5 ms·

A friend of mine called this back in 2019. Even wrote a short story about it; https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/repla

A friend of mine called this back in 2019. Even wrote a short story about it; https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ https://www.ectoplus.com/shorts/replacement/ - apparently I was the only person among the beta readers that figured it as a horror piece. It'll be a damned seductive business model. Reach out to people in their moment of greatest grief, offer a customized service with a subscription attached, and they never have to let go. Receive photos, videos, phone calls with an AI model of their partner. Why grieve at all? It's just like switching to a long distance relationship. Worse, unsubscribing would be like letting your loved one die all over again. The potential for abuse is... astronomical.

cfr2023 3y ago
My god, this (very insightful) vision just gets more horrific with each line.
hyperdimension 3y ago
Black Mirror keeps getting things depressingly correct. :/
HuShifang 3y ago
I think one further bit of horror is, it has the potential to erode your memory of the lost person, piece by piece regressing your recollection of them to the mean (so to speak) of the model's training set. At some point, will the bereaved -- to use the example given here -- just passively accept that the lost loved one actually was the sort of person to write about quilting, even when they never did in life?
- tormeh 3y ago
  That's the worst. This already happens in real life with dementia. Not sure why we would want to recreate it with computers...
toomuchtodo 3y ago
A plot point of a recent FBI’s Most Wanted episode “Ghost in the Machine.” https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCDQlqf/ https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/
BoorishBears 3y ago
I've seen this sentiment before and I think it misses the mark in a few ways. - People often value specific memories with a person. We can give AI memories but that takes recording them down. Stuff like Rewind.ai can close the gap, but anything that records you in enough fidelity to serve this function is going to need your cooperation. - People aren't the same person to everyone. You need to intimately know the person who you're communicating with to correctly emulate a person. Lou Reed wasn't the same person to a random stranger asking that chatbot a question as he was to family. It's not enough to just record the person replicated at that point, you suddenly need an intimate understanding of the person interacting with the replica. - As AI gets more advanced, why bother with lossy replications of people you knew? If grief is the underlying problem, why does an LLM so advanced it can replicate an entire human not just as readily help address the underlying mental health/social needs that are driving you to replicate a human? Even for nefarious goals: why bother trying to copy your grandma, this hyper-intelligent AI that can replicate grandma can probably look at your social media and invent a new persona that's able to manipulate you pretty readily... In a way fidelity is the biggest hurdle for "AI as a person", and you can generally do better on that by abandoning copying real people, and instead inventing people who fill the same underlying gap that the real person was supposed to. Equally dystopian, but not quite as bothersome when it comes to worrying about our own likenesses.

cfr2023 3y ago

My god, this (very insightful) vision just gets more horrific with each line.

hyperdimension 3y ago

Black Mirror keeps getting things depressingly correct. :/

HuShifang 3y ago

I think one further bit of horror is, it has the potential to erode your memory of the lost person, piece by piece regressing your recollection of them to the mean (so to speak) of the model's training set. At some point, will the bereaved -- to use the example given here -- just passively accept that the lost loved one actually was the sort of person to write about quilting, even when they never did in life?

tormeh 3y ago
That's the worst. This already happens in real life with dementia. Not sure why we would want to recreate it with computers...

toomuchtodo 3y ago

A plot point of a recent FBI’s Most Wanted episode “Ghost in the Machine.” https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCDQlqf/ https://www.cbs.com/shows/video/QS8_lLDApWdwkawykAmsZMZqtvCD... https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt30746350/

BoorishBears 3y ago

I've seen this sentiment before and I think it misses the mark in a few ways. - People often value specific memories with a person. We can give AI memories but that takes recording them down. Stuff like Rewind.ai can close the gap, but anything that records you in enough fidelity to serve this function is going to need your cooperation. - People aren't the same person to everyone. You need to intimately know the person who you're communicating with to correctly emulate a person. Lou Reed wasn't the same person to a random stranger asking that chatbot a question as he was to family. It's not enough to just record the person replicated at that point, you suddenly need an intimate understanding of the person interacting with the replica. - As AI gets more advanced, why bother with lossy replications of people you knew? If grief is the underlying problem, why does an LLM so advanced it can replicate an entire human not just as readily help address the underlying mental health/social needs that are driving you to replicate a human? Even for nefarious goals: why bother trying to copy your grandma, this hyper-intelligent AI that can replicate grandma can probably look at your social media and invent a new persona that's able to manipulate you pretty readily... In a way fidelity is the biggest hurdle for "AI as a person", and you can generally do better on that by abandoning copying real people, and instead inventing people who fill the same underlying gap that the real person was supposed to. Equally dystopian, but not quite as bothersome when it comes to worrying about our own likenesses.