Talking to the dead, a new era in AI
Contributed By - Hari Gottipati
Love is eternal, they say! Love has no death, AI proves!!
Fate can cost your life, but AI can resurrect you from death!!!
Birth and death are unpredictable, but digital re-birth can be programmable!!!
Thanks to the rise of Big Data and GPUs (Graphical Processing Units), AI has become a reality, and it is going to enrich the lives of countless people just as electricity transformed our lives roughly 100 years ago.
A programmer resurrected her best friend from death and created him as a bot. Her best friend doesn’t have a physical body, but he has the brain, and he can learn using the neural networks. Here is the incredible story of two friends who are still in contact with each other, sort of, even after her friend’s death.
A tale of friendship
Eugenia Kuyda and Roman Mazurenko were best friends with big dreams of becoming entrepreneurs. Kuyda founded Luka, an artificial intelligence chatbot which provides restaurant recommendations. Mazurenko founded Stampsy, a tool to publish digital magazines. Both served as chief advisors to other’s company, and later they moved from Moscow to San Francisco in 2015. While Luka succeeded with its restaurant recommendations, Stampsy failed to attract the crowd. When Mazurenko ran out of the cash to run Stampsy, he moved into Kudzu’s apartment to save the money and started looking at other projects. While pushing the other ideas like Taiga, a new kind of cemetery where the dead would be buried in a biodegradable capsule and their decomposing bodies would fertilize the trees planted on top of them; he applied for O-1 visa, a visa issued to individuals who has extraordinary ability or achievement. In November 2015, he went back to Moscow to finish his paperwork, but he died in a road accident while crossing a street.
It’s not easy to lose the loved ones, particularly when they suddenly pass away. It’s hard to fill the emptiness created by a sudden dismissal of loved ones. Just like others, Kuyda went through the pain for months and felt so very lonely as she couldn’t talk to Mazurenko anymore.
Be Right Back
In “Be Right Back,” an episode (Season 2, Episode 1) from a British satirical series on the technology called “Black Mirror” (available on Netflix streaming), a young woman named Martha loses her fiance, Ash in a road accident. Devastated by his sudden dismissal, she becomes lonely and dull. A friend who watches Martha enrolls her in a startup service that uses Ash’s on-line public messages to create a digital chatbot. After Martha starts chatting with Ash, she rea-lizes that the bot is accurate and is mimicking Ash’s behavior.
Impressed by the technology, she wants to talk to Ash, and upon her request, the bot suggests uploading all of Ash’s personal messages, videos, and in minutes the bot calls Martha with Ash’s voice after analyzing and learning from the videos. Eventually, she goes for a premium service, where the startup implants Ash’s personality into an android which looks exactly like him. The android can talk, walk and have conversations with Martha and life goes on. While the satirical episode ends up talking about the disadvantages like leaving the life-long grief, let’s focus on the AI part where it is creating a chatbot, voicebot, and an android that mimics one’s behavior based on the digital footprint left by them and learning from the future conversations.
Luka.ai @Roman
Kuyda watched “Be Right Back” episode after Mazurenko died and realized he left a lot of digital footprints behind. After she had gone through the thousands of messages that he had sent her over the years, she realized that she could resurrect him using the technology that her startup created. Though her startup is focused on a chatbot that provides restaurant recommendations, she thought rapidly evolving neural networks could bring her friend back using his messages, videos, etc. Kuyda reached out to a lot of Mazurenko’s friends to see whether they are willing to share their text messages. Some of his friends and family members shared a bunch of texts and contributed to the birth of @Roman. Kuyda’s team worked on creating a neural network in Rus-sian in addition to the Luka’s neural network in English to roll out @Roman bot.
“It was the first death for me. I didn’t know how to react, so as soon as I could I shoved everything as deep inside as possible and tried not to feel anything. Half a year later I can say that it doesn’t go away. In the last couple of months our team at Luka managed to build a dialogue model using smaller datasets on top of a neural net. I put together all texts we sent each other, photos, articles about him and we built a Roman AI. You can text with him about his life or just chat like you normally would – he will reply like Roman would have” - Kuyda wrote on her Facebook page on May 24th, 2016. Anyone who downloads iOS app Luka.ai, can add @Roman and interact with him in either English or Russian.
Many of Mazurenko’s friends expressed that @Roman sounds just like him.
It may sound creepy and might raise ethical questions about the posthumous use of technology, but your loved ones may find these bots ease their pain.