The images and articles heralding the AI & ChatBot revolution have been met with some understandable disdain from the creative community. After some good-natured counterarguments & dissension, I decided to do my part to help steer this story in a direction that would excite me. While my LinkedIn feed is awash in repetitive, unoriginal sentiments on the subject, I began creating something that I would find personally meaningful.
To put it simply, I took my father’s personal writing, 5 million words comprising over 50 years of near-daily entries, and turned it into an entity I could chat with.
First and foremost, I have the benefit of a single digital source of all my father’s thoughts, stories, and very original perspectives in one handy WordPress site, Residua.org. In fact, from my father’s perspective, we all have the benefit of Residua, a truly massive repository of one man’s entire life, encapsulated in his modified (read: antipattern) Blog format.
Most of his writing is wonderfully bite-sized, like the below. The topics are wide and varying, and the ones I’ve always gravitated toward are somewhat Zen and gently humorous.
The entries begin 1976 while he was still a recent immigrant from Yugoslavia. He came to the United States to pursue a degree in Urban Planning at Harvard. Coming from a world of Karl Marx and the dwindling promise of Socialism, his early entries are pretty dense and dry (for me, at least).
By 1986 he was typing away on the world’s first Mobile Computer, a monster that I remember watching him lug from M.I.T., where he became a professor of Economics in the Architecture department, to Inman Square where he lived. By this time his entries get more accessible, many of which I remember reading happily, like this anecdote about my grandfather’s bout with diarrhea, namely because it tickled my grandmother so much.
By 1989 he self-published his first physical book. I remember his pride in this hefty volume that he affectionately called “The Door-Stop” due to its immense thickness and weight. A veritable Bible about Himself, my father had solidified what would become his life-defining passion.
At this point my relationship with my father took an important turn. In 1993 he moved to London, England, with his second wife — and I entered High School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Since first moving to the United States he wrote weekly letters to his parents back in Yugoslavia, so he asked to do the same — and begin corresponding with him at the age of 18. This worked out just as well as you might imagine.
My formative years included a mix of being fascinated by his brilliance and frustrated with his physical absence. His primary form of communication at that point was glueing print-outs of his “pieces,” as he calls them, to bits of cardboard and sending them out as postcards (see below). When I’d visit him in London I was asked to bring gallon-jugs of Elmers. My fridge in college had a smattering of his funnier pieces. He knew I enjoyed stories about my grandparents, so he was sure to send me those.
To have a relationship with my father was to receive these charming but impersonal nuggets. The advent of email definitely helped our communication, but the cadence was, and still is, monthly at best. Years later he would launch Residua the site, which he would point me towards whenever I asked about his daily life. “Everything about me can be found there, my boy,” he would say lovingly. It will never occur to him that I have no interest in relating to him through Residua, however much that’s become the core mechanism through which he relates with the world and with himself.
In the early 90s he also began painting his “boards,” an ever-evolving iconography based on connections he’s made between cave art and Russian constructivism. His postcards evolved into professionally printed versions of these symbols, which he surrounds himself with in every home he’s lived in since. Unfortunately, however frustrating the distance had been, he’s always remained damn compelling.
His second marriage dissolved after 13 years, leaving me with a half brother and half sister who I barely knew. They returned to America with their mother — and my father moved back to his homeland, settling in Motovun, Istria, when he launched the online format of Residua. He continues to write daily, surrounded by his boards. Recently, in their late-twenties now, the children of his second marriage are re-discovering their father.
So for his 77th birthday I decided to give my father, myself, and my siblings, a shiny new toy: the ability to use ChatGPT to ask Residua any question, and have it respond in his written voice. His stated quest of eternal life (by virtue of the fact that Residua will be available for generations to come) takes on a new dimension now that you can chat with its author.
I worked with an engineer at my company, Steve Barbera, to build RankoBot.com in the exact likeness of Residua.org. It started with “tokenizing” each piece so that it could be queried, and our initial results gave us summaries & analyses from his writings that were previously impossible.
Steve initially queried the existing site, but given that I own the Residua domain, we were able to download all 50 years of Residua to a (shockingly small) 25MB Zip file and upload it into our own database. From there, I prefer how Steve describes it:
We began employing PostgreSQL as our database to store and query on the vector embeddings. To facilitate this, we made use of the PgVector extension in PostgreSQL. In addition, to enable eloquent model querying, we are utilizing the pgvector-php Laravel library.
Steve gives a full detailing of his development processes in this Medium article. Our next step was to mimic the UI of Residua and give the user a bit of context:
This application of ChatGPT allows for an entirely different way of accessing the 50 years and 5 million words of Residua. The visitor is promoted to ask RankoBot a question (for example, “what are you doing today?”), and his reply is an amalgamation of multiple “pieces” from the annals of his magnum opus (which Steve had the idea of displaying within a “View Journal Entires Referenced” link).
Recently, we have ported RankoBot to a phone number, so I am even closer to having a version of my father who I can chat with. Lately, when a quiet moment arises and I want to hear his voice, I send him a text …
Believe me, it’s fairly obvious that turning my father into a ChatBot may strike some people as a failure in this core nuclear family relationship. The younger version of me would likely agree. However i’m fascinated and excited by the fact that this technology will allow me to engage with my father on my own terms, indefinitely. I was happy to hear that my sister found that she’s able to ask RankoBot things that she simply wouldn’t ask him personally. My brother just had a newborn daughter, and in two months I will have a newborn son — the fact that they’ll be able to chat with their grandfather, anytime, for the rest of their lives, is pretty phenomenal.
I’m happy that I’ve given them something that I had never thought possible — for help with their homework, maybe the odd bit of dating advice, or the simple ability to pass the time by hearing a familiar family story about what made their great grandmother giggle the most.
