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When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using artificial intelligence
- billconan 10y agoI really want to know the model behind this chatbot
- Hydraulix989 10y agoYes, any idea on the specifics? I wouldn't be surprised if the chat bot actually didn't work too well, but the opportunity for a good article was too much for any journalist to pass up.
- kelvich 10y agoI bet whole source code of that engine can be found in Basic Usage section of https://github.com/jsvine/markovify https://github.com/jsvine/markovify
- Rhapso 10y agoThis has been one of the reasons life logging has been interesting to me. It might be a while before we can "upload" your brain, but we can build a predictive model of your behavior and leave an interactive "autobiography" much sooner.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- space_ghost 10y agoThe British sci-fi sitcom Red Dwarf had a character that was just such an interactive recreation.
- ClassyJacket 10y agoIt was implied that Rimmer had all the real Rimmer's memories and behaviour though, and was a pretty much completely accurate simulation.
- pmoriarty 10y agoPhilip K Dick, in the 1950s and 60s, wrote about simulations of famous people (like Einstein or Lincoln), of ordinary people's deceased relatives, and of other humans that were used for pleasure or entertainment. He also wrote of living people, famous or not, who turned out to be simulations.
- sapphireblue 10y agoI very much agree with this point of view. It seems to me that dry metaphysical debates (i.e. questioning the nature of these conversation models) are obscuring interesting practical questions that could be asked and tested empirically. Given modern deep learning conversation models it is already possible to recreate some basic patterns of human dialogue with a recurrent neural network trained on a large corpus (see Google's "A Neural Conversational Model" paper and someone's implementation of it: https://github.com/macournoyer/neuralconvo https://github.com/macournoyer/neuralconvo ). It would be interesting to experiment with it and see, just how far can we push this modeling approach? How much data is needed? Is it possible to train the model on a huge corpus of human dialogues, and then to finetune it on small amount of data from one specific person?
- butz 10y agoBlack Mirror episode in 2013 had the same plot.
- placebo 10y agoIt is mentioned in the article
- topbru 10y agoSuch an incredible show, new episodes later this month on Netflix, can't wait.
- dudouble 10y agoThanks for this. I loved this show and had no idea. Can't wait either!
- jotux 10y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back_(Black_Mirror)
- BlytheSchuma 10y agoTales from the Dark side did it first. Mookie and Pookie
- m_fayer 10y agoFor me, this was easily the most subtle, thoughtful, and powerful episode of the entire series. The plot device has obviously been done before, but never like this.
- nickpinkston 10y agoShe can rebuild him - we have the technology!
- lancefisher 10y agoCaprica, the prequel to Battlestar Galactica, uses this idea as a major plot element. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caprica_(TV_series)
- drdeca 10y agoWhy are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? It isn't a person, it's a chatbot. There is even a company saying that they will try to revive people with a combination of chatlogs and brain scans or something. Chatlogs aren't going to bridge the gap between what you can get with brain scans and what you need to do a full emulation. Even if humanity does succeed in doing complete mind simulations, humanity will not have thereby solved death. It will have, at best, delayed it for a very very long time. And then what? ;)
- js8 10y ago> Why are people acting like a simple chatbot is somehow a recreation of a person? I hate to state the obvious, but, because they are emotionally heart-broken?
- PakG1 10y agoUnfortunately, many people are not good at grieving and healing. I wish there was a way for people to learn how to do that instead of rely on fakes. But not sure what the answer is when they're so emotionally distraught that they default to such lengths. I'm reminded of those who get their old dogs cloned after their original dog dies. It doesn't seem like a good thing for the mind long-term to think an artificial replacement is the same companion. It's better to get a completely new dog, new friends, etc. I'm no psychologist, but this type of option seems like a scary start in potentially breaking from reality.
- kranner 10y agoSorry but this is a little judgemental. Even a photo is 'fake'. This is somewhere between a photo and a cloned copy. I don't think there is reason to believe (yet) that this will lead most people's minds to break from reality. It may be an effective coping mechanism while they slowly adapt to the passing of their loved one.
- kuyda 10y ago
- neoteo 10y agoThe Max Headroom series 2 episode "Deities" was about a Vu Age church that sold A.I. recreations of loved ones as salvation.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- tudorw 10y agoThis is well worth a watch. Prescient.
- zeristor 10y agoWasn't this the core of Stanislav Lem's Solaris? Albeit reconstructing the personality of a loved one from someone else's memories.
- evolve2k 10y ago"An uncomfortable truth suggested by the Roman bot is that many of our flesh-and-blood relationships now exist primarily as exchanges of texts, which are becoming increasingly easy to mimic" This. I was reflecting with a friend today how with modern social networks there is this strange feeling of being connected yet somehow disconnected. I think the above paragraph captures this same essence. We discussed that maybe digital technology is akin to medicine, it's all about the dosage. Chat to the bot a little, maybe be healing, chat all the time and maybe it's really not going to be good for you. How do we navigate these tools that can connect us with the world and yet often leave us feeling so alone at the same time?
- rublev 10y agoI think our psyche is extremely delicate, and pretending we can mentally manage and sort the influx of constant information is fooling ourselves. Fooling ourselves because by virtue of exposing yourself to so much information daily, you're altering the way you think and rewiring your mind. I'd like to think that I'm above being influenced by subliminal propaganda in media (especially television), but I'm not. I've caught myself a few times where I held a strong opinion about something I knew nothing about and I was able to trace it back to what originally influenced me. When pressed on certain opinions I couldn't say anything concrete. Life has been a lot better when I deleted all social media accounts (900+ 'friends' on FB). Really only about 20 of those connections I keep in touch with, and I've made it a point that texting is only for details not chatting. Since talking on the phone and making efforts to see people in real life I've been a lot happier. My world feels less overloaded, there are no strings connecting my life to social media and the control is back in my hands. I can feel how I want to feel about things without carefully summing up and absorbing how others feel about my experiences. Social media and texting and all that shit is just another and even more shaved off abstraction of human interaction (boiling down interaction to just characters on a screen). I draw the line at the human voice, nothing below that save for carefully thought out and written letters is 'human' enough for me to really derive any lasting pleasure from. It's depressing for a very long time after deleting social media accounts, it feels like your entire social rug has been suddenly swiped right out from underneath you. I didn't back any of it up or save any of it. And you know what? I don't remember any of it. I don't remember the conversations because there were 100's a day. I don't remember any of the comments or banter left on photos, or the photos themselves. It all blends into one. All of it was meaningless, I didn't grow closer to any of those people. I discovered more about them, sure. Omitting (or at least trying my hardest to) popular media and social media has been mentally freeing. I get to ask people 'Oh yeah? Why don't you tell me about it?' when they say 'Hey have you heard of <current event>?' I have no idea what's going on anywhere and I love it.
- fixxer 10y agoI find this unseemly. Grief is a vital part of the healing process. This strikes me as a part of a goal to avoid/numb it.
- kuyda 10y agoThis is exactly the opposite. What happens today that there is no ritual, nothing that allows us to remember and to face it. We try to avoid our feelings by trying to shove them as deep as possible as fast as possible. It doesn't help. We all need a ritual that would work in the digital age to process - this is like sitting shiva.
- fixxer 10y agoI disagree with your statement to my core. I think we're going to have to accept philosophical differences on this one. Sorry for your loss.
- beeskneecaps 10y agoI can definitely sympathize here. There are so many people that I wish I could have one last conversation with and this would maybe help.. I, personally, would _really_ not want to be reanimated and potentially misrepresented by Markov chains and some early deep learning system.
- RandomName2020 10y agoIt ultimately boils down if you accept John Searle's Chinese room argument or not. (BTW his claim is not that conscious machines are not possible - we are such machines, but they cannot be implemented as digital symbol manipulators; we first need to figure out what exactly makes the biological machines conscious).
- Esau 10y agoAn interesting article, although I disagree with use of the term "artificial intelligence" to describe what was created. In some ways, I can sympathize with Ms. Kuyda. Both my father and grandmother died in 2013, and even though they are gone, I still get birthday alerts for them on my phone. I don't have the heart to remove them.