Minor note: the 2021 Anthropic paper may have been the first published proposal of an AI assistant character, but the idea was being actively explored several years before that. Specifically, AI Dungeon allowed you to create custom scenarios for use with their GPT-2 integration, and among the most popular was a system prompt along the lines of “The following is a conversation between a human and an advanced AI who is friendly and very helpful.” I first made one myself in summer 2020, and the capability was originally offered by the devs in December 2019.
Wild to think how this kludgy “talk to an AI” workaround basically laid the foundation for ChatGPT, “prompt engineering”, and the whole AI chatbot phenomenon.
Minor note: the 2021 Anthropic paper may have been the first published proposal of an AI assistant character, but the idea was being actively explored several years before that. Specifically, AI Dungeon allowed you to create custom scenarios for use with their GPT-2 integration, and among the most popular was a system prompt along the lines of “The following is a conversation between a human and an advanced AI who is friendly and very helpful.” I first made one myself in summer 2020, and the capability was originally offered by the devs in December 2019.
Wild to think how this kludgy “talk to an AI” workaround basically laid the foundation for ChatGPT, “prompt engineering”, and the whole AI chatbot phenomenon.