HERIKA-THE CHATGPT COMPANION

Skyrim with a follower using OpenAl's chatbot.

- Christopher Livingston

As I continue to nervously monitor the meteoric rise of artificial intelligence, I have all sorts of questions. Is AI actually intelligent or just very good at pretending to be intelligent? Is it creating art or just stealing from human artists? Can it be trusted? Will it take our jobs? Will it become sentient like Skynet and give rise to terminators bent on the destruction of the human race except for one who is nice and makes us sad when it gives a thumbs-up while sinking into a vat of molten steel?

Maybe I should start with an easier question: will AI make Skyrim better? I decided to find out using a mod called Herika—The ChatGPT Companion, which adds a new follower to the game powered by OpenAI’s chatbot.

Herika works like any other Skyrim companion: she follows me around, pitches in with combat, and I can give her armor, weapons, and items to use and carry for me. But the mod connects her in real time to ChatGPT, and also allows me to type in questions or even (using Azure speech-to-text) ask them by speaking into my microphone. It’s honestly pretty neat.

And I can genuinely ask Herika anything. It can be lore-friendly questions, such as where a particular town is located in Skyrim, or what she knows about an NPC, or her opinion about the helmet and armor I’m wearing. I can break the fourth wall and get meta, asking her how to enable cheat codes or what key I should bind to crouch or how she feels about other games, like Diablo IV or even Starfield.