If we could talk to our younger selves, what would we say, what advice would we impart and how would it feel?
Well, one woman has an idea after she created an artificial intelligence chatbot of herself as a child by training it to learn what she was like based on a diary written when she was young.
‘Creative coder’ Michelle Huang used source material from 10 years’ worth of entries and combined it with the OpenAI language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3).
She told people on Twitter that she created the AI system so that she ‘could engage in real-time dialogue’ with her ‘inner child’.
Ms Huang (left) used source material from 10 years’ worth of entries and combined it with the OpenAI language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3. Pictured right is her as a child
AI creation: Michelle Huang created an artificial intelligence chatbot of herself as a child by training it to learn what she was like based on a diary written when she was young.
‘Overall, this was a very trippy but also strangely affirming / healing experience that i didn’t realise that i had access to using real data from my past self allowed me to connect with her in deeper + more tangible ways than i typically have,’ she tweeted.
‘Conversing with “younger michelle” reminded me of the parts of myself that have stayed constant through the years, but also of the parts that i forgot or buried as life went on it was like holding a mirror to an unapologetic, more earnest, and pure version of my own essence.’
She revealed that she had kept diaries for more than 10 years of her life and wrote them almost everyday about her ‘dreams, fears and secrets’.
‘The content ranged from complaining about homework, to giddiness i felt from talking to my crush some days were very mundane, some rather insightful,’ Ms Huang tweeted.
‘After scribing a ton of journal entries and feeding them into the model, i got working responses that felt eerily similar to how i think i would have responded during that time.’
Ms Huang said she asked her younger self about her world view, before allowing the chatbot to reply with its own questions.
‘This specific interaction felt very similar to a normal texting conversation – as if i were texting my past self in real time i felt like i was reaching through a time portal, disguised as a chatbox,’ she wrote.
‘I was also surprised at how accurately the model predicted my current stated interest (after lots of iterations / trial & error) from decade-old journal entries this made me wonder that maybe this path was actually already seeded long ago in my psyche.’
Ms Huang highlighted two key interactions that were most memorable.
‘I told her that she was loved, cared for, and safe: the words that my past self always wanted to hear,’ she tweeted.
Ms Huang told people on Twitter that she created the AI system so that she ‘could engage in real-time dialogue’ with her ‘inner child’
‘It felt like i was reaching into the past and giving her a giant hug, and i felt it ripple back into the present.’
The other was when she prompted her younger self to write her a letter ‘into the present day’.
‘While reading this, i felt the rumination spirals — the ones that i fall into sometimes when i feel shame or disappointment — melt away a little,’ Ms Huang said.
‘These interactions really elucidated the healing potential of this medium: of being able to send love back into the past, as well as receive love back from a younger self.
She revealed that she had kept diaries for more than 10 years of her life and wrote them almost everyday about her ‘dreams, fears and secrets’
Developed by OpenAI, it requires a small amount of input information to generate large volumes of relevant and sophisticated machine-generated text. Pictured is Ms Huang’s diaries
‘The stuckness becoming unstuck, of finding closure with past guilt or stories that we had of ourselves.’
She later shared a tutorial for other people to create their ‘inner child’ chatbot using GPT-3 after receiving a lot of interest about her AI experiment.
GPT-3 is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce human-like text.
Developed by OpenAI, it requires a small amount of input information to generate large volumes of relevant and sophisticated machine-generated text.
Anyone can use it but it does require a lot of work, with a tutorial from Ms Huang included below.
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