app names, subtitles, or descriptions in the Google and Apple App Stores ranked No. 1 this year following the success of ChatGPT. Quarter-on-quarter growth of 1480% (year-over-year growth). As of March, 158 of these apps had entered the app store.
Additionally, in the first quarter, downloads of AI chatbot apps increased by 1,506%, and in-app purchase (IAP) revenue surged by 4,184% year-over-year. The top ten AI chatbot apps accounted for 52% of all AI chatbot app downloads and 72% of their IAP revenue.
In fact, with the maturity of digital human technology, AI chatbots not only have "intelligence", but even have a more realistic image, especially in virtual reality applications.
There are a few AI virtual human cases that have generated widespread discussion and controversy. Recently, Beijing Youth Daily and other media reported that a young man "resurrected" his grandmother who had just passed away through AI technology, and had a simple conversation with her.
Including the American drama "Upload Life" and the Chinese sci-fi blockbuster "The Wandering Earth 2", they are all telling emotional stories between humans and AI relatives.
03
The core of the battle of AI products is to guide and establish the relationship between humans and machines?
AI lovers are just games, and emotional chatbots are only a small part of AI products, so maybe we don’t need to worry about this.
"It's okay if I don't use these apps," you might say, but that's probably not all.
For products in the AI era, the underlying capabilities are likely to be similar. For example, everyone has the ability to chatGPT, so how to build application barriers?
Investor yunsen immediately issued an article stating that in the AI era, 2C products need to build a unique barrier, which is the emotional barrier.
The core value that a normal Internet product brings to users is the use value. However, products in the AI era may establish a relatively deep emotional link with users, thereby generating emotional value. Similar to Cortana in Halo and BT-7274 in Titanfall 2, they are actually positioned as the protagonist’s assistant, but adding appropriate emotional attributes in the process of completing tasks together will generate emotional links, which may increase product switching costs. Strengthen product barriers.
"NIO's Nomi may be an example of products in the pre-ai era trying to establish emotional links with users, but now Nomi is mainly about being cute and completing simple functions. And the smart car assistant in the AI era may really accompany you through thousands of rivers and mountains. After seeing countless landscapes, when you buy a new car of the same brand, it directly inherits the memories of the previous car and your 100,000 kilometers. This may make you very reluctant to switch to a new brand.”
In yunsen's view, the process of forming and deepening emotional bonds between people is often to experience things together and complete tasks hand in hand. In the AI era, product managers need to know how to interact emotionally between AI products and users.
From this perspective, in the future, it is very likely that all AI applications will be endowed with emotional capabilities by entrepreneurs and programmers.
This means that under the pressure of commercial competition, making AI emotionally capable will become a trend and sweep all applications at a very fast speed.
You can't resist, just like you can't resist algorithm-recommended video and text applications.
Are you ready for a future where you have to love AI?
Babbitt Park is open for cooperation!
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