A few days ago, a Twitch streamer that I’ve been following for a bit, DougDoug, uploaded a new video to his channel called “I locked Ai into an endless debate.” Doug’s known for content where he combines programming with gameplay for some fun (and chaotic) streams. It can range from using vision to convert President Obama’s hand gestures to a GameCube controller’s input to “teaching” an AI based on Pajama Sam to play his own game. It’s always a great time.

In this particular instance, Doug wrote a Python app that let him start a conversation with some predefined AI personalities, then walk away, leaving them to talk amongst each other. Beforehand, he’d made a Bingo board of popular video games, and by asking them to discuss amongst themselves about the greatest video game of all time, he’d let his chat bet on whether they’d get a bingo line or not. I won’t spoil what happens, but it’s a fun watch!

Afterwards, I thought it might be a fun project to tackle myself, so… that’s what I spent half an evening on! It’s a Python app that uses OpenAI’s API (with support for any LLM provider that has OpenAI-like endpoints, like LM Studio for local generation) for text generation and ElevenLabs’ API for optional speech generation (though be forewarned, if your personalities are talkative you’ll eat up your monthly free quota there).

The code to run it is available on my GitHub account at AriannaStory/AIRoundtable, alongside instructions for how to define your own characters. Let me know if you get any interesting conversations out of it!

… and, of course, a big shout-out to Tony, King of New York!