When Her Best Friend Died, She Rebuilt Him Using Artificial Intelligence (theverge.com)

When Roman Mazurenko died, his friend Eugenia Kuyda created a digital monument to him: an artificial intelligent bot that could "speak" as Roman using thousands of lines of texts sent to friends and family. From the report: "It's pretty weird when you open the messenger and there's a bot of your deceased friend, who actually talks to you," Fayfer said. "What really struck me is that the phrases he speaks are really his. You can tell that's the way he would say it -- even short answers to 'Hey what's up.' It has been less than a year since Mazurenko died, and he continues to loom large in the lives of the people who knew him. When they miss him, they send messages to his avatar, and they feel closer to him when they do. "There was a lot I didn't know about my child," Roman's mother told me. "But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I'm getting to know him more. This gives the illusion that he's here now."

Comments

lost people

[zephvark]

I wanted to rebuild a friend a long time ago. It really wasn't going to happen on a 386, but I figured I'd anyway get to know him better. He was not exactly excited at the prospect. Well, privacy issues, plus the fact that the whole project was not remotely plausible.

It still isn't . The AI isn't anywhere near close to being able to mimic a real person, yet. But I understand why you would try that, and... go for it.

We may not be able to live forever. It's possible that some semblance of who we were can. Call them poems of humanity.

Re:Bullshit

[bluegutang]

It's not pulling "random" text lines. It's pulling the text lines that best fit the context, giving (I assume) a somewhat convincing illusion that there is a person on the other end.

This program is clearly not conscious or intelligent in the sense that human beings are. But the current usage of the term "AI" does not require that.

Prior Art, 1984

[Orgasmatron]

`How you doing, Dixie?'
    `I'm dead, Case. Got enough time in on this Hosaka to figure that one.'
    `How's it feel?'
    `It doesn't.'
    `Bother you?'
    `What bothers me is, nothin' does.'
    `How's that?'
    `Had me this buddy in the Russian camp, Siberia, his thumb
was frostbit. Medics came by and they cut it off. Month later
he's tossin' all night. Elroy, I said, what's eatin' you? Goddam thumb's
itchin', he says. So I told him, scratch it. McCoy, he says, it's the _other_
  goddam thumb.' When 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.'

He jacked in.
    `Dixie?'
    `Yeah.'
    `You ever try to crack an AI?'
    `Sure. I flatlined. First time. I was larkin', jacked up real high,
out by Rio heavy commerce sector. Big biz, multina-
tionals, Government of Brazil lit up like a Christmas tree. Just
larkin' around, you know? And then I started picking up on
this one cube, maybe three levels higher up. Jacked up there
and made a pass.'
    `What did it look like, the visual?'
    `White cube.'
    `How'd you know it was an AI?'
    `How'd I know? Jesus. It was the densest ice I'd ever seen.
So what else was it? The military down there don't have any-
thing like that. Anyway, I jacked out and told my computer to
look it up.'
    `Yeah?'
    `It was on the Turing Registry. AI. Frog company owned
its Rio mainframe.'
    Case chewed his lower lip and gazed out across the plateaus
of the Eastern Seaboard Fission Authority, into the infinite
neuroelectronic void of the matrix. `Tessier-Ashpool, Dixie?'
    `Tessier, yeah.'
    `And you went back?'
    `Sure. I was crazy. Figured I'd try to cut it. Hit the first
strata and that's all she wrote. My joeboy smelled the skin
frying and pulled the trodes off me. Mean shit, that ice.'
    `And your EEG was flat.'
    `Well, that's the stuff of legend, ain't it?'
    Case jacked out. `Shit,' he said, `how do you think Dixie
got himself flatlined, huh? Trying to buzz an AI. Great...'
    `Go on,' she said, `the two of you are supposed to be
dynamite, right?'

    `Dix,' Case said, `I wanna have a look at an AI in Berne.
Can you think of any reason not to?'
    `Not unless you got a morbid fear of death, no.'

Re:Bullshit

[hairyfeet]

Sigh. We old greybeards know that one of the great truths is "everything old is new again" and all we have here is the millennials discovering their own versions of ELIZA and the stuff we were doing way back in the 70s. We had movies of machines becoming intelligent, we had people looking at what was in reality very simplistic programs and proclaiming them AI, its just the kids aren't old enough to have experienced any of this so they think they have found something profound...everything old is new again.