Undoubtedly, the loss of a loved one is a severe blow for anyone. And you can assert as much as you like that this is a natural course of things, but if even the most illusory opportunity to communicate with the “departed” one more time comes, few will refuse it. The girl, whose name is Evgenia Kuyda, unable to survive the loss of her close friend Roman Mazurenko, decided not to give up such an opportunity and, with the help of neural networks, created a chat bot, whose messages are not much different from ordinary correspondence with a person.
After the loss of a close friend, Evgenia often re-read their correspondence from various social networks. The volume of messages was really huge. Over and over again, rereading the correspondence, the girl gave herself the idea that this could become the basis for a bot that could imitate the individual speech characteristics of a person (fortunately, the experience of such developments has already been - the restaurant bot Luka). The most ingenious readers have probably already found a resemblance to one of the series of the series "Black Mirror", in which, after the loss of her groom in a car accident, the main character used a service that mimics the behavior of people through messages. I will not disclose the plot of the series to you, as I advise you to watch the entire series in person. It's worth it. But back to the real world, as Evgenia herself says, “Definitely, these monument bots are part of the future, and I always look to the future. But will it benefit us? Will it help to let the person go? Or will it be a corpse in the attic? Where is this border? Where are we? It just breaks."
Evgenia began collecting correspondence from all friends with whom she managed to contact, as a result of which she managed to collect about 8000 lines of text on a variety of topics. Using the TensorFlow library (on the basis of which many bots are built), in February of this year, the team began to create a neural network based on the available information. After the bot was ready, Evgenia asked him the question "Who is your best friend?" “Don't show your complexes,” the car replied. The girl decided that this is very similar to how Roman would answer. Many of Mazurenko's friends have found striking similarities between the bot and Roman's behavior. Even Roma's mom says:
“There was a lot that I did not know about my child. But now I can read what he thought on certain topics. I get to know him better. This gives me the illusion that he is here now. I want to reiterate that I am very grateful that I have this thing."
Fragment of correspondence
Evgeniya continued to improve the bot and added various photos that the system can now operate, and also improved the behavior model. If earlier the neural network sent ready-made answers based on one of the available ones, now the machine generates new answers based on previous experience.
Promotional video:
In conclusion, I would like to add: you can be skeptical about such events and even condemn them from a moral point of view. It can be argued (and no one denies this, by the way) that this is just a bot, and shake the Turing test, which no machine has yet passed. But think about this: Our online communication is mainly about sending each other text messages. Each of them has acquaintances whom they have never seen personally, but only perceived through “letters on the screen”. Reading any information on the Web (even this article), where is the guarantee that it was not written by a machine? And if so, what difference does it make who provided this information to you? And where is the border between our consciousness, which generates responses based on our experience, and neural networks, which, in essence, do the same?
VLADIMIR KUZNETSOV