Artificial intelligence could make it possible to continue conversing with someone even after their death. In any case, this is the challenge that Microsoft is throwing if we believe that a patent filed by the company in late 2020 with the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). The idea would be to develop a chatbot to be able to dialogue with a deceased person.
Based on the principle that the more an artificial intelligence is fed, the more capable it is of correctly meeting our expectations, Microsoft has presented a patent with respect to a chatbot capable of expressing itself as someone specific. This can therefore lead to a dialogue with someone who is not physically present, or even with someone who has passed away.
An accurate portrait of the dear deceased thanks to artificial intelligence
The idea is “feed“the information chatbot until it adapts as best as possible to the personality in question, to be able to interact with someone close in an almost natural way.
To achieve such a result, the chatbot will have to collect a large amount of information, available online, mainly in social networks. This applies to both posted messages and shared images, sounds, or various other documents.
The idea is to be able to artificially recreate a personality, as close to reality as possible, even to its way of expressing itself, in order to be able to dialogue with it if necessary.
Still, if one day such a chatbot saw the light of day, it would be obvious legal and ethical issues.
“Dadbot”: the experiment carried out in 2017
Keep in mind that the idea of communicating via the Internet in this way with deceased people is not new. A first experience caused a stir in 2017 when an American journalist created a “Dadbot“allowing you to talk with his father, who died shortly before.
To achieve such a result, he had recorded his father extensively and then transcribed his testimony online, corresponding to several hundred pages of notes. A chatbot fed with this information now allows you “dialogue“via Facebook Messenger with the deceased.
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