5 ms·

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

eddonner 3y ago
Great point. Bound to be a big area of debate as LLMs get increasingly good at this. Black Mirror’s take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
RobRivera 3y ago
Oh hey Black Mirror!
V__ 3y ago
Could probably be just as dangerous as helpful. You work through some issues, maybe want to forgive or be forgiven to get closure and the LLM says f*k you, no.
- jononor 3y ago
  They will RLHF* that away, as best as they can. * Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback
mewpmewp2 3y ago
> it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one. Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate. If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation? Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life. But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.
- alchemist1e9 3y ago
  Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet? I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
  - jazzyjackson 3y ago
    I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot. What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind ! I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
    - pixl97 3y ago
      > Maybe some extremists will think its unholy At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.
      - HKH2 3y ago
        I'm sure people will create holographic Hitlers for historical reasons too.
    - 3y ago
AriedK 3y ago
It has been tried. Joshua Barneau tried it with GPT-3, training it on his deceased fiancees text- and facebook messages. It’s a moving read: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation... It ‘worked’ for him for a while.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- lomir8 3y ago
  Shocking a biochemical reaction ceases when external stimuli is removed. Technology is like acupuncture and astrology of the modern west.
  - ben_w 3y ago
    Unless there is an acupuncture powered smartphone and an astrology powered orbital telecommunications network I am unfamiliar with, the only similarity between them and technology is in the minds of the users, not the stuff itself.
    - oreegumee 3y ago
      What we get out of these gadgets is addiction to peering into them for answers and filling an existential hole like astrology. Meanwhile tomorrow will go by just the same as yesterday. Technology isn’t altering physics, it’s operates within the boundaries set by experiment a century ago. It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever. Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking. The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane. If designer drugs that implanted experience made line go up that’s the technology we have. But what we do have makes line go up; why bother with other ideas? Social zeitgeist is to see consumer tech as allowing us to experience and achieve magical things as with astrology, yet daily life is still right there too. We’re addicted to juicing our own biochemistry with video games because drugs are bad mmmk
a_e_k 3y ago
Something like that is the core idea behind Black Mirror S2E1, "Be Right Back" (2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
- robotbikes 3y ago
  Also something like this happens in the Greg Egan book Zendegi. It starts off with a anecdote about someone ripping their music files and the issues that arise from the copy (or something along those lines). But definitely an interesting read and one that tackles the possible issues that could arise in a different way than other novels.
sir0010010 3y ago
You can already do this without LLMs: give someone else all of your loved one's writing samples and ask them to do their best to text you in a style as if it was the loved one.
paxys 3y ago
I'm not a professional in the field, but I really don't see how something like this could be therapeutic. Isn't the goal to help people let go and move on with their lives? To me this seems like the exact opposite.
chrisco255 3y ago
I think it would be ok from the right frame of mind. To think of the LLM as a digital memento and not as some kind of replacement for the deceased.

eddonner 3y ago

Great point. Bound to be a big area of debate as LLMs get increasingly good at this. Black Mirror’s take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

RobRivera 3y ago

Oh hey Black Mirror!

V__ 3y ago

Could probably be just as dangerous as helpful. You work through some issues, maybe want to forgive or be forgiven to get closure and the LLM says f*k you, no.

jononor 3y ago
They will RLHF* that away, as best as they can. * Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback

mewpmewp2 3y ago

> it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one. Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate. If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation? Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life. But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.

alchemist1e9 3y ago
Have you ever watched the original Superman movies and Clark talks with the AI hologram of his biological father from his home planet? I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
- jazzyjackson 3y ago
  I also get the vibe that digital cloning will be popular. Maybe some extremists will think its unholy and some addicts will lose sense of reality, but for the vast majority of people, I think it's just a user interface - maybe to some particular piece of information in the chatbot-as-librarian role, or puzzle boxes that eventually reveal information once you ask the right question, like Will Smith in I Robot. What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind ! I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
  - pixl97 3y ago
    > Maybe some extremists will think its unholy At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.
    - HKH2 3y ago
      I'm sure people will create holographic Hitlers for historical reasons too.
  - 3y ago

AriedK 3y ago

It has been tried. Joshua Barneau tried it with GPT-3, training it on his deceased fiancees text- and facebook messages. It’s a moving read: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation-artificial-intelligence/ https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation... It ‘worked’ for him for a while.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
lomir8 3y ago
Shocking a biochemical reaction ceases when external stimuli is removed. Technology is like acupuncture and astrology of the modern west.
- ben_w 3y ago
  Unless there is an acupuncture powered smartphone and an astrology powered orbital telecommunications network I am unfamiliar with, the only similarity between them and technology is in the minds of the users, not the stuff itself.
  - oreegumee 3y ago
    What we get out of these gadgets is addiction to peering into them for answers and filling an existential hole like astrology. Meanwhile tomorrow will go by just the same as yesterday. Technology isn’t altering physics, it’s operates within the boundaries set by experiment a century ago. It’s not curtailing human social problems that have existed since forever. Trade offs in society just like engineering; arguments it saves people from exploitation at home but airplanes and modern tracking enable large scale human trafficking. The yearly resource consumption for yearly phone updates is insane. If designer drugs that implanted experience made line go up that’s the technology we have. But what we do have makes line go up; why bother with other ideas? Social zeitgeist is to see consumer tech as allowing us to experience and achieve magical things as with astrology, yet daily life is still right there too. We’re addicted to juicing our own biochemistry with video games because drugs are bad mmmk

a_e_k 3y ago

Something like that is the core idea behind Black Mirror S2E1, "Be Right Back" (2013). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

robotbikes 3y ago
Also something like this happens in the Greg Egan book Zendegi. It starts off with a anecdote about someone ripping their music files and the issues that arise from the copy (or something along those lines). But definitely an interesting read and one that tackles the possible issues that could arise in a different way than other novels.

sir0010010 3y ago

You can already do this without LLMs: give someone else all of your loved one's writing samples and ask them to do their best to text you in a style as if it was the loved one.

paxys 3y ago

I'm not a professional in the field, but I really don't see how something like this could be therapeutic. Isn't the goal to help people let go and move on with their lives? To me this seems like the exact opposite.

chrisco255 3y ago

I think it would be ok from the right frame of mind. To think of the LLM as a digital memento and not as some kind of replacement for the deceased.