exAlice

exAlice is a fictional open-source software project used in design fiction and academic discussions to illustrate advanced conversational AI systems. It is not a real product, but a prototypical model for exploring how an agent named exAlice could balance helpfulness, safety, and transparency in dialogue.

Overview: exAlice envisions a modular architecture with a dialogue manager, a task planner, a user model, memory, and an explainability layer. The system is designed to maintain a persistent but privacy-conscious user profile, track provenance of actions, and provide justifications for its responses.

Architecture and operation: The core components include a natural language understanding and generation module based on large language models; a planning component that sequences actions; a constraint layer that enforces safety and policy compliance; and an explainability module that can render rationale for outputs. It emphasizes modularity to allow swapping components and tailoring behavior to different use cases or domains.

Development and hypothetical history: As a design fiction, exAlice is described in hypothetical project briefs and academic exercises rather than a deployable product. Scenarios typically explore how modular AI systems could improve collaboration with humans while attempting to maintain accountability and user trust.

Reception and status: In its fictional context, exAlice is used to discuss AI alignment, explainability, and human–AI collaboration. Critics in these discussions point to real-world concerns such as computational cost, data privacy, potential misalignment, and the challenges of ensuring robust safety across diverse tasks.