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"Amodei Appears on OpenAI"


Why Are Characters Showing Up in AI Tools?

The character feature recently added by OpenAI to its coding AI app, Codex, is creating a buzz among developers.

Creating an AI character in the OpenAI app 'Codex'. Photo by Eunseo Lee.

According to industry sources on May 5, OpenAI’s Codex now offers eight default AI characters, along with a new feature that allows users to create their own characters. Users are sharing their custom creations on library sites such as "Codex Pet" and "Petdex." The Codex Pet site alone features more than 600 characters, and the "Angry Amodei" character—modeled after Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic—has recorded over 5,000 views.

By entering the '/pet' command in the Codex interface, users can activate a character, or type '/Hatch Pet' and describe a concept to create a custom character. The character appears in the bottom right corner of the computer screen, allowing users to check on their coding progress or get responses even while using other apps. The character uses speech bubbles to display Codex’s progress status, whether it is waiting for input, or if a task has been completed.

Creating AI characters in the OpenAI app 'Codex'. In the lower right corner, the 'Angry Amoday' AI character shows the progress through a speech bubble. Photo by Eunseo Lee.

This feature demonstrates how AI is evolving beyond being a simple tool to become a companion AI that fosters an emotional bond. Because the character can comment or continue conversations via speech bubbles, users can interact emotionally with it. This can help reduce the psychological burden and sense of isolation that developers often feel when programming alone for extended periods.

It also helps solo developers spot bugs they might otherwise miss. This is because, by explaining an unresolved bug to another "entity," users often experience the "rubber duck debugging effect," which helps them refresh their thinking and find solutions on their own.

Last month, Anthropic also briefly introduced "Claude Buddy" to its Claude Code platform as an April Fool’s feature. Claude Buddy is a personal assistant mascot that users can raise in the terminal (a program for inputting commands via text), observing coding and sharing feedback through speech bubbles. Users could interact with 18 different characters, each with distinct traits such as bug detection skills, patience, chaos, technical insight, and blunt evaluation, using various commands.

The industry is paying close attention to the possibility that AI characters could evolve into truly personalized assistants supporting actual coding in the future. There is also a view that this marks an early stage of experimenting with multi-agent environments where various AIs collaborate. Park Jinho, Professor at the Department of Computer and AI at Dongguk University, said, "Character AI interfaces tailored to individual preferences can make AI agents feel more approachable and increase accessibility." However, he also noted, "When creating characters, it is important to design options that consider legal and regulatory guidelines and allow for the addition of industry-optimized features."

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.