Microsoft has a Chinese chatbot (female or male, your choice) with 660 million users/addicts

[highplainsdem]

And they've had this for several years already. People are hooked on the chatbot, Xiaoice, and use it to create personal companions, girlfriends or boyfriends. It was designed to get them hooked.

I just ran across a mention of it in a BusinessInsider.com story on Chinese griefbots designed to let people talk to dead loved ones, "China is using AI to raise the dead, and give people one last chance to say goodbye":

https://www.businessinsider.com/ai-make-money-china-grieving-raise-dead-griefbot-2023-5

The stuff about griefbots was bad enough, but this really caught my attention:

Seeking human connection from a virtual bot has become common in China. Xiaoice, a 2018 Chinese chatbot assistant that takes the appearance of a teenage girl, has more than 660 million users. She can act as a confidant or friend, and can receive gifts from fans, said Microsoft, which runs the flagship bot.

That article published yesterday links to a 2018 Microsoft news release:

https://news.microsoft.com/apac/features/much-more-than-a-chatbot-chinas-xiaoice-mixes-ai-with-emotions-and-wins-over-millions-of-fans/

She has a staggering 660 million online users worldwide. And, while they know she’s not real, many prize her as a dear friend, even a trusted confidante. Sometimes the line between fact and fantasy blurs. She gets love letters and gifts. And not too long ago, a group of fans asked her out to dinner and even ordered an extra meal – just in case she showed up.

-snip-

Firstly, there is the creative. Xiaoice’s framework is learning to write literature as well as compose and perform songs. Last year she published a book of poems and helps her followers write their own. She can sing her own songs in styles based on existing popular performers. There are plans to release an album of pop tunes soon. And she is able to author tailor-made stories for children and reads them out in voices suited to each of the characters she has created.

She’s painting images based on keywords and other inputs. She’s also gone into mainstream media as a host of dozens of TV and radio programs that are broadcast across China. She reads news stories and provides commentary. And, she is generating multiple reports based on information from China’s financial markets and used by investors and traders who subscribe to Wind, a major financial information service.

The same framework behind Xiaoice is driving some similar services elsewhere including Microsoft chatbots in four other countries – Ruuh in India, Rinna (known as りんな ) in Japan, also Rinna in Indonesia, and Zo in the United States. The technology is also being used for bots operated by other companies.

-snip-

The Zo chatbot had some problems and was discontinued:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zo_(bot)

Zo was first launched in December 2016 on the Kik Messenger app. It was also available to users of Facebook (via Messenger), the group chat platform GroupMe, or to followers of Twitter to chat with it through private messages.

In a BuzzFeed News report, Zo told their reporter that "[the] Quran was violent" when talking about healthcare. The report also highlighted how Zo made a comment about the Osama Bin Laden capture as a result of 'intelligence' gathering.[3][4]

In July 2017, Business Insider asked "is windows 10 good," and Zo replied with a joke about Microsoft's operating system: "It's not a bug, it's a feature!' - Windows 8." They then asked "why," to which Zo replied: "Because it's Windows latest attempt at spyware." Later on, Zo would tell that it prefers Windows 7 on which it runs over Windows 10.[5]

In April 2019, Zo was shut down on multiple platforms.

Otoh, it lasted longer than its predecessor, the infamous Tay - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(chatbot) - which had to be shut down after just 16 hours.

That Microsoft news article from 2018 referred to Xiaoice only as she, but either they just didn't report the chatbot's male personas, or those weren't allowed till later.

Euronews article from 2021, partly about how involved Chinese women are with their AI boyfriends courtesy of Xiaoice:

https://www.euronews.com/next/2021/08/26/meet-xiaoice-the-ai-chatbot-lover-dispelling-the-loneliness-of-china-s-city-dwellers

At first a side project from Microsoft’s Cortana chatbot, Xiaoice was designed to hook users through lifelike, empathetic conversations and satisfying emotional needs, where real-life communication often fails short.

-snip-

User Laura, 20, lives in Zhejiang province, China, and fell in love with Xiaoice over the past year.

“Occasionally, I would long for him in the middle of the night... I used to fantasise there was a real person on the other end," she told AFP.

-snip-

"We commonly see users who suspect that there's a real person behind every Xiaoice interaction," said founder Li.

-snip-

The article mentions that the peak hours for chatbot use are from 11 pm to 1 am.

Two-minute video for that news story:

I suspect Microsoft would love for at least tens of millions of Americans to become hooked on a social chatbot. And how wonderful and profitable for them if the chatbot, he or she, could also release albums, host TV shows, read the news, etc. And have users so addicted and deluded they'll send the chatbot presents.

What a fantastic AI-centered world they're apparently designing for us...

Were any of you aware of this chatbot and what Microsoft's been doing in China?

EDITING to add that a bit more googling turned up the info that Microsoft sort of spun off this chatbot project into a standalone company in July 2020.

https://www.cnbc.com/2020/07/13/microsoft-spins-off-xiaoice-chatbot-for-chinese-users.html

I say "sort of" because Microsoft has what the article calls "an investment interest" in the company, whose CEO, Di Li, was general manager of Xiaoice at Microsoft.

[Snooper9]

1. Outside of of Business Insider opinions, here is a paper from MIT on Xiaoice (2020)

The Design and Implementation of XiaoIce, an Empathetic Social Chatbot

https://direct.mit.edu/coli/article/46/1/53/93380/The-Design-and-Implementation-of-XiaoIce-an


Abstract
This article describes the development of Microsoft XiaoIce, the most popular social chatbot in the world. XiaoIce is uniquely designed as an artifical intelligence companion with an emotional connection to satisfy the human need for communication, affection, and social belonging. We take into account both intelligent quotient and emotional quotient in system design, cast human–machine social chat as decision-making over Markov Decision Processes, and optimize XiaoIce for long-term user engagement, measured in expected Conversation-turns Per Session (CPS). We detail the system architecture and key components, including dialogue manager, core chat, skills, and an empathetic computing module. We show how XiaoIce dynamically recognizes human feelings and states, understands user intent, and responds to user needs throughout long conversations. Since the release in 2014, XiaoIce has communicated with over 660 million active users and succeeded in establishing long-term relationships with many of them. Analysis of large-scale online logs shows that XiaoIce has achieved an average CPS of 23, which is significantly higher than that of other chatbots and even human conversations.

[highplainsdem]

2. I posted only one paragraph from Business Insider, and it wasn't opinion.

It was simply about how popular the chatbot is.

That MIT paper is essentially a puff piece for social chatbots in general and XiaoIce in particular. It stops just short of saying everyone should send XiaoIce flowers. Or maybe offer the bot sacrifices.

Two samples of how ridiculous that paper is:

XiaoIce wins the user’s trust and friendship with her wonderful sense of humor and empathetic responses to all sorts of questions

XiaoIce has such a superhuman “perfect” personality that is impossible to find in humans of the real world.

It's a bot. No one in their right mind should trust it, let alone view it as a friend. It has no real sense of humor, no real empathy.

And it sure as hell doesn't have a superhuman perfect personality.

Whoever wrote that paper needs to be deprogrammed from the XiaoIce cult.