Thanks to the science fiction series “The Black Mirror”, humanity learned about a program that can recreate the manner of human communication based on the analysis of his correspondence. We checked whether such programs are used in reality.

The British series "Black Mirror" is rightly attributed to the genre of anti -utopia - it warns about how technologies can irrevocably change our life. In the first episode of the second season, entitled “I will return soon”, first shown on February 1, 2013, it tells about a young couple, in which the tragedy comes in life. Ash dies in a car accident, and his widow Marta has to learn to live without a loved one. Once she learns about the latest technology in which artificial intelligence generates the “digital Self” of a person based on his behavior in social networks. Martha begins to communicate with the new “Ash” through personal messages, and then uploads photographs and videos with it into the database, which allows her to communicate with a bot in voice mode. Further, things that are very difficult in our times take place, such as the appearance of the physical model Ash - an exact copy of it, with the exception of small details. In this case, we are only interested in the virtual, intangible side of the human image, namely, a chat bout.

In 2014, a year after the output episode, a startup appeared in the United States called Eternime, which According to the journalists The New Yorker, expanded the concept of “ending of the service life” to the “Azimov extremes”. The message on the site said: “We all die sooner or later, leaving the family, friends and humanity only rare memories of ourselves. What if they remember you forever? " The startup concept was represented by Marius Ursache as part of the Entrepreneurship Development Program program of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). According to the creator’s idea, the service was supposed to aggregate correspondence and other data from Facebook, Twitter, e-mail, photographs, video gallery and even collect GPS navigation data. The owner of the account, while he was alive, had the opportunity to select information in detail that could be used in case of his death, of course, filtering the list of potential “heirs” at his discretion. Further, the system had to analyze all this activity and create a digital copy of a person who could not only support the conversation with loved ones, but also give them advice.

According to information for 2017, 37,486 people issued an Eternime services. Nevertheless, apparently, none of them could take advantage of their subscription. Website The company ceased to exist in 2018. And in December 2020, Microsoft issued patent To create chat bots like the brainchild of Ursache. The latter, having learned about it, wrote In Facebook: “I am not upset, on the contrary. I did not submit a patent in 2014 because I did not think that this was an original idea that should be protected. I still think that in order for everything to work, it is needed not so much by technological as a psychological breakthrough. But it seems that the guys have a different strategy. Good luck to them. The design of a patent is the simplest part of the problem. ”

In the comments on his publication, Ursache admitted that there is no “current version” of Eternime. Nevertheless, judging by the publications on the network, the development of the application was conducted for four years and some of its beta versions existed. As for the Microsoft approach, the company plans to process the following data: photos, voice recordings, texts from social networks, electronic correspondence and personal messages in instant messengers. By the way, the company filed a patent back in 2017, but, indeed, almost all of this was provided in Eternime.

More successful in this matter can be called the children of Russians Evgenia Kuida. In November 2015, in Moscow, the car knocked down a friend of Kuida, former art director of the Institute of Media, Architecture and Design of Strelka, Roman Mazurenko. A few months later, Evgenia with his startup Luka I decided to create A digital copy of a friend based on 10,000 of its messages and other information. She later admitted: "The first thing I wrote to @novel [Bota Name]:" This is your digital monument. " He replied: "You have in your hands one of the most interesting puzzles in the world. Sit and decide it." We will definitely solve it. ”

As a result, the developers went further, and in 2016 a project appeared Replika. Now the program offers everyone who wants to create not only a chatbot, reminiscent of himself, but also his digital avatar. The “grown” artificial intelligence by long communication with the owner is “grown”.

And these are far from all examples of such developments, there are and other. In other words, chat bots, to details imitating the behavior of a person (living or deceased), exist today. The future came earlier than he was waiting.