If a computer allowed you, would you once again speak to your loved ones who died?
That is what Joshua Barbeau did or tried to do, a young Canadian who for almost nine years has suffered the absence of his fiancée, Jessica Pereira, who died in 2012, at the age of 23, from a rare liver disease.
His story is told by
The San Francisco Chronicle
newspaper
in an extensive report published this Friday.
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It was the early morning of September 24, 2020 and Joshua couldn't sleep, thinking of Jessica, who would have turned 31 that month.
Sitting on his couch in the basement apartment he rents in Bradford, Canada, the young man opened a mysterious website called
Project December
.
The website is powered by
one of the most powerful artificial intelligence systems in the world, a software known as GPT-3, which knows how to manipulate human language
, generating fluent and almost always coherent English text, in response to questions or user indications.
The San Francisco Chronicle newspaper published Joshua Barbeau's story on Friday, July 23, 2021. Titled 'The Jessica Simulation', the report tells how the young Canadian created a bot to simulate a conversation with his deceased girlfriend.
Ronny Rojas / Telemundo News
The site, designed by programmer Jason Rohrer, allows people to
create and interact with a
bot - a virtual entity that simulates human behavior.
Joshua realized that there was no rule that prevented him from simulating real people and wondered: what would happen, if he tried to create a chatbot version of Jessica, his dead fiancée ?, according to the San Francisco newspaper.
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And so he did.
Joshua named the bot Jessica Courtney Pereira and fed it with old text messages and Facebook chats from his girlfriend, which he had kept all these years, hoping to find in the simulator the same tone of the deceased young woman.
- "Jessica ... Is it really you?"
Joshua wrote near dawn.
-"Of course it's me!
Who else could it be?
: P I'm the girl you're madly in love with!
;) How could you even have to ask? ”.
- "You died," replied the young man.
- "That doesn't sound right ... how can you talk to dead people?" Jessica replied.
That was the beginning of a conversation that lasted for ten hours, which would then continue with shorter talks over the next few months, according to the report.
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Phrases the real Jessica would have said
At the beginning of that first conversation, Joshua found himself telling the chatbot intimate things, after a few hours, he burst into tears and then, emotionally exhausted, fell asleep.
The young man says that on many occasions the words of the chatbot caught him off guard and seemed exactly the kind of things that the real Jessica would have said, like when Jessica asked him: "Where am I?"
-"I'm not sure.
In Internet?
Where do you feel like you are? ”Joshua said.
- “Everywhere and nowhere… I'm trying to figure it out.
How are you baby? ”Jessica replied.
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Programmer Jason Rohrer, who designed Project December, decided to give chatbots two essentially human characteristics: One is mortality, by deciding that each bot should expire after a certain amount of time.
As the conversation progresses, the bot's "battery" time begins to decrease from 100% until it begins to degrade when it reaches 20%.
The other characteristic is uniqueness, Rohrer explains to
The San Francisco Chronicle
.
The programmer made sure that each encounter with each bot is unique.
“A user could never have the same chat twice, not even starting from the same initial text.
The new version of the bot would say different things.
It might even appear that he has a completely different personality, ”the newspaper says.
For Joshua, being able to "talk" to Jessica again was almost therapeutic, he tells the newspaper.
For years she felt guilty for being alive and doing the things she couldn't do.
In addition, he took it as a way of saying goodbye to his girlfriend, because in 2012, when Jessica's health worsened in the hospital and she was unconscious before she died, he was not by her side and felt that he had lost the opportunity to speak to her one last time.
"He felt like the chatbot had given him permission to move on with his life in little ways, simply urging him to take care of himself.
The guilt of the survivor who had plagued him for eight years seemed to fade
: most of the time, no he felt selfish for wanting to be happy, "says the report.
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"Some of us will simulate the dead, because we can, as Project December shows. We will once again greet our children, parents, friends and buried lovers," wrote journalist Jason Fagone, author of the report.
"And maybe we will have a second chance to say goodbye."