Turning Your Ex into AI
Who owns your old texts? One man used his texts with an ex to create an AI bot that anyone in the world can interact with.
Breakups can be hard for anyone. In the digital age, breakups have become harder with the texts and digital content our past relationships leave behind.
So, what do you make of those texts from your ex? Delete them? Keep them?
Maybe you read those private texts from time to time. But, what about making them into an interactive AI chatbot? And share it with the world for free?
"You broke up, but the way they texted is still burned into your brain. You remember every tone, every pause — you just can't receive another one."
Well, that’s what one man in China did with his ex’s texts: made “ex.skill”1 by training an AI on their texts so that anyone can now talk to his ex in the form of AI.
There aren’t rules or regulations to guide this kind of behavior to use the shared digital artifacts to make something new, without informing the other person.
If you shared texts with another person, reasonably those texts also belong to them.
Right? Maybe not, though. This is a grey area of ethics and training data ownership.
This act of using texts as training data to make the “ex.skill” system is unethical to me without the consent of his ex.
Training data is the information used for an AI system to be able to make predictions. The training data tells the AI model what type of outcomes it wants to create so without that data, these private texts, the AI wouldn’t work.
While we can’t tell if this developer did get consent of his ex for this creation, he’s set a new precedence of what can be made with AI. AI bots of your ex are now a thing.
What’s also interesting is that this AI bot is licensed by the Massachusetts Institute for Technology, MIT, so it is a seemingly accredited piece of code to use.
This isn’t malware from the looks of it but you need to verify yourself if you choose to use this tool. It’s gaining popularity in Github, which is the world’s most popular code repository for software developers. This skill could be replicated by anyone.
I wonder how many other people will do the same to create an AI bot with text threads they shared with lovers or friends in the past.
In this age of AI, it’s important to think about digital footprints the same as a physical space and ensure you share content with people you trust. Unfortunately, you could still end up as an AI bot from an ex, but let’s hope that’s not the case.
As always, thank you for reading and I hope you learned something!
TTFN,
LD
Ex.skill on Github: https://github.com/titanwings/ex-skill?tab=readme-ov-file#readme