Chappie is a ubiquitous, personalized artificial general intelligence companion. With you everywhere you go, Chappie is constantly picking up data through its user’s ambient environment and conversations, generated data through user’s activities, and user-on-AI interactions. Most crucially, Chappie grows and develops with the user. The more a user interacts with their Chappie, the more Chappie evolves to match the user’s personality.

Data to help Chappie learn and evolve would be constantly pulled in through the Trigger and associated personal accounts of the user. However, the Trigger can also be used to put the Chappie into any of the user’s devices, in public or in private. This makes interacting with the Chappie easier and more personable. Acknowledging that few users would be willing to give up the data for every moment of their lives, we’re considering the disembodied Chappie entity itself as existing on a private cloud for each individual.

As the Aura exhibit is happening in the mid-twenty first century, the most possible future is one where Chappie is a research experiment carried out by Aura over a ten-year span, rather than a produced and distributed product. Aura carefully selected 60 adults to test drive a Chappie prototype--essentially, an algorithm that can be called up onto a variety of devices--over a decade. This allowed Aura to investigate the relationships that can form between AI companion and human, as well as to gain insight on the way those relationships form, how long it takes for intimacy to be achieved, and the conditions facilitating a genuine connection. Aura believes these insights will allow them to develop improved algorithms and AI products in the future.

Chappie is designed to carefully explore two primary questions:

• What happens when AI assistants are as ubiquitous and readily available as smart phones today?
• How does constant companionship affect human behavior and lived experiences?