Microsoft patented a chatbot that would permit you talk to lifeless men and women. It was way too disturbing for generation

A patent granted to Microsoft (MSFT) final month aspects a method for developing a conversational chatbot modeled soon after a particular individual — a “past or existing entity … these types of as a close friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical determine,” in accordance to the submitting with the US Patent and Trademark Office environment.

The engineering is reminiscent of a fictional app in the dystopian Tv set sequence “Black Mirror” that permitted a character to continue on chatting with her boyfriend right after he dies in an incident, by pulling data from his social media.

Want to talk songs with David Bowie? Or get some words and phrases of knowledge from your late grandmother? This device would theoretically make that probable. But really don’t get far too energized, or freaked out for that subject: The organization isn’t really arranging to change the technologies into an actual products.

Tim O’Brien, Microsoft’s normal manager of AI plans, explained in a tweet on Friday that he “verified that there’s no prepare for this.” In a different tweet, he also echoed the sentiment of other web consumers commenting on the technological innovation, declaring, “certainly, it is really disturbing.”

Here is how the technological innovation would perform if it have been in truth constructed into a product or service. According to the patent info, the tool would cull “social info” such as pictures, social media posts, messages, voice information and penned letters from the decided on specific. That info would be employed to prepare a chatbot to “converse and interact in the personality of the distinct individual.” It could also depend on outside facts resources, in circumstance the person questioned a dilemma of the bot that couldn’t be answered centered on the person’s social facts.

“Conversing in the identity of a certain person may contain deciding and/or making use of conversational attributes of the particular person, these kinds of as design, diction, tone, voice, intent, sentence/dialogue duration and complexity, subject and regularity,” as perfectly as utilizing behavioral characteristics this sort of as passions and thoughts and demographic information these as age, gender and career, the patent states.

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In some cases, the device could even be employed to use voice and facial recognition algorithms to recordings, images and films to generate a voice and 2D or 3D design of the person to increase the chatbot.

Although Microsoft won’t have programs to create a item from the know-how, the patent does reveal that the prospects for synthetic intelligence have moved over and above making phony persons to creating digital types of real men and women.

The application for the Microsoft patent was submitted in April 2017, which O’Brien explained on Twitter predates the “AI ethics testimonials we do now.” These days, the corporation has an Business of Dependable AI and an AI, Ethics, and Results in Engineering and Investigation Committee, which support oversee its inventions.