“Spooky Bots”—Personalised Dialogues with the Deceased

In 2016, there was a really unusual development of a chatbot: A memorial

bot for a deceased friend. Eugene Kuyna, a bot developer of Russian descent

from Silicon Valley, got the idea after receiving the devastating news about

the casualty Roman Mazurenko. In defiance of all her ethical reservations,

she collected thousands of lines of chats from other relatives and fed them

into a neural network similar to how Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri were

developed.

The results are both fascinating and scary. Many of Mazurenko’s

friends that spoke to the bot were staggered at the unique expression of

Mazurenko’s, which his bot had perfectly imitated in many places, Even his

humour shines through at times. A friend once wrote to him, for example:

“You are a genius!” and the bot replied quick-wittedly as Mazurenko would

have: “And good-looking!”

Kuyna collected some log files of the chats in order to be able to get an

idea of the outcome. She noticed that the bot listened more than it spoke.

For many of the relatives, the benefit of the bot was therapeutic. They were

thus able to tell it things they had always wanted to say. Many were able to

bid their farewells to him in this way, a fact that would not have been possible without digital avatars. Yet, the effect can also turn into the opposite and

the mourning phase of the relatives can be suppressed and extended.

The unusual and relevant example closely shows the possibilities that are

open to all of us with this technology these days. Yet, the commercial weighing up of costs and benefits is at least just as important as the continuous further development of the technology. We are living in times where each

one of us individually and society as a whole has to give some thought to

a more responsible use of the new technologies to ensure a meaningful and

profitable use. For, as many advantages as AI brings along, as with any kind

of technology, they come with certain risks that are to be identified and

avoided.

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