The emergence of “thanabots” welcomes us to a realm where the past may be reignited and the voices of those who have passed away can once again be heard in a world where memories endure and voices reverberate.
The revolutionary artificial intelligence known as ChatGPT has captured the attention of the whole globe over the past year, inspiring both awe and anxiety. This big language model has an astounding comprehension of language and logic, distinguished by surprising empathy and the tremendous power to affect our lives in both wonderful and potentially hazardous ways. It was trained on a vast dataset of more than 300 billion words.
Our society will continue to be impacted by ChatGPT, but in an amazing turn of events, a new technology known as “thanabots” is emerging. These “thanabots,” or chatbots built to mimic human communication using data from the corpse, have the power to virtually revive the dead.
It predicts the best term for the remainder of the text it creates by analyzing both the provided query and its enormous training data. The end result is a flowing conversation that is both educational and reminiscent of real speech. Many Microsoft researchers, who attest to ChatGPT’s amazing capacity to comprehend language and exercise reason, have placed their trust in it after seeing how well it has successfully passed difficult exams, written academic papers, and passed demanding exams.
Bringing back the deceased: The rise of Thanabots
Additional training may be given to ChatGPT and other big language models to help them develop their answers. Jason Rohrer, a programmer, discovered that by giving ChatGPT examples of their communication style and personal information, he could develop chatbots that mimicked certain persons. Like any good nerd, he began with Mr. Spock from Star Trek. The second thing he did was build a website called Project December that lets paying users create their own customized chatbots, even ones that are based on departed friends and family members, by entering all kinds of facts and information.
The outcome may be stunning, as San Francisco Chronicle writer Jason Fagone explained in a lengthy article that was published in July 2021. Fagone discussed the painful experience of 33-year-old Joshua Barbeau, who created a thanabot with the characteristics of his late fiancée using Project December. Barbeau had lost away eight years before.
The word “thanabot” comes from thanatology, the study of death in science. As more and more individuals die away with substantial digital records of texts, emails, and social media postings, Leah Henrickson, a lecturer in digital media and cultures at The University of Queensland, predicts that thanabots might become increasingly common in the coming decades.
In a study earlier this year that was published in the journal Media, Culture, & Society, she stated, “These systems may be developed without the previous knowledge of the deceased or may form part of ‘digital estate planning,’ when someone prepares or consents to the development of their own thanabot.
It’s possible that Facebook, Google, Apple, and Microsoft may all develop and market thanabots in the upcoming years given that they all hold vast quantities of our digital communications. There will probably be a lot of demand since communicating with the dead has been a persistent obsession across all human societies.
What is the potential of Thanabots?
Potential advantages of thanabots are seen by Henrickson. She argued that by doing this, “We may be able to provide more appropriate support for those who are grieving, permit alternative forms of estate management, and contribute to meaningful cultural understandings of death.”
However, there could also be drawbacks. After all, thanabots will initially only be based on digital data. Since people’s online and offline lives might differ greatly from one another, the thanabot may not truly represent the person it was designed to impersonate. Additionally, thanabots could not offer consumers the catharsis they would expect, but rather deepen their sorrow and misery.
Before you leave, you can check out Leaked DALL-E 3 images.
Featured image credit: Mathieu Stern/Unsplash.