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A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

edwarddonner.com

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Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#2
> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic!

Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#3
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

Great point. Bound to be a big area of debate as LLMs get increasingly good at this.

Black Mirror’s take: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Be_Right_Back

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#4
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

Oh hey Black Mirror!

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#6
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

Could probably be just as dangerous as helpful. You work through some issues, maybe want to forgive or be forgiven to get closure and the LLM says f*k you, no.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#8
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

> it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate.

If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation?

Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life.

But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#9
post #7

If you’re more an email person, then it might be a better resource? Need to have a process to extract information from Outlook .msg files? To: From: Body: Actually, I guess you could just do an export from Outlook to a CSV file and then process?

Setup a local IMAP server (for example Dovecot), have Outlook connect to it (I think you have to use Old-Outlook if on a Mac, not sure) and copy all your Outlook messages to it.

Re: A simulation of me: fine-tuning an LLM on 240k text messages

#10
post #2

> I immediately recognized this would be in extremely poor taste and removed the data. Enough on that topic! Poor taste for a blog post. But I wonder if LLMs could advance to a point where it might be therapeutic to have a conversation with a deceased loved one.

It has been tried. Joshua Barneau tried it with GPT-3, training it on his deceased fiancees text- and facebook messages. It’s a moving read: https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2021/jessica-simulation... It ‘worked’ for him for a while.
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