A man used an AI chatbot to bring his fiancée 'back from the dead' eight years after she passed away - as the software's own creators warned about its dangerous potential to spread disinformation by imitating human speech.
Freelance writer Joshua Barbeau, 33, from Bradford in Canada, lost Jessica Pereira in 2012 when she succumbed to a rare liver disease.
Still grieving, Barbeau last year came across a website called Project December and after paying $5 for an account fed information its service to create a new bot named 'Jessica Courtney Pereira', which he then started communicating with.
Freelance writer Joshua Barbeau, 33, from Bradford in Canada, lost Jessica Pereira in 2012 when she succumbed to a rare liver disease (they are pictured together)
Some of the example conversations that Barbeau had with the bot he helped create
All Barbeau had to do was input Pereira's old Facebook and text messages and provide some background information for the software to mimic her messages with stunning accuracy, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
The story has drawn comparisons to Black Mirror, the British TV series where characters use a new service to stay in touch with their deceased loved ones.
Project December is powered by GPT-3, an AI model designed by OpenAI, a research group backed by Elon Musk.
The software works by consuming vast amounts of human-created text, such as Reddit threads, to allow it to imitate human writing ranging from academic texts to love letters.
Experts have warned the technology could be dangerous, with OpenAI admitting when it released GPT-3's predecessor GPT-2 that it could be used in 'malicious ways', including to produce abusive content on social media, 'generate misleading news articles' and 'impersonate others online'.
The company issued GPT-2 as a staggered release, and is restricting access to the newer version to 'give people time' to understand the 'societal implications' of the technology.
There is already concern about the potential of AI to fuel misinformation, with the director of a new Anthony Bourdain documentary earlier this month admitting to using it to get the late food personality to utter things he never said on the record.
Bourdain, who killed himself in a Paris hotel suite in June 2018, is
