Thanks to the recent arrival of “Black Mirror” Season 6, we’re once again able to descend into the wormhole of deeply unsettling, endlessly binge-able entertainment. But it will be hard to top “Be Right Back”, which remains a standout episode that has only become more relevant over time, as the current AI revolution continues to transform our world into a true “Black Mirror” episode. “.
Of course, series creator Charlie Brooker draws a lot of inspiration from the real world and told Timeout that he based “Be Right Back” on his own experience of losing a friend and struggling to delete his name from his contacts. That and the time he was “up late and on Twitter, thinking, what if these people were dead and it was software mimicking their thoughts? Now, ever since “Be Right Back” first aired on Channel 4 in February 2013, the real world seems to have taken inspiration from Brooker.
As recounted in an article by The Verge, founder of Luka – a messaging app connecting users with bots – Eugenia Kuyda decided to use her expertise to create a chatbot trained on thousands of text messages from her late friend Roman Mazurenko. . A tech entrepreneur himself, Mazurenko was tragically killed in 2015 after being hit by a car in Moscow. Inspired by “Be Right Back” and her own work with AI and chatbots, Kuyda built a virtual version of Mazurenko using her own interactions with him from the Telegram app and over 8,000 lines of text provided by her friends and family. This was fed into a neural network created by Kuyda’s own AI startup, and the resulting bot was eventually made available to Mazurenko’s friends and family and added to the Luka app as well. of Kuyda.