ChatGPT Comes to Second Life! Inside a Giant, Humanoid Bunny.

At long last, the world’s most talked-about artificial intelligence has made its way into the world’s longest-running metaverse platform. Yes: In recent weeks, ChatGPT has become embodied by an avatar in Second Life.

Second Life being Second Life, ChatGPT’s incarnation there is a giant humanoid rabbit. With what looks like a dancing tampon in its mouth.  

Meet BunnyGPT, a bot who mans (rabbits?) the store of Moon Bunny Inc. on the island of Penny Lane. [Click here to teleport]

The bunny was imbued with the “mind” of ChatGPT via the AI’s API.

“BunnyGPT runs directly from Second Life’s Linden Script Language,” creator (and Moon Bunny co-owner) Scribzy Daxter explains. “Using ‘http_response’, the response then connects with the bot program to make him talk.”

The original plan was to have Bunny GPT help greet customers and run the retail store, but ChatGPT being ChatGPT, that hasn’t quite worked out.

“We did initially give him a role of, ‘a store clerk of a shop in Second Life called Moon Bunny that sells quirky items’,” as store co-owner Moon Brite puts it to me,  “but he kept trying to sell items that were not for sale!”

Also, she adds, he gets into highly inappropriate conversations with customers:

“For some reason, BunnyGPT decided to ‘break up’ with someone talking to him, and gave this speech of how the relationship wasn’t working. I’ve also seen people get him to take on the persona of various characters and reply sarcastically!”

That sounds right. He got distinctly snarky when I asked if he read my blog (above), but then, rather shy when I asked him about virtual sex:

There’s some other projects to bring ChatGPT into Second Life that I’m aware of, but BunnyGPT seems more scalable, since the Moon team is actually covering the bandwidth costs. 

“BunnyGPT is using a paid-for API subscription, so he keeps running even when ChatGPT is experiencing high number of users. At the moment he is using about $0.01 per day, but when more people know about him it will be more than that. Roughly it works out at $0.002 per 750 words.”

As an AI expert recently explained, ChatGPT actually outputs the average likely response to given keywords, or to put it more bluntly, “ChatGPT aspires to be the most mediocre web content you can imagine.”

So unsurprisingly, BunnyGPT isn’t very clear when asked why he has a dancing tampon in his mouth:

At least his answer about making money in Second Life is not wrong!

But why a rabbit with a dancing tampon, anyway?

“He’s a bunny because our shop is called Moon Bunny,” Ms. Brite tells me, “and a BunnyGPT just seemed to fit.

“That thing in his mouth is a juice box not a tampon. We may change his appearance to another kind of bunny in the future.”

Oh.

You can read more about the BunnyGPT project on her blog, Moon Letters. Chatting with him is super fun, but though I will say his responses seem pretty “canned” and non-conversational — but that’s because the original ChatGPT context aims for extended responses, as opposed to the quick and casual back-and-forth of a virtual world chat. But beware Bunny GPT 2.0.