This isn’t *like* something from Black Mirror – this is literally is a plot from Black Mirror
Microsoft has been granted a patent for technology that could create chat bots based on dead people, using their digital history to ‘resurrect’ them.
The patent, entitled “Creating a conversational chat bot of a specific person,” says the it would be created from the “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages” and other internet data of the deceased person.
The patent goes on to say that “the specific person [who the bot is mimicking] may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc.” So we could also make an AI Donald Trump or Barack Obama after they have died, as well as allowing you to talk to a digital version of your dead grandma.
“The specific person may also correspond to oneself, e.g, the user creating/training the chat bot,” continues the patent. Meaning that in theory, you could help train your own afterlife AI so that when you are dead you can be safe in the knowledge that the virtual version of you is as accurate as possible.
Before you say anything, yes, this literally is the plot of a Black Mirror episode.
In 2013’s “Be Right Back,” the first episode of the second season, Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson play a young couple whose relationship is torn apart when Gleeson is killed in a car crash. Atwell then turns to an experimental new service for solace which resurrects Gleeson’s personality, based on his online and social media communications. It starts with just a voice chat, but eventually, that personality is placed in a synthetic body, completing the ‘resurrection’.
We are not quite at the point where we can put AI in clone bodies, thankfully. We won’t have to impose mandatory Voight-Kampff tests just yet. But the Microsoft patent does include mention of creating 2D or 3D avatars for the chatbots. And with hologram technology having been used to recreate the likes of Tupac Shakur and Robert Kardashian, we can’t be that far off.
