What If Facebook Let You See Dead People?
The technology exists to bring people back from the dead. A techno-savvy person could do it. On Facebook. Today.
Of course, I’m not talking about bringing a person back like they were in the living flesh, or in a religious sense, but a digital representation based on their Facebook data — likes, posts, comments, and messages. This resurrected persona would be a weak shadow of the person they once were but this digital simulacrum could be robust enough to fool friends and loved ones. At least for a short while.
Over two years ago J Dunn describes how to create a digital personality using chatbots, Facebook messages, and empathy. Over two years ago! That’s like twenty in robot dog years. A lot has changed since then but I encourage you to check out his article. In goes into detail about how you would go about creating such a “creature”.
The TLDR is there are existing tools such as cleverbot that have an API that can be used to create custom chatbots. Chatbots are simple AI that can process natural language and deliver a response. The cleverbot API has been used to create chat personalities from PewDiePie to William Shakespeare. J Dunn combines cleverbot with functionality from emote(r), which includes an automated way of parsing Facebook messages to build a text corpus off a person’s Facebook profile. So Boom! There you go…
