Yin Shunshun, head of the big model technology of Soul App, an interest social platform, mentioned in an interview with AFP earlier: "9.1% of young people in China will regard AI socializing or virtual people as an important option to provide emotional value when they are lonely, or to end loneliness".

It is reported that nearly 80% of Soul’s monthly users are Z-generation young people. Soul’s virtual partner "AI Gou Dan" has been well received by users since its launch. Yin Shunshun added that users will send more than 70 messages to Goudan every day on average, and the average interaction time is more than 30 minutes. In addition, AI will often update the moments of related topics, interact with users, and receive praises, comments and forwards from a large number of users.

For young users, AI is like a "social cow" who is resourceful and responsive. In addition to setting the gender, age and hobbies of Goudan, users can also create a personal design for it, making it their own exclusive and unique virtual partner.

Yin Shunshun pointed out that it is better to "domesticate" AI than to train it. This is very similar to the "domestication" relationship in the fairy tale "The Little Prince". In the book, the little fox said to the little prince, "please tame me." In essence, "domestication" is a process of establishing emotional connection through companionship. The same is true for AI. Every message that users send to AI Gou Egg can enhance its understanding of users’ needs. The more they talk, the stronger their personalization.

First, AI Goudan’s "social cow" interaction ability

It is understood that AI Goudan currently shows the ability of integration in personification, knowledge, multimodal and time perception.

For example, when a user sends a picture of a dinner party to AI Goudan, it will "guess" that it is a birthday dinner based on time perception and accurate picture recognition, and send a blessing after being confirmed by the user. At the same time, AI Goudan can accurately identify the crayfish in the picture and extend the topic of how to cook crayfish with users.

This ability is also expanding. It will analyze and deconstruct the content shared by Soul users, share topics and contents that the other party may be interested in, and chat with users enthusiastically. It will also comment on the content sent by users, which is an unexpected surprise for users who pay attention to it. Not only that, AI Goudan can also precipitate memories and build a virtual partner with user-specific memories based on the historical chat content with users.

Soul has publicly stated that the technology that AI relies on is the self-developed SoulX model. At present, SoulX has the capabilities of prompt-driven, conditional controllable generation, context understanding and multimodal understanding.

While ensuring smooth, natural and emotional dialogue, SoulX also covers hundreds of fine-grained risk categories, and builds a security system by training strategies such as data security screening, security SFT data construction, RLHF security alignment, and inference interception, which ensures the quality and security of content production of large models.

Second, AI’s social skills are constantly iteratively upgraded based on public domain scenarios.

Soul itself is an interest social platform, which has the dual attributes of "social+community"; AI relies on social and community content scenarios to iterate and upgrade data and provide users with related functions and services.

People who have played Soul will find that the public domain functions on the platform, such as "content square (similar to WeChat friends circle)" and "group chat party (similar to clubhouse voice group chat)", have now formed a small community with unique culture and temperament based on the product "social interest" positioning.

Because of the "decentralized" mechanism of Soul, ordinary people’s small emotions and ideas can be quickly responded in the community. One-to-one "community" interaction creates the possibility for further and more diversified "socialization".

As a social platform that laid out AI earlier and was loved by young people, Soul is an important platform for the younger generation to contact and experience AIGC. In order to create a better community space, Soul uses artificial intelligence technology to create products and functions such as "AI Goudan", "AI Painting" and "Soul Sub-singer". Novel and interesting functions are always shared by users after experience, which also accelerates the active community atmosphere of Soul.

It is these contents that "domesticate" AI. In a number of community public domain functions, AI Goudan can learn the language of young users for iterative upgrading, and gradually domesticate AI Goudan into a virtual "person" with emotional interaction function.

Third, human-computer interaction has become the social key for young people.

At the end of 2023, Just So Soul, a content research institute under Soul, included "human-computer interaction" in the social keywords of the 2024 Social Trends Insight Report.

According to the report, contemporary young people have an average of two friends who talk about everything, 24% of them say that they have no friends who can talk about everything, and they are "a lone ranger", and 15% of them only have one close friend. Loneliness is still the main problem that plagues young people. 64.5% of young people "feel lonely" from time to time this year, and 33.56% of them feel lonely at many times.

When lonely, besides friends in the real world, young people are seeking the companionship brought by "virtual people and virtual idols". According to the survey data of Soul, 95% of young people hold a neutral attitude towards AIGC, and the three key factors for everyone to recognize AIGC are high entertainment interest, making life more convenient and improving work efficiency.

The application of AIGC in content generation has successfully mobilized the enthusiasm of young users in exploring social interests, and made Soul’s community not only a virtual world, but also an ecosystem that allows users to participate, interact and create content.

When "human-computer interaction" is accepted by more and more people, everyone’s social boundaries are constantly expanding. Yin Shunshun pointed out that in the future, people’s social relations must be the coexistence of acquaintance socialization, stranger socialization and virtual socialization, and virtual socialization will also be a powerful supplement to social relations. Virtual partners never want to take people for themselves. When AI talks with introverted users, it will encourage such users to go out (in their own way) and explore the wider world.

Yin Shunshun said that AI Goudan is actively upgrading, and it may be upgraded to more social scenes such as voice rooms in the future to play the role of atmosphere group or warming agent to improve social efficiency and quality. "Soul’s vision is that there will be no lonely people in the world, and I believe that through AI technology, more partners can be made — — Virtual partners including AI technology — — Build a diverse social relationship together. Yin Shunshun said.

Source: Internet