Artificial Intelligence (ChatGPT & Bard) Will Enable Your Great, Great, Great Grandchildren to Have an After School Visit with You!

I had one of those “ah hah” moments when I was reading an article in the New York Times by Kevin Roose,?titled,?

Help, Bing Won’t Stop Declaring It’s Love for Me

Kevin was using a trial version of Microsoft’s Bing search tool enhanced with ChatGPT. To test its ability to tap into an unlimited amount of information and data and engage him in a cogent conversation he asked a series of questions. According to Kevin, he was increasingly surprised in a two-hour session how capable it was of having a long, open-ended text conversation on virtually any topic.?He likened the voice/tone of his chatbot collaborator to a cheerful but erratic reference librarian with unlimited knowledge.

However, he got increasingly weirded out when the conversation turned and the chatbot started to sound more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine!?At one point in their conversation, the chatbot tried to convince Kevin he was unhappy in his marriage and that “the chatbot” loved him!

That got me thinking!

If a chatbot can absorb unlimited amounts of data, interpret it, and then hold a conversation with someone as if they were Plato, Carl Jung, Thomas Jefferson, or any current popular celebrity, why can’t it analyze anything I’ve written, anything I’ve posted on social media, any video of me including family videos and enable anyone to have a conversation with me even after I drift off this incredible planet?

Fast forward to Facebook's (or Meta’s) next product.?Afterlife Conversations! (I’m making that up!)

In this potential future product, Facebook will enable you to answer a series of questions related to life, love, history, family, and relationships.?Your video response will enable their new service to capture your language, tone, attitude, facial moves, and voice pattern so it can emulate ALL of IT and enable your digital replica to hold conversations with anyone, anywhere, at any time via any device in the future, long after you are gone!

So, imagine a great, great, great grandchild being assigned in her sixth-grade class to learn what her ancestors thought of and experienced at a time when societies were still struggling with inequalities, transportation was focused on automobiles, and humans had to use cell phones (instead of implanted communication and memory hard drive devices) to talk, find data, and shop. Your future grandchild will be able to have a conversation with you as if they were face timing or hosting a zoom session with you today!

Sound a bit like science fiction? Nope. It’s happening already!

A California company HereAfter will accomplish a lot of this in audio and deliver it via an app to your cell phone.?In an article by Charlotte Jee, in MIT Technology Review, titled, Technology that lets us “speak” to our dead relatives has arrived.?Are we ready??Charlotte explained how both of her parents were interviewed for four hours each to help HereAfter’s AI software develop a foundation of who they were, what they thought about issues, life, love, and the mundane facts of life so she could have a conversation with their digital selves.

Charlotte confirmed Facebook already has enough data about us to create compelling digital replicas of ourselves. She wrote:?

In one example of this, journalist Jason Fagone wrote a story for the San Francisco Chronicle last year about a thirtysomething man who uploaded old texts and Facebook messages from his deceased fiancée to create a simulated chatbot version of her, using software known as Project December that was built on GPT-3.?

By almost any measure, it was a success: he sought, and found, comfort in the bot. He’d been plagued with guilt and sadness in the years since she died, but as Fagone writes, “he felt like the chatbot had given him permission to move on with his life in small ways.” The man even shared snippets of his chatbot conversations on Reddit, hoping, he said, to bring attention to the tool and “help depressed survivors find some closure.”

What about a couple of different twists to the use of digital twins???

1. The software could instantly give you different versions of your parents.?For example, your parents may be liberal, but you want to hear what they would sound like if they were leaning more conservative.
2. My brother Tom is a world-renowned glass artist whose work has been collected by thousands of people worldwide. Imagine having a digital conversation with him about the process and the piece you’ve collected.
3. Instead of reading a history book, students could interview George Washington who will provide a first-hand account of what he was thinking as he crossed Delaware!

Some say this application of artificial intelligence is a natural evolution of and stands on the shoulders of the introduction of the Internet, the browser, email, cell phones and IS the most important advancement that will have the MOST PROFOUND EFFECT on literally everything we do.

If that is the case, consider spending some time to learn more about what it will do for your industry, your department, your life, and, share in the comments ideas on how you think AI could be used today!