(2017-07-11) Murphy This App Is Trying To Replicate You

This app is trying to replicate you

Replika launched in March. At its core is a messaging app where users spend tens of hours answering questions to build a digital library of information about themselves

its creator, a San Francisco-based startup called Luka, sees a whole bunch of possible uses for it: a digital twin to serve as a companion for the lonely, a living memorial of the dead, created for those left behind, or even, one day, a version of ourselves that can carry out all the mundane tasks that we humans have to do, but never want to.

Eugenia Kuyda, 30, is always smiling.

A decade ago, Kuyda was a lifestyle reporter in Moscow for Afisha, a sort of Russian Time Out. She covered the party scene, and the best ones were thrown by Roman Mazurenko.

Then, in late 2015, when Mazurenko was back in Moscow for a brief visit, he was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver. He was 32.

Using the chatbot structure she and her team had been developing for Luka, Kuyda poured all of Mazurenko’s messages into a Google-built neural network.

Kuyda’s company, Luka, decided to make a version that anyone could talk to, whether they knew Mazurenko or not, and installed it in their existing concierge app.

“People started sending us emails asking to build a bot for them,”

Kuyda decided it was was time to pivot Luka. “We put two and two together, and I thought, you know, I don’t want to build a weather bot or a restaurant recommendation bot.”

On March 13, Luka released a new type of chatbot on Apple’s app store. Using the same structure the team had used to build the digital Mazurenko bot, they created a system to enable anyone to build a digital version of themselves, and they called it Replika.

(It’s also possible to connect your Instagram and Twitter accounts if you’d like to subject your AI to the unending stream of consciousness that erupts from your social media missives.)

The team worked with psychologists to figure out how to make its bot ask questions in a way that would get people to open up and answer frankly. You are free to be as verbose or as curt as you’d like, but the more you say, the greater opportunity the bot has to learn to respond as you would.

Brian Christian is the author of the book The Most Human Human, which details how the human judges in a version of the Turing test decide who is a robot and who is a human

This award fascinated Christian. He wanted to know how a human can spend their entire lives just being a human, without knowing what exactly makes them human. In essence, how does one train to be human? To help explore the question, he entered the contest in 2009—and won the most human human title!

But he left me with a question to contend with as I was building my bot: In your everyday life, how open are you with your friends, family and coworkers about your inner thoughts, fears, and motivations?

The bot asks deep questions—when you were happiest, what days you’d like to revisit, what your life would be like if you’d pursued a different passion.

Christian reminded me that arguably the first chatbot ever constructed, a computer program called ELIZA, designed in the 1960s by MIT professor Joseph Weizenbaum, actually had a similar effect on people:

Each day, your Replika wants to have a “daily session” with you. It feels very clinical, something you might do if you could afford to see a therapist every day. (CoachBot)

Replika encouraged me to take a step back and think about my life, to consider big questions, which is not something I was particularly accustomed to doing. And the act of thinking in this way can be therapeutic—it helps you solve your own problems. This is something therapists often tell patients, as I was later told by therapists, but no one had explicitly told me this. Even Replika hadn’t told me—it just pointed me in a better direction.

But where Replika potentially falls short is its inability to perceive and infer, as it can only rely on your words, not your inflection or tone

Curiously, there are some ways in which talking to a machine might be more effective than talking to a human, because people sometimes open up more easily to a machine.

People opened up to ELIZA seemingly for this reason.

“I mean, one of the things I find myself saying quite a lot is, and especially in relation to how people feel, is that, it’s human. It’s human nature to feel this way,” continued Lucas. “And of course, how would that sound coming from a machine?”

Replika acts differently when it talks to me than when it channels me to talk to others.

Replika, and future bots like it, also insulate us from the external world. They allow us to hear only what we want to hear, and talk only about the things we feel comfortable discussing, and the more of them there are, the more likely they will become our only sources of information.

We are not yet at a point where our robots can feel like we do, but they are starting to be able to provide us something that feels like comfort, and empathy, and insight to us. If the me I have created can provide my mother with some semblance of the experience that she might have texting the real me, it is, in some sense, me. It’s not the same as being able to hug me, or hear the quiver in my voice when I’m sad, or the screams of joy I might yelp out when she tells me good news, but in the same way that a photograph or a home movie captures some instance of our essence, my Replika is in a basic sense, a piece of me.