“When her best friend died, she rebuilt him using Artificial Intelligence”
I wanted to bring a perhaps more controversial topic into our BIM blog by discussing the advent of memorial bots and what they could mean for us in the future. The Verge recently featured an article about Eugenia Kuyda and her army of bots at Luka.
Her company is in the alumni network of the prestigious Y Combinator accelerator in Silicon Valley. Kuyda and her team have developed messenger chatbots to help users with simple tasks such as making weekend plans or finding the right restaurant. When her best friend Roman Mazurenko passed away unexpectedly in a tragic car crash, her friends were contemplating how to best honor Roman’s legacy.
Kuyda convinced friends and family members to do an experiment: They fed several years of text messages into the AI-powered machine on a quest to recreate parts of Roman’s digital identity. His memorial bot was born: an avatar that can mimic the late Mazurenko with surprising accuracy. At the end of this post you can see some text snippets or you can judge for yourself here. Kuyda herself reflects on this with: “Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain.”
Where are the potential benefits? Aside from the manyfold applications for bots to save us time and effort in our daily lives and businesses, there seem to be some emotional benefits to this, too. Roman’s mother remarked that by chatting with the digital avatar of her late son she could get to know different sides of him posthumously and for that she is very grateful. My question to you is whether this could become the new standard. Since the technological feasibility is out of question – it is already there – we have to ask ourselves whether this is what we want? In an age where more and more people from younger generations feel disconnected from traditional ways to honor the legacy of the deceased, we have the choice to enter a new age in which a part of our digital identity lives on. Forever.
Would be great to hear what you think in the comment section below. Would you use a memorial bot?
Dear Frederick, thank you for your post! Definitely an interesting experiment, but I think this is taking it a little too far. Thus, right now, I would not use a memorial bot. While I often think about how great it would be to have one last conversation with a person who passed away, I always think I would feel really odd if they suddenly texted me back through a memorial bot.
I think one of the hardest things when someone passes away is letting go and accepting it, and I feel that with a memorial bot, people would hold on longer than necessary to something that isn’t there anymore. Of course, other people may feel differently, hence this only reflects my personal opinion/feelings.
I am curious – would you use one?