7 ms·
Microsoft patent: Creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person
- elliottcarlson 6y agoBlack Mirror feels like prior art here...
- fimdomeio 6y agoExactly. Also I remember some company trying to do that (not sure if before or after the Black Mirror episode)
- netsharc 6y agoI know 1 story of not a company but a programmer: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
- flemhans 6y agoArs Technica coverage: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/luka-ai-chatbot-speaking-to-the-dead-mind-uploading/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/07/luka-...
- danboarder 6y agohttps://replika.ai/ https://replika.ai/ has been doing this type of work. See the origin story in length on the Lex Fridman AI podcast: https://youtu.be/_AGPbvCDBCk https://youtu.be/_AGPbvCDBCk
- gmuslera 6y agoA work of fiction can count as prior art? It is not like anyone would not have tried to do something similar in practice, before or after that, but the episode itself? In any case, that episode qualifies both as prior, and art.
- Ensorceled 6y agoYes, there's the waterbed case from Robert Heinlein ... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed#Heinlein_descriptions https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterbed#Heinlein_descriptions
- the-dude 6y agoIsn't a patent a protection for the way it is implemented vs the idea itself?
- Ensorceled 6y agoThe lines have blurred. Algorithms have been patented as have things like 1-click purchasing.
- pnw_hazor 6y agoAlgorithms remain unpatenable. The claims of this patent recite a chat bot system that does specific things a certain way. If it does require a particular algorithm, the algorithm itself is not protected.
- m12k 6y agoSee also the Dixie Flatline construct from Neuromancer (1984), an AI-reconstruction of a brilliant hacker https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Construct https://williamgibson.fandom.com/wiki/Construct
- Timpy 6y agoPermutation City deals with the artificial consciousnesses too
- snaut 6y agoAnd before that, Stanisław Lem's novels.
- Applejinx 6y ago"It looks like you're grieving. Would you like help with that?"
- vernie 6y agohttps://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E21/1147896.jpg?b64lines=IFlPVSdSRSBTVElMTCBFVklMLCBBTkQKIFdIRU4gWU9VJ1JFIFRSWUlORyBUTyBCRQogR09PRCwgWU9VJ1JFIEVWRU4gTU9SRQogRVZJTC4= https://frinkiac.com/meme/S08E21/1147896.jpg?b64lines=IFlPVS...
- pjc50 6y agoLooking forward to Microsoft claiming copyright over my grandmother.
- jrsj 6y agoSomeone doesn’t necessarily have to be dead for this to work either, which is a little disturbing. Or in my case I want to hook this up to my work Slack so I can take a bathroom break without someone complaining about me being AFK for a couple minutes.
- Apocryphon 6y agoYep, we’ve seen that episode https://youtu.be/IWIusSdn1e4 https://youtu.be/IWIusSdn1e4
- Insanity 6y agoI think you might just need a better job if someone complains about that..
- krageon 6y agoYou can have a bot reply with "ah! Give me a second" or something along those lines while you're away. There's no need for a sophisticated solution, as people already know you're a person and are thus not very likely to suspect a bot (assuming you don't tell anyone that is).
- c22 6y agoI used to do this while botting MUDs. Immortals (administrators) would check up on you occasionally, so first my script would send a "mis-channel" communication to make it look like I was actively talking to someone else, then a quick "Ack, sorry" followed by a pause and a "one second". All while simultaneously sending me an SMS so I can take over the communication stream in person.
- netsharc 6y agoIt would then be another Black Mirror episode, the USS Callister one, where (spoilers:) introvert programmer Matt Damon takes DNA of his colleagues and makes virtual copies of them and imprisons them in his play universe. Obviously the tech won't be that advanced, but having people have emotional connections to chatbots that they programmed to pretend to be their exes would be... creepy. On the other hand I can imagine at least one Twitter user who we could put in a virtual playpen and it would benefit mankind.. Virtual Pennsylvania Ave 1600..
- 2sk21 6y agoI am pretty sure that I already read about a version of this in a science fiction story written by Charles Sheffield in the 1990s!
- Apocryphon 6y agoBut can it generate automated comments, to capture the spirit of long-gone forums posters?
- disabled 6y agoThe problem with making a "digital copy of oneself" for posthumous use is that it can cause a pathological grieving state for your loved ones. If you are thinking about doing it--don't.
- Ecstatify 6y agoI wish chatbots would follow my dead loved ones to the grave
- st1x7 6y agoThe current state of chatbots is embarrasingly bad. I still haven't seen a chatbot use-case that can't be solved better with an FAQ section + documentation search and a human as second line of support.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoI use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a chatbot. It provides plenty of useful functionality, especially Alexa-auto which I bought my wife for Christmas. She loves the ability to add items to her todo list whilst driving, asking it questions about the weather, playing music, performing communcation tasks, etc.
- st1x7 6y ago> I use Alexa on a daily-basis - which can be seen as a chatbot. More general virtual assistants (Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri) are at a completely different power level from most chatbots. Most chatbots use cases that I come across are some company thinking that they can replace human support with a language model trained on their custom knowledge base. They expect something as good as Alexa but which also has knowledge about the company's product and the results are always disappointing.
- krageon 6y agoIn all fairness I used to hate them but I have seen one or two customer support bots used in a way that definitely helped me get the answers I needed. Perhaps the fact that these bots are generally set up by consultants that understand search rather than some random intern that probably set up the documentation search is the deciding factor there.
- CodeGlitch 6y agoI don't get the hate for chatbots. Sure they are not perfect yet (it's a hard problem to solve!) but I see them as early-stage technology, which will improve over time. No comment on this news article though.
- gnicholas 6y agoHope it works better than their racist chatbot, Tay. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idUSKCN0WQ2LA https://www.reuters.com/article/us-microsoft-twitter-bot-idU...
- DoingIsLearning 6y agoThe amount of brain power and financial resources these companies have amassed for the purpose of generating targeted ads or HMIs, is disconcerting. Maybe it's too much of an Arthur C. Clarke type fantasy but I always wonder what our world would be like if a substantial fraction of these billionaire budgets at Facebook, Google, Microsoft were spent on Natural Sciences, even if with a commercial scope narrowed to Applied Sciences.
- kleiba 6y agoI remember reading about a startup that already did that. If I recall correctly, it developed organically out of a situation where the founder had actually lost a friend and trained a chat-bot on their email backlog. Later she realized that there might be a business idea in this. Does anyone recall that article?
- loldot_ 6y agoSounds a bit like this article: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memorial-roman-mazurenko-bot https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo... haven't had the time to read all of it again and can't recall all of it, so might not be the one.
- kleiba 6y agoI don't remember the exact details either but I believe this is it. Thanks for digging it up. Now, wouldn't that constitute prior art wrt. the patent application?
- webmaven 6y agoYeah, the origin story described sounds like Replika's. In case Verge's story isn't the right one, here is another from Quartz that might be the coverage you remember: https://classic.qz.com/machines-with-brains/1018126/lukas-replika-chatbot-creates-a-digital-representation-of-you-the-more-you-interact-with-it/ https://classic.qz.com/machines-with-brains/1018126/lukas-re...
- cwkoss 6y agoWas the friend also an employee? The tone of the sentence sounds quite different if you replace those words: from touching to dystopian > situation where the founder had actually lost an employee and trained a chat-bot on their email backlog.
- moebis 6y agoI had this exact same idea 2 years ago. My wife said it wasn't worth pursuing. lol
- Ensorceled 6y agoTo be fair, this doesn't prove her wrong ... they haven't made money from it yet.
- cvaidya1986 6y agoIsn’t this the founding idea of Replika ?
- Closi 6y agoIn terms of the patent, I can't actually read anywhere that says the intent or a use case is specifically to create chatbots for dead loved ones. The headline is misleading - The technology could be used to create chatbots from your dead loved ones, but that isn't what the patent is about.
- unrevelant 6y agoSeems like a less advanced, but clearly more automatable version of the South Korean mother who was able to see her deceased 7-year-old in VR[0][1]. A friend of mine wrote a short story about this sort of thing a couple of years ago[2]. We actually spoke about it, and it got me to wondering what the business model of a service like this could be. Subscribing to receive videos from and communicate with a deceased relative. "Unsubscribing" would be like condemning them to the grave yourself. It's gross and scummy, but I could definitely see it being backed. Money on the table, I guess. [0]: https://www.pcgamer.com/a-grieving-mother-meets-her-deceased-daughter-in-vr-in-this-tragic-unsettling-documentary/ https://www.pcgamer.com/a-grieving-mother-meets-her-deceased... [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflTK8c4w0c&feature=youtu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uflTK8c4w0c&feature=youtu.be [2]: https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/
- elmo2you 6y agoLet's not forget that this is a commercial company. Even if people will know it is a bot, these people's rational capacities will in most cased be diminished under such circumstances, at best. Many will be easily (emotionally) manipulable, even more than with all the psychological trickery in product advertisement and big data exploitation these days. Opinion: this clearly crosses the line of criminal behaviors, exploiting people who are clearly in a vulnerable positions (at least more than usual). I think the track record of tech companies rather clearly shows that their promised of taking good care of collected data (and privacy) mean little to nothing. At the end of the day, they do this for profit. That's enough for me to make this cross the line. Also, what's really the "invention" here? Would something like this ever deserve a patent monopoly? If you take (dead) people's personal data and build a neural net (or any other "AI") to mimic/compliment that data (needed for answering questions), have you not just done what any/every neural net already does? If we're going to call that novel and innovative, then hold my beer ... or is this just again a big tech company abusing the patent system to hijack an obvious (use of) technology, excluding anyone who doesn't belong to their cozy little cross-licensing inbreed family from using what should be free to use in the first place? #end-of-rant
- eurasiantiger 6y ago(Software) patents are protectionist bullshit and against the notion of a free market
- powerapple 6y agoYes, software should be copyrighted. Ideas should not be patentable.
- kerng 6y agoWhy can this be patented? I mean I also had this idea long ago and it's not anywhere novel.
- dalu 6y agoThis should not be permitted that someone files a patent of something so common. That's not what patents should be. I'm disgusted by how corrupt the system is
- whatshisface 6y agoNew proposed rule: All patents must be accompanied by a working prototype that encompasses all claims. Anything not implemented in the prototype is not in the patent.
- webmaven 6y ago> New proposed rule: All patents must be accompanied by a working prototype that encompasses all claims. Anything not implemented in the prototype is not in the patent. Interesting rule. I'm not sure that a single prototype per patent is reasonable, though, given that claims may cover mutually exclusive claims and divergent use-cases. A set of prototypes that collectively cover all claims (though not all possible combinations of claims) might work, except that the hard part might still be reducing to practice a particular combination of claims not in any of the prototypes. Eg. A patent that has claims for electronic storage and playback of music and claims for a handheld data storage device (each claim embodied separately in prototypes) as well as the combination of a handheld device for electronic storage and playback of music (claim not embodied in a prototype). I'm not sure how to construct the rules in such a way that you aren't either saddling inventors with the need to produce a huge number of prototypes representing a combinatorial explosion of claims and their combinations, nor allowing patent holders to extort subsequent inventors for inventions that they could never have reduced to practice themselves. Leaving the determination of which combinations of claims to allow as "reducing to practice is left as an exercise for the engineer" up to the patent examiner still leaves in place the existing misalignment of incentives that the current system has, except it makes applying for patents more expensive.
- curation 6y agoThe system is not corrupt. The system is authoritarian capitalism controlled by international capital. We can keep asking the wrong questions or act.
- jmugan 6y agoFunny. I filed a patent for this same thing in 2015 and it was rejected for not being novel. https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160332079A1/en https://patents.google.com/patent/US20160332079A1/en
- ChrisLomont 6y agoFrom looking at your application, you were not patenting a chatbot, but a vastly different thing. The word "chat" only appears once in your application, but only as an input source, not a conversation tool.
- johnisgood 6y agoBut is a chat bot novel?
- pnw_hazor 6y agoSome are. It depends on how they work. Remember utility patents are about how things work, not what they are. There are probably 1000's of issued patents for chat bots each one claiming different hows.
- jmugan 6y agoThe chatbot part was a subset of what I was doing.
- jmugan 6y agoIt was the patent application supporting Happy Cyborg https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140927011544-42285562-you-and-your-digital-clone/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/20140927011544-42285562-you-a...
- ChrisLomont 6y agoThe patent app you linked doesn't mention a chatbot in any claims, which is all that matters. Saying it was for some project has zero relevance to the patent system. Care to list the claims in your patent you think are the same as the MS claims?
- ChrisLomont 6y agoThe claims are what is patented, not the simplistic headline, nor the discussions that do not analyze the claims in detail. For all the outrage, not a single post here yet discusses the actual claims.
- qwerty456127 6y agoI told you this was going to happen! Some month ago I wrote a comment predicting exactly this.
- keiferski 6y agoWhen the construct laughed, it came through as something else, not laughter, but a stab of cold down Case’s spine. ”Do me a favor, boy.” “What’s that, Dix?” “This scam of yours, when it’s over, you erase this goddam thing.”
- johnisgood 6y agoI created a Markov chain bot from my friend's log files. Is it a "conversational chat bot of a specific person"?
- slaymaker1907 6y agoI'm pretty sure that one Black Mirror episode has prior art on this.
- kptkrunch 6y agoCan someone contest this patent on the grounds that it is obvious?