Chatting With the Dead | The MIT Press Reader

Eugenia, who was herself an entrepreneur and software developer, had been working on a messenger app called Luka that used AI to emulate human dialogue. Inspired by an episode of the show Black Mirror in which a young woman, Martha, shattered by the loss of her boyfriend Ash, installs an app that allows her to keep communicating with him, Eugenia decided to modify Luka. The app would become a functional version of the software imagined by the creators of Black Mirror : a tool that would allow her to communicate with Roman s digital ghost.

Eugenia asked Roman s friends and relatives to send her the written messages they had received from him. She ended up with several thousands of messages from which she excluded content that was too personal. With the help of some friends who were computer scientists, she created a bot that could mimic human language and make it possible to communicate with Roman.

via thereader.mitpress.mit.edu

Russians.