The DeanBeat: The inspiring possibilities and sobering realities of making virtual beings
But the summit made clear that this wasn’t just a matter of physically reproducing humans with digital animations. It was also about getting the story and the emotion right to make a believable human. Cyan Banister, a partner at Founders Fund and an investor in many Virtual Beings Projects, said she wanted to see if someone could reproduce her grandmother so that she could have conversations with her again. Banister said these characters could be so much more compelling if they remember who you are and converse with you in context.
“I saw Hatsune Miku in person, and that was magical, seeing how genuinely excited people were,” Banister said. “I wondered what is the American equivalent of it. We haven’t seen it yet, but I think it’s coming.”
Her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was killed in a car accident. Months afterward, she gathered his old text messages in an effort to preserve his memory. She wanted one more text message from him.
She had her team in Russia build a chatbot using artificial intelligence, with the aim of reproducing the style and nature of Mazurenko’s personality in a text-based chatbot. It worked. Kuyda put it out on the market as Replika, and now it has more than 6 million users in the past couple of years. Many of those users write fan letters, saying that they are in love with their chatbot friends.
There are so many lonely people in the world, Kuyda said. She has been told that Replika is creepy, but she has begun to figure out how to measure the happiness that it creates.
The potential risks of the wrong use of AI — virtual slaves, deep fakes, Frankenstein monsters, and killing machines — are plentiful.
The moral is, “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
Peter Rojas, partner at Betaworks Ventures, said, “We shouldn’t be afraid to think about legislation and regulations for things that we want to happen.”
He said there are moral, ethical, and responsibility issues that we can discuss for another day.
See the full story here: https://venturebeat.com/2019/07/26/knights-and-bikes-is-a-quirky-take-on-1980s-coming-of-age-stories/