I really don't understand this sort of thing at all. Even a hypothetical distant future AI that had a human level of sentience and intelligence and could perfectly emulate you in every way still would not be you (even if it could hypothetically be indistinguishable from you in communication), and it's especially odd now with the crude simulacrum it would provide.
If you're gone, you're gone. Some model of your brain or body isn't going to bring you back, and I don't see how it would help anyone recover from grief. It would just make me feel way worse, and very creeped out.
Why not skip the AI part and just create an archive of writings and communications and such so they can recall memories of you if they wish?
There was an episode of the old 80's TV show "Max Headroom" which explored the idea that a new age church was taking advantage of people by providing kiosks, for a price, that contained a crude digital simulation of their lost loved ones. The show came down pretty much on the side of "it's just creepy, false hope".
Incidentally, part of why I've been in no rush to watch Star Trek: Picard past season 1. At the end of that season, Jean-Luc Picard dies, period and end of story. But I'm guessing the following seasons carry on like the android that now thinks it's Picard actually is Picard.
Human level is putting it mildly. Which human? I've tried showing it to a few people that barely understand the answers and miss insights given in previous answers 2 minutes prior.
My dad and I played around with asking it questions about a rare proprietary piece of software he uses at work. My dad is decent at the software and even does consulting after hours because so few people are know it. Chatgpt was teaching him things he never even knew about, or thought about doing. And my dad is pretty decent at his work.
Did your dad ever search online trying to learn new things about the software? I've seen the experience you describe happen with people spontaneously discovering Ctrl+L and Ctrl+R in bash, e.g. in a comment here on HN. They could have found it years ago if they'd searched for "list of bash features" or whatever.
My point is that your example is not necessarily more than "a better search engine" (with all caveats about it not being "search"). People are asking ChatGPT things that they could have searched for previously. Some of it is because it can provide a better search-like experience, for sure. Some of it is, "let me play with my new toy", and getting answers the old toy could have given you.
I'm addressing your specific example, not making a blanket comment on LLM intelligence. And to clarify, I've also used these models in ways I could have before, for both of those reasons. They do offer a productivity boost.
I have tried to help him with that software before. It's in a niche CNC manufacturing type industry. You can find people discussing problems in forums sometimes, but even that was always sparse. Honestly I don't think you could even find proper docs for that software. I even tried asking chatgpt where to get the documentation for what it was telling us and it basically just said the help file in the program, but we looked and it was nowhere near as helpful as chatgpt answers. I don't know where it pulled all that info to be honest.
But even if it was out there, the ease at which it gave great answers that fit exactly what we threw at it made it 10x more (or more) valuable than spam filled and loosely related google results.
That’s what we’ve came to the conclusion too, kinda like the movie Transcendence. It is a pretty interesting conversation to talk and think about though from a moral, humane, and social aspect.
If you're gone, you're gone. Some model of your brain or body isn't going to bring you back, and I don't see how it would help anyone recover from grief. It would just make me feel way worse, and very creeped out.
Why not skip the AI part and just create an archive of writings and communications and such so they can recall memories of you if they wish?