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Comment by ryanianian | Hacker News Reader

Very reminiscent of the Be Right Back episode of Black Mirror [1].

A family member recently died unexpectedly, and I have a small collection of texts, emails, and blog posts by them saved on my machine in the small (perhaps delusional) hope that they'll be a useful training set for a them-flavored chatbot. Perhaps even one that's trained to help me with the grief of their loss. Not a huge amount of training data, though. I suspect a training model would have to "fill in the holes" (a la Jurassic Park DNA), and that's where the fun begins.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

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On a lighter note this reminds me of the Bobiverse comedy sci-fi series on Audible.

Premise of __ We Are Legion (We Are Bob): Bobiverse, Book 1 __

>> Bob Johansson has just sold his software company for a small fortune and is looking forward to a life of leisure. The first item on his to-do list: Spending his newfound windfall. On an urge to splurge, he signs up to have his head cryogenically preserved in case of death. Then he gets himself killed crossing the street. Waking up 117 years later, Bob discovers his mind has been uploaded into a sentient space probe with the ability to replicate itself. Bob and his clones are on a mission to find new homes for humanity and boldly go where no Bob has gone before.

Loved the whole Bobiverse series. Highly recommended for folks who want a relatively easy sci-fi read.

Ray Porter does an amazing narration as well for book listeners.

I recommended this series to my friend after he finished reading The Expanse. I never thought to describe it as sci-fi comedy. Have you found any other good sci-fi comedy series?

I wouldn't describe it as a comedy as well.

However, I'd recommend Murderbot series, it is full of humour and shares atmosphere of Bobiverse and this personal approach to characters, as well. Highly recommend.

Yes, Bobiverse and Murderbot are very close in spirit, and if you like one you are very likely to enjoy the other. Also both have great audio narration.

I am not a native speaker of English so maybe that's why. Typically anything that has lots of humor and makes the reader laugh or be amused frequently -- I think of as comedy. Is there a more nuanced distinction to what is usually called a comedy in literature / movies?

I tried to think of some other examples. Trevor Noah's biography 'Born A Crime' came to mind. I would not explicitly describe it as a comedy myself - because a 'biography' is descriptive enough as well as non-fiction by definition so any humor is mostly not made up. If it were not a biography through -- it would probably go into the comedy bucket in my mind. Maybe I am just mis applying terms here.

There is always the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.

Almost too popular to recommend but: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

If you're okay with something only tangentally related, "John Dies at the End" is spectacular, along with its sequels.

Also ya gotta read 17776 if you like Bobiverse. Try not to second guess the url: https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

First, someone did exactly that and created a chatbot to emulate his dead fiancée [1]. You can read about their experience.

In my opinion, this type of chatbots will generate mostly generic messages ("So, how's the weather?"), but also some random ones (I have a chatbot right now that starts answering exclusively in emojis for no good reason) and some that are actually following the fine-tuned data ("I love fishing!"). I believe most people (myself included) will stick to those last ones as proof of the chatbot actually answering the way the person would have answered and rationalize all evidence to the contrary ("maybe grandpa really liked emojis and I just didn't know until now").

I think it has the potential of being therapeutic, but I am not a psychologist. And I do worry about the fine line between "this realistic baby doll will help you overcome the loss of your child" and "this realistic female doll of a woman is better than a real woman and I'm going to marry it".

[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation...

On a side note, I thought a little bit about that concept. For me, recreating deceased loved one with AI would be reigniting the grief all over again. I would want to avoid that.

Maybe, just maybe, I would be able to use it, for example, to see my grandparents who died ~30 years ago, as a curiosity, but still I'm not sure if I'd want to.

My interest is training a model on myself and everything I’ve learned through life so that if I die, my kids might be able to extract some value from my experience. Learning life on your own without help can be tiring and costly (both emotionally and financially), and bad advice can be worse than no advice. A guide would be helpful imho. Step 1: survive. Step 2: enable yourself to thrive.

I already have boxes of paper notes and videos I’ve recorded, as well as books and url bookmarks, just need to get them into a machine readable format.

https://irobot.fandom.com/wiki/Alfred_Lanning

This all assumes the model would give them good advice, which is sort of based on the assumption you would give them good advice, right?

If the AI could extract advice to give people from his life experience, wouldn’t that be an advanced enough AGI not to need his personal experience to begin with? It’d just analyze the inputs and dispense personalized wisdom.

All decisions or advice must be made on certain assumptions.

If you wore a voice recorder and recorded all your physical interactions with your family for a year then transcribed it then trained an LLM I wonder if you could get close.

Just imagine this as a subscription service. Lovely! When a loved one dies, you donate their cellphone and provide delegated access to their messages to their social media, and allow a LLM to train.

Now, it's a subscription service to talk to an AI, and not an actual human, so some settings can be tweaked. Lets turn up the honesty, so we can all reach some closure.

Oh... turns out... Johnny sure like to talk smack behind your back. Edna was SUPER gay but had to hide it...

So, so, so many ethical roadblocks. I truly hope this never happens, but, I think we all know that if it looks profitable, it's coming soon.

Oh no, Edna was gay (and a Republican). Whatever will we do. What a huge calamity. The family will never recover from this.

Low-cost DNA testing has caused a number of families to learn about infidelities more easily than before. That technology is out of the bag, and the same with LLMs. If Johnny is a gossip, so what? We already knew that and loved to talk to him because he always had the hot goss.

You're not wrong, or the other half of the Lebowski quote, honestly. It's just going to be another one of the recent (~15 years back) technology items that are pushing the general public toward transparent lives.

I guess it's not so much an ethical issue as it is an issue of letting sleeping dogs lie. I can tell you that with a very small amount of "dna uncertainty" in my (ancestral) family, I'll never get a 23-and-me done because I just don't want to be cataloged and accidentally paired up with some random family who doesn't know what they don't know.

As long as they're opt-in services, it's not a huge issue for me, just... the first wave of people doing this will be in for some uncomfortable surprises.

This feels very dark to me: I think it would make it enormously harder to actually process the grief. (The thought "You could make one to mimic your ex" passed through my head just long enough for me to recoil in absolute horror.)

yeah i was thinking to myself i could train an LLM on my wife's social media history because it's extensive. But i concluded one wife is enough.

Material for a meme. Next... Imagine a triple boss.

I could see someone doing that to practice bringing up a difficult suggestion like moving to another state, or trying a sexual fantasy. I’m not proposing this actually be done, mind you. It doesn’t seem healthy. But LLM usage is hardly about advancing healthy behavior so far, despite their emphasis on safety.

https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/high-tech-headstones-speak...

People already buy headstones that let the dead speak a pre-recorded message from the grave. It's a natural extension to put an AI trained with their thoughts behind it that can engage in actual conversation. That isn't for me, but I have gone to my father's grave to speak to him, and I can sympathize with the wish to have him speak back.

I am looking forward to conversing with prolific writers among the dead, from Hitchens to Lincoln to Aristotle.

Apparently they didn't buy them, though. http://www.personalrosettastone.com/

Combine that with AI to emulate their voice, and AI renderings to use photos of their face to render a 3d model that moves it's lips and face realistically as it talks (both of which already exist). Yeah, you could with today's technology "bring back" a loved one and be able to talk to them, even verbally, and see and hear them respond and even have some shared history in common, if it was in the training set.

It could send you greetings automatically on your brithday.

Would it be helpful in coping with loss, or just a painful reminder? I don't know. Maybe both at the same time.

This was also the premise of the Battlestar Galactica prequel "Caprica." The father of A.I. created a digital copy of his recently deceased daughter based on her digital trail from life. The copy struggles with her existence in an artificial environment, initially being unaware she was in one. It was interesting how they tied her existence into the eventual rise of religious monotheism and the emergence of the Cylons. Underrated show.

Did he though? I thought the digital copy of the daughter was already in that digital world, and her still-living friend had to take him to meet her in said world? I think what he eventually did was transfer digital her into a physical Cylon body. Been a while since I watched though, could be wrong.

That's the way I remember it too, so you may be right. I remember being shaken by the first time she realizes she can't feel her own pulse in the simulation, then starts to panic and have an existential crisis on the realization of what she was. It was kind of horrifying but also humanizing too.

Also, take more videos of everyone as they will very soon be able to create very accurate 3d renderings of people just from videos. More training materials the better, make sure you get full views with different aspects , movements, angles and expression. Creepy, I know.

Then you can interact with these recreated avatars on your vr/ar head sets. Good for kids as when they grow up maybe you can recreate some old times lol

Another interesting thing would be people wearing a GoPro camera all day, recording each other. Then you can train a model on people based on their interaction with one person, but also wrt other people. And then you can have the experience of virtually talking to a person as if you were another person.

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