In the Black Mirror’s Be Right Back 2013 episode, a grieving woman interacts with a digital recreation of her dead boyfriend.
BBC
THE THERE chatbot that allows you to interact with deceased loved ones sounds like something straight out of science fiction. But if the technology of a patent granted to Microsoft comes to fruition, interaction with a speaking 3D digital version of the deceased may one day become de rigueur.
The patent, entitled “Creating a conversational chatbot from a specific chatbot of a specific person”, details a system that would access images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages and the like to “create or modify a special index on the topic of personality of a specific person. “In some cases, images and video can be used to create a 3D model of the person for extra realism.
It is an especially provocative notion when you consider the patent suggestion that the technology “may correspond to a past or present entity”.
The patent lists Dustin Abramson and Joseph Johnson Jr. as inventors. Microsoft filed the patent in 2017, but it was granted this month and has become the subject of online conversations in recent days due to the suggestion of a chatbot that brings an “entity from the past” back to life as a kind of interactive living memorial. . As shocking as the idea may seem at first, many who have lost a loved one will understand the comfort that can come from watching old videos of the deceased or listening to their archived voicemail messages. Death creates a painful hole that we want to fill.
Still, Tim O’Brien, general manager of AI programs at Microsoft, confirmed on Twitter on Friday that “there are no plans for this.
“But if I get a job writing for the Black Mirror,” he wrote, “I will know that I should go to the USPTO website for story ideas.”
Yes, I understand, don’t worry. Anyway, confirmed that there are no plans for this. But if I get a job writing for the Black Mirror, I’ll know that I should go to the USPTO website for story ideas.
– Tim O’Brien (@_TimOBrien) January 22, 2021
The British science fiction series explored a similar concept of raising the dead through technology in the exciting 2013 episode of Be Right Back. In it, a bereaved woman played by Hayley Atwell hires a service that allows her to interact with a shockingly accurate AI recreation of her dead boyfriend, played by Domhnall Gleeson. This version is based on your previous profiles of online communication and social media.
Similar scenarios have already arrived in real life, with holograms of celebrities like Whitney Houston and rapper Tupac Shakur. And in 2015, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder and CEO of software company Replika, trained a chatbot on thousands of text messages she shared with her best friend Roman, who died in a car accident. In doing so, she created an immortal digital Roman who could still “speak” to family and friends.
The fact that a company as prominent as Microsoft has outlined a system to immortalize the dead through chatbots suggests that the practice could one day become much more widely accepted and used. But, as my colleague at CNET, Alison DeNisco Rayome, explores in this story, the question is should we do this? And if we do, how should it be? As the Black Mirror episode highlights, there are no easy answers.