Soul Zhang Lu’s Vision of AI and the Future of Social Interaction

Pictured Che Bin, Soul’s Vice President and Product Lead

The year 2024 marked a pivotal moment in the evolution of social networking, as artificial intelligence (AI) began to redefine how people connected and interacted with each other on social platforms. The CEO of Soul, Zhang Lu, who is also the founder of this pioneering Chinese social platform embraced AI as a catalyst for innovation since the very beginning. 

Given the innovative ways in which the social platform has integrated AIGC into various app features, it came as no surprise when Soul Zhang Lu was asked to send a representative to the recently held ChinaJoy Summit in Shanghai. The event was a part of the China International Digital Entertainment Industry Conference, an authoritative and top-tier symposium in the digital entertainment industry.

The central theme of the ChinaJoy AIGC Conference was “Intelligence Across All Things”, and the event saw the coming together of industry representatives, investors, and other guests. The discussions centered on AIGC infrastructure, model layers, and application scenarios as well as business models powered by AIGC technology, all presented from a holistic perspective. The aim was to offer a comprehensive view of AIGC’s role in shaping future technologies.

Soul Zhang Lu and her social platform were represented at the event by Che Bin, the Vice President and Product Leader of the company, who delivered a keynote titled “From Reality to Virtual: Exploring the New Future of AI Social Networking”.

Many analysts have stated that 2024 will be the year of “AI Application Explosion”. In his address, Che Bin explained that while groundbreaking trends powered by AIGC technology are expected to sweep across all industrial sectors, only the social networking field offers a rife environment for the emergence of the crucial “Killer App” scenario of the AI era.

Because the social networking sector has high traffic value and network effects, AIGC applications can be used to bring about significant transformation in social product formats. The CEO of Soul, Zhang Lu was a pioneer in the field of reconstructing social experiences through AI. 

In fact, Soul was one of the first social platforms in China to rethink the relationship between humans and machines, and this has led to the constant exploration of new possibilities of social interactions powered by AIGC technology. Che Bin summarized the platform’s insights into AIGC innovation in three core dimensions of social interaction: “people,” “AI,” and “environment.”

As far as the “people” aspect of this equation is concerned, Soul Zhang Lu has always held that “people” are the key to all innovation. Che Bin added that enhancing the user’s experience in a meaningful way so that they feel the true value of the product in an “AHA moment,” is essential for achieving PMF (Product-Market Fit).

To understand the perceptions and views of the users of her platform towards AIGC technology and its applications in the social scenario, Soul Zhang Lu got her team to conduct a survey that was used to compile the “2024 Gen Z AIGC Attitude Report” released by the Just So Soul Research Institute.

The responses to this survey showed the emergence of a distinct new trend – Young people are rethinking “human-machine relationships”. The data showed that over 60% of young people believe AIGC products can help alleviate or somewhat alleviate loneliness. Additionally, 32.8% of the Zoomers who participated in the survey were willing and even eager to be friends with AI.

Che Bin went on to explain that current AIGC technology allows social platforms to achieve the level of human-machine interaction which was up until now only a fantasy presented by Hollywood. He gave the example of the movie “Her” in which the protagonist develops a special emotional connection with the AI operating system “Samantha.” 

AIGC technology can indeed be used to make such connections a reality and to power intelligent social platforms where humans coexist with AI. While explaining the journey of increasing the integration of AI into various platform features, Che Bin clarified that when Soul Zhang Lu and her team started dabbling in AIGC technology, the focus was on integrating AI into social relationship discovery, relationship-building, and icebreaking.

 So, the platform’s programmers used the technology to create an AI chat assistant that generated chat content based on interest graphs to assist in icebreaking and in creating digital avatars that would be a digital representation of the user’s personality. In other words, AIGC was used in applications that played a supporting role.

 But, now the focus has shifted towards making AIGC one of the two main players, the other being the user. So, now the team of Soul Zhang Lu is invested in exploring the possibilities of human-AI interactions with an emotional undercurrent. The aim is to provide a realistic human-like feel to the conversation between people and machines. 

In addition to this, Che Bin stated that the founder of Soul, Zhang Lu thinks that engagement with machines through the help of AIGC technology needs to transcend beyond just mere conversations. And to achieve this, AI needs to have just as much emotional intelligence as it does general intelligence.

The idea should be to develop AIGC applications that offer a sense of companionship to the users and create emotional value. To achieve this, LLMs will need to be multimodal and have anthropomorphic attributes. Because Soul Zhang Lu recognized this need early on, a lot of effort was put into developing the platform’s independent language model Soul X as well as its large voice model. Together, these are currently being used to power a host of interactive social scenarios on the platform including AI gaming, AI companionship, and AI-assisted social networking  

Che Bin concluded the keynote by stating that the ultimate goal of the team of Soul Zhang Lu is to reconstruct social environments and reshape social experiences through AI to a level where it becomes possible for Soul App to enable users to create memories together with AI.