Artificial Intelligence Will Keep Our Loved Ones Alive
Interactive simulations of real people are no longer the stuff of science fiction
After Eugenia Kuyda’s closest friend died in a car accident, she decided to build a monument to him. She gathered text messages Roman Mazurenko had sent her and convinced his friends and family to do the same. Eventually, Kuyda, a software developer, gathered more than 8,000 lines of text that captured Mazurenko’s interests, thoughts, and personality. This was the raw material needed to train a neural network to speak like Mazurenko, to respond to messages as if he were writing the words himself.
“Roman bot” was published on Kuyda’s chatbot platform, Luka, in 2016. All a user needed to do was add @Roman, and they would be able to converse with the simulation, learning about Mazurenko’s life and career and, hopefully, glean something of his temperament. The rhythm of speech and the kinds of responses all carefully mimicked Kuyda’s friend. It was an experimental monument, a digital facsimile. Some called it a ghost. In a Facebook post, Kuyda described the experience of chatting to the bot as talking to “a shadow of a person.”
The technology wasn’t perfect, she noted, and a lot of the time @Roman would say something that didn’t make sense, but what her team had done…
