A grieving man is using an AI chatbot to bring his girlfriend back to life eight years after she died.
33-year-old Joshua Barbeau from Bradford, Canada, lost his fiancée Jessica Pereira when she lost her battle against rare liver disease.
But last year, he found a website called Project December and paid $5 for an account to create a chatbot he named ‘Jessica Courtney Pereira.’
Joshua fed information into the software by inputting Pereira’s text messages. He also provided some background information so the software can mimic her messages accurately, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.
Powered by a software called GPT-3, the bot can manipulate human language and copy the writing style of anyone using writing samples and old text messages.
Joshua tried the software a few times before he decided to input Pereira’s old messages.
The line on the computer reads: ‘Human is typing as ‘Joshua.’ The next line shows: ‘Human types first.’
Only a second later, a new line appears: ‘Jessica: Oh, you must be awake… that’s cute.’
Joshua replies: ‘Jessica… Is it really you?’
The bot replies: ‘Of course it is me! Who else could it be? :p I am the girl that you are madly in love with! How is it possible that you even have to ask?’
Joshue says: ‘You died,’ to which the bot replies: ‘That doesn’t sound right. How can you talk to dead people?’
The chatbot was designed to have a finite lifespan to save on processing power. It uses up ‘battery power’ every time Joshua chatted with the bot. When it reached 20 percent, the system would start degrading and become incoherent.
Speaking to the Chronicle, Joshua shared how responses given by the bot opened him up to new pain.
He eventually decided to stop using the chatbot and ended the conversation with a heartfelt message: “I’ll never stop loving you as long as I live, and hopefully ever after Xoxo Goodnight.”
The bot then replied: “Goodnight. I love you.”
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