What you're looking at above is an excerpt from a moving conversation between tech artist Michelle Huang, and Michelle Huang as a young girl.
"I trained an AI chatbot on my childhood journal entries - so that I could engage in real-time dialogue with my 'inner child'," as she recently explained on Twitter:
I kept diaries for about 10+ years of my life, writing almost everyday — about my dreams, fears, secrets... I used GPT-3 as my playground, and ended up taking samples of text from a bunch of different entries that I felt were representative of my personality and values during that time... this way, i could accurately simulate what it would be like to talk to my childhood self, based on real data sources during that time period.
Michelle tells me she learned something crucial about herself by engaging with this simulation of her younger self:
"I would say, for me personally - the kindness and understanding I felt from my 'past self' helped me untangle some knots and stuckness that I felt," as she puts it. "It illuminated to me how hard I was on myself, but how much I extended understanding to others. It felt really rewarding to receive this kindness as well, from a younger version of myself.
"From a broader learnings [perspective], what stood out to me was the ability for technology to be used for mental health and wonder."
I also see amazing potential in this for NPCs and avatars. Imagine entire digital personae you can engage with that are directly based on yourself. Or for that matter, NPCs directly based on novelists, poets, and public speakers from history and fiction.
Michelle agrees on that front:
"This is the stuff I think that has the most interesting ramifications: more broadly, more immersive human / computer interface loops, from conversation with virtual therapists to in-game interactions for virtual worlds, given there is user input, AI could be used to train highly customizable responses or generate unique storylines per use."
It could even become the seed of a new virtual world product:
