Microsoft patent: Creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person
independent.co.uk
independent.co.uk
The loneliness epidemic is seen by companies as something to be exploited, not corrected.
Also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA
It's just another sick twist in an already distorted reality.
SHRUG
edit: also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie
I've seen this so many times in science fiction that I am disappointed that MS can claim IP over such a scheme. It is like, after centuries of writers writing about it, applying for a patent on "flying machines". I understand that patent law may in fact protect such things, broad concepts that innumerable people have dreamt about for decades, but it shouldn't. At most it should grant monopoly to a specific implementation rather than sequester the entire field.
On the other hand, let MS have it. All that science fiction points to such schemes going either going horribly wrong or being sad and pathetic. Let MS keep shooting that same foot.
That said, if a sci-fi novel were to go into great technical detail about how to train a chatbot to emulate the way a dead loved one communicates, and Microsoft were to copy that method exactly, it's possible that the novel could be treated as prior art.
If you haven't tried Microsoft's voice synthesis service, it's incredible so maybe they'll have something here in 10 years.
(Scroll down to the demo box) - https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services/cognitive-service...
I cannot see this as being helpful to the grieving process. I do see it being useful for businesses: create a chat or VR bot of a founder or shrewd executive to tap their take on things on demand. This is similar to the ghost AIs in Cyberpunk 2020, and to the corporate ghosts in the Cat series by Joan D. Vinge.
Anyway. I'd want to come back as Clippy.
I do not believe we will ever capture emotion perfectly in synthetic life. I think they will be capable of feeling, just not the way we do. As a result, I think Art will be an area where humans will still dominate. More specifically, our forms of Art. Since I believe they will eventually be able to feel, but not the way we do, it stands to reason that they'll have Art forms but ones that are greatly different from ours.
Business management is mostly a science based on 95% logic, 5% intuition, and that intuition is more subconscious hyper-logic than emotion. To me that means an AGI trained from the personality and thoughts of a business leader should be able to make similar (if not the same) decisions as what the business leader would have in life. I think V-space clones like Zoe, except for business, will be a thing for this reason.
> For instance, a personalized personality index may comprise social data relating to a deceased relative of a user. Although the social data may comprise information from the lifetime of the deceased relative, the social data may not comprise information related to a time period after the lifetime of the deceased relative. As a result, a set of data acquisition rules may be generated for (or assigned to) the personalized personality index. The set of data acquisition rules may provide instructions for acquiring data related to various time periods of the deceased relative's lifetime (e.g., before, during and/or after the lifetime). Such instruction may include asking a user questions about a time period, one or more events and/or people, or asking a user where such information may be obtained. In such an example, such questions may indicate the specific person represented by the personalized personality index (e.g., the deceased relative) possesses a perceived awareness that he/she is, in fact, deceased.
I’m always in the market for good search tools to run over all that stuff (I currently like Recoll). The ideal tool would be something akin to a virtual museum curator - something that knew all the content of the archive, all the relationships between the content, all the context, the lineage, the referents, and all the implications.
“Jeeves, what was the thing I was working on last week? You know, the thing?”
Nobody knows all that better than me, as I created and gathered the data in the first place.
So is a sufficiently advanced search tool for all that stuff indistinguishable from an AI-of-me?
"Yes, of course I remember. I also binged for you these great deals on honeymoon Baltic cruises."‘Here is a chatbot of your dead friend, unfortunately he didn’t authorize a paid account, so we have to fund his digital after-life with advertising. This means he will occasionally try to sell goodyear tires to you. Please press accept.’
The thought of my dead relatives supposedly trying to sell me grocery goods is quite odd...
Think rather of people whose job it is to talk and interact.
College lecturer can keep teaching.
From a few hours ago:
When your professor is dead, but teaches anyway