Eliza is a soon-to-be relevant and very interesting visual novel about artificial intelligence and machine learning that practically reads like what I would imagine a Black Mirror visual novel would be like, just much more realistic and down to earth taking in context of current technological advances. Based on a semi-dystopian Seattle, we are placed in the shoes of one yet unknown Evelyn Ishino-Aubrey as she works as a "proxy" for the Eliza counseling system, basically, she reads out ChatGPT prompts to clients of the service in a desperate attempt from the big corporation Skandha to push forward AI-powered mental health assistance with a liiiittle touch of human interaction in-between. And of course, Eliza sucks.
The counseling system barely does anything outside of listening into the conversation, asking a few redundant questions and then recommending medications and AR/VR experiences suited for the users' needs, and yeah, it's a pretty big testament against the usage of AI in conversational or counseling practices, the language model will have problems here and there and because there isn't any sort of empathy or logical thinking behind it, most sessions are to no avail because of this and there's always the feeling of wanting to say something from one's soul to another, but then Eliza providing the most cookie-cutter questions of all time.
It's a pretty interesting argument to make the center of a visual novel of this kind, with it being fully voiced and super well presented with amazing art for an individually developed one and with an actual message to deliver out there, it saddens me to say that it falls flat when it comes to telling its story, being kinda repetitive and boring and kinda overstaying its welcome. Characters range from being unlikeable to just plain and without much substance at all, including our protagonist which has had a conflicting past and is now suffering living with depression... A lot of it is very subdued and there's no real emotional impact as the novel would expect it to, infuriating knowing that there is real human soul behind it, and some of the struggles presented by the many sessions you do are pretty real.
And it pains me to realize that the novel never really works on getting a true instance on the advent of AI as an unethical, personal information harvesting and fed tool, it insists on being pretty open-ended and up to whoever's playing it and has pretty much no catch in a narrative sense, which would be fine if every ending wasn't literally what it says on the tin when you get to it, with no real resolve or way of knowing how our actions determined the future of Eliza, the world or how does Evelyn get to live with the burdens of her past that they like to tease so much throughout the runtime of the novel.
It's all pretty half-assed and kinda disappointing, I'm glad people can like it and get some perspective on how things are so royally fucked in real life, but for the rest of us that have been on this pond for so long, I think it's fair to complain about the lack of depth when touching these subjects that passed on to be so important in cyber life. Or just life in general.
The counseling system barely does anything outside of listening into the conversation, asking a few redundant questions and then recommending medications and AR/VR experiences suited for the users' needs, and yeah, it's a pretty big testament against the usage of AI in conversational or counseling practices, the language model will have problems here and there and because there isn't any sort of empathy or logical thinking behind it, most sessions are to no avail because of this and there's always the feeling of wanting to say something from one's soul to another, but then Eliza providing the most cookie-cutter questions of all time.
It's a pretty interesting argument to make the center of a visual novel of this kind, with it being fully voiced and super well presented with amazing art for an individually developed one and with an actual message to deliver out there, it saddens me to say that it falls flat when it comes to telling its story, being kinda repetitive and boring and kinda overstaying its welcome. Characters range from being unlikeable to just plain and without much substance at all, including our protagonist which has had a conflicting past and is now suffering living with depression... A lot of it is very subdued and there's no real emotional impact as the novel would expect it to, infuriating knowing that there is real human soul behind it, and some of the struggles presented by the many sessions you do are pretty real.
And it pains me to realize that the novel never really works on getting a true instance on the advent of AI as an unethical, personal information harvesting and fed tool, it insists on being pretty open-ended and up to whoever's playing it and has pretty much no catch in a narrative sense, which would be fine if every ending wasn't literally what it says on the tin when you get to it, with no real resolve or way of knowing how our actions determined the future of Eliza, the world or how does Evelyn get to live with the burdens of her past that they like to tease so much throughout the runtime of the novel.
It's all pretty half-assed and kinda disappointing, I'm glad people can like it and get some perspective on how things are so royally fucked in real life, but for the rest of us that have been on this pond for so long, I think it's fair to complain about the lack of depth when touching these subjects that passed on to be so important in cyber life. Or just life in general.