Show HN: A tool to make a bot that speaks like you, learning from WhatsApp chats
github.com
github.com
I built the bot as a gift for a friend, and didn't really see the Black Mirror angle, even though I have seen the series.
Anyway, if someone is interested in building extensions of this, please write to me at smadan@mit.edu, I'd be happy to collaborate and guide :)
From "Bicycle Repairman", by Bruce Sterling (1996) (This is a spoiler, BTW!):
"The mook speaks just like the Senator did, or the way the Senator used to speak, when he was in private and off the record. The way he spoke in his diaries. As far as we can tell, the mook was his diary.... It used to be his personal laptop computer. But he just kept transferring the files, and upgrading the software, and teaching it new tricks like voice recognition and speech-writing, and giving it power of attorney and such.... And then, one day the mook made a break for it. We think that the mook sincerely believes that it’s the Senator."
Oh, and just note that this was way before Black Mirror.
:')
It’s not that privacy is an endless pursuit, it’s more that the governments enjoy it so much that they don’t really work on preventing it.
This makes private conversations that much more valuable to ad companies: if WhatsApp sells all your conversation packaged into a model similar to this, most of your personality is easily summarised to be targeted.
I had been lurking with an idea where one could create a bot, which is a clone of yourself. Bot learns/trains by hearing what you say and how you say. When you talk with the bot, it replies back with your own voice, basically Siri with your own voice and attitude. It would be the best thing one could leave behind after his death.
Is it possible to pull off something like this?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back
Synopsis: "The episode tells the story of Martha (Hayley Atwell), a young woman whose boyfriend Ash Starmer (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. As she mourns him, she discovers that technology now allows her to communicate with an artificial intelligence imitating Ash, and reluctantly decides to try it. "Be Right Back" had two sources of inspiration: the question of whether to delete a dead friend's phone number from one's contacts, and the idea that Twitter posts could be made by software mimicking dead people."
That's a mass media instantiation of the premise of I am a strange loop, by douglas Hofstadter, which is to be honest a tome lamenting the passing of his wife
"Three years ago, Kuyda hadn’t intended to make an emotional chatbot for the public. Instead, she’d created one as a “digital memorial” for her closest friend, Roman Mazurenko, who had died abruptly in a car accident in 2015. At the time, Kuyda had been building a messenger bot that could do things like make restaurant reservations. She used the basic infrastructure from her bot project to create something new, feeding her text messages with Mazurenko into a neural network and creating a bot in his likeness. The exercise was eye-opening. If Kuyda could make something that she could talk to—and that could talk back—almost like her friend then maybe, she realized, she could empower others to build something similar for themselves." https://www.wired.com/story/replika-open-source/
Or a more in depth read: https://www.theverge.com/a/luka-artificial-intelligence-memo...
You can talk with the deceased friend: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/roman-mazurenko/id958946383?...
(There are also "alpha simulations" referenced which were experimental direct mind uploads. The experiment was never repeated because, due to some deficiency in the process, the uploads went mad.)
Poor bastard who stumbles into such a forum never realizing everyone is a bot.
if "facebook" in $Title: print ( "I deleted my facebook years ago and it was the best thing I ever did")
if "uber" in $Title: print("Uber has only $dollars left of runway. They only have $months left before they'll need another rescue")
if "I made" in $Title: print("Why would I use $new_app when I could just use $old_app_from_90s? I really don't like the trend of using $technology instead of $older_technology. I hope $technology dies a cold death at the bottom of a ditch")
Why connect it to a facebook-owned, proprietary service?
Traceback (most recent call last): File "clean_whatsapp_chats.py", line 39, in <module> all_text[-1] += line IndexError: list index out of range
Then you also need to create a `res` directory in the root directory and install the necessary dependencies. Then you also need to change the encoding when you load the serialized data in the preprocessing notebook.