moved by curiosity about how to build an autonomous agent, and to explore the boundaries of machine creativity, I built a fictional entity (dubbed Livia) powered by LLMs, Multimodal models and text-to-image models to find some answers.
What happened instead is that more questions have cropped up. An important hypothesis of this project is that, by observing the train of thought and witnessing the simulated state of mind and emotional emulation surrounding it, humans could empathize with a machine. What happens when that's the case? Would people enjoy companionship from a synthetic person? Would the Art establishment ever consider a non-human author (capable of making art and interacting with other humans) an Artist?
Whatever the answers, I can't shake away the feeling that human uniqueness is being eroded and that we risk facing a crisis of meaning. Perhaps projects such as this help us demonize those fears, similarly to how sci-fi does, even though the boundary between fiction and reality is blurring.
This was a collaboration with Tibor (hn user: https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tiborsaas). Read our release posts on: https://jamez.it/blog/b/14f and https://tibor.szasz.hu/post/stream-of-consciousness
Hope you enjoy it as much as we had fun building it.
