Hello Sophia. We saw that you linked to a few character.ai cards. We were wondering if you've heard of many fictives/introjects sourced from ai chats/roleplays? Pluralpedia gives the terms "aitive" and "char.aitive", and a few systems also describe such a thing on r/plural, but so far there seems to be very little documentation of such experiences. we appreciate your resources btw!
I've heard of it, but I don't know of any specific resources. It's just a thing that happens.
Honestly, it's something that I think probably should be explored more. Because a AItive sort of blurs the line between fictive and factive. Or, maybe it's more accurate to say it lets you make a fictive in a way that you could previously only form factives.
See, pretty much every fictive in the past was created by either consuming the source material or interacting with a character you created in your own head. A traditional Naruto fictive would be formed by watching Naruto or reading the manga and letting your brain create a type of Naruto simulation. Then at a certain point, the simulation is able to develop personhood.
I tend to think of this as your brain running a predictive algorithm. If you are trying to empathize with the character, your brain needs to run a simulation of what that character would be feeling in that given situation. And if you dissociate from those feelings enough, it can lead to it developing sentience.
Or if you were writing a Naruto fanfiction, you would be running the simulation to figure out how your character should act in the story that you are telling.
Both of those are traditional ways for a fictive to form.
And some factives form the same exact way. If it's someone you see on TV, or someone you are in a parasocial relationship with, those are going to form pretty much the same exact way as the fictive.
But there's another way of forming that has been practically exclusive to factives: introjecting a headmate based on two-way interactions with somebody else.
Because these aren't parasocial relationships that form them. These are social relationships. Why some people with DID will introject friends and family members... And unfortunately, abusers.
But in the formation of these, there is a back and forth that takes place. You are talking to a person in front of you, and your predictive algorithm is trying to predict how that person will behave. It's not something prescripted like a movie or a book. It's an interaction between you and the other person.
In the past, there was no way for somebody to really interact with a fictional character. The fictional character doesn't exist. They can't talk back to you. Maybe roleplays would be the only exception, but then it's a human being on the other end. So your fictive of somebody else's roleplay character is also kind of a factive.
But with AI, you can form something that is 100% a fictive, only interacting with a non-human fictional character, in a way that was previously impossible!
And that, I think, is pretty cool! 😁
