The topic of artificial intelligence is already beginning to scare many. If a few years ago the possibility of talking to dead relatives was considered, now trips to the future have arrived: talk to yourself, but in 20 or 30 years. That’s Future You.
For the first time, people can talk to an older version of themselves about their lives and aspirations, using an advanced chatbot powered by artificial intelligence, complete with a photographic avatar of your future face.
The Future You project, created by MIT Media Lab scientists and international collaborators, uses AI to create a simulation of the self of a user between 60 and 70 years old. The details have been published in a recent study.
Users can chat with the AI through a text interface about topics such as how to achieve what they want in life based on their circumstances, beliefs and perspectives. Was devised to give people a feeling of being connected to their future selfthe scientists said in the study.
Co-author Hal Hershfield noted that the ability to receive advice from your older self instead of a generic AI chatbot makes us feel much better about the future. “The interactive and vivid components of the platform they give the user an anchor point and turn something that could result in anxious reflection into something more concrete and productive“explains Hershfield in a statement.
The first component of Future You is an image generation model called StyleClip. After the user uploads a selfie, the system uses age progression models to predict what they will look like at age 60, adding features like wrinkles and gray hair.
On the other hand, the training data for the Future You chatbot come from the data we provide through an interview about our lifedemographic details and our goals and concerns for your future.
These answers are processed by ChatGPT d, which runs GPT-3.5 and creates an architecture that Hershfield’s team calls “future memory.” It combines predictions about the user’s future based on quiz responses, using training data from a larger data set of people talking about their life experiences in their careers, relationships, and beyond.
The chatbot, which takes on a personality based on the user’s responses, answers the user’s questions about what their life could be like and offers advice on possible paths to the future you wantto.
The data is combined in a natural language processing architecture that maintains a sense of continuity and personalization for the user, which makes your future personality believable and relatable.
The Future You programmers had care to protect users against possible negative spins in conversations with their future selves. The system routinely reminds the user that they are only postulating a potential future based on the questionnaire answers, and that different answers produce completely different results.
For the project, 344 speakers (all English speakers) between 18 and 30 years old were recruited, who They interacted with representations of their future selves for between 10 and 30 minutes. Most users reported a decrease in their level of anxiety, an increase in their level of motivation, and a greater sense of connection with their future self.
“This work breaks new ground by adopting a well-established psychological technique to visualize the times to come (in this case an avatar of the future self) with cutting-edge artificial intelligence – explains Jeremy Bailenson, director of the University’s Virtual Human Interaction Laboratory. from Stanford, in the statement -. This is exactly the type of work academics should focus on as the technology to build virtual models of the self merges with larger models of language.”