In this week’s episode of Previously, on Black Mirror, Microsoft’s patent describes a chatbot that uses a person’s online or other available data to generate content. This definitely, probably can’t go wrong.
Titled “CREATING A CONVERSATIONAL CHAT BOT OF A SPECIFIC PERSON”, the patent defines a complex system of data acquisition and compilation from sources including “images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, written letters, etc.” to “create or modify a special index in the theme of the specific person’s personality”, and “may correspond to a past or present entity”. Translated into human, this is a process to construct a sort of digi-clone of your dead granny, for example, based on her Facebook posts.
The special index may be used to train a chat bot to converse and interact in the personality of the specific person.
And CyberGranny wants you to know that Mark Zuckerberg is secretly updating Facebook’s user policies at exactly 03:56 tomorrow to make your profile completely public unless you copy-paste this opt-out disclaimer immediately. Maybe she’s onto something.
Not even joking, this was the plot of the Black Mirror season two episode Be Back Right, starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson, except this version also involved an android for extra realism and, uh, “bonus services”. Microsoft’s patent also adds that “a 2D or 3D model of a specific person may be generated using images, depth information, and/or video data associated with the specific person” so I guess the androids are next.