In an unusual gesture of friendship and creativity, Eugenia Kuyda, co-founder of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) start-up Luka, made a memorial chatbox of her deceased best friend Roman Mazurenko by adding most of his text messages to a neural network.
This incredible creation took three months of work and on May 24th, Mazurenko was available for conversation as the user @Roman in the Luka app. Since that moment, many of his friends and family have sent messages to the AI chatbox, trying to have a conversation in which they explain to him their grief.
This AI chatbox an extraordinary work
"All those messages were about love or telling him something they never had time to tell him. Even if it's not a real person, there was a place they could say it. They can say it when they feel lonely. And they come back still," Kuyda told to GEEK.
According to the Daily Mail, she made such extraordinary work with the messages that when you chat with him; the bot reveals a conversation that is almost indistinguishable from a real human being. For example, if you ask him where he is right now, he would answer "Next to your office", and if you ask about what he does in his free time, he can reply "Restaurants and galleries."
However, the most unbelievable and emotional message was when someone told him that life goes on on but they will miss him for the rest of their life, and he respond "I miss you too. I guess this is what we call love." This AI chatbox was created with the purpose of letting people express what they couldn't when Mazurenko was still alive.
The line between grief and irrationality
Although this is a magnificent creation, Kuyda doesn't know if this could be the answer to situations where you lose someone you love, considering the fact that the system could grow, learn, and adapt, as reported by GEEK
"It's definitely the future - I'm always for the future, but is it really what's beneficial for us? Is it letting go, by forcing you to actually feel everything? Or is it just having a dead person in your attic? Where is the line? Where are we? It screws with your brain, " Kuyda told the Verge.
