A Chilling Piece Of Tech From Black Mirror Season 2 Already Exists
"Black Mirror" provides a public service. In an age where unctuous, self-satisfied tech bros strut around stages extolling the virtues of their latest invention, there needs to be some balance. Thankfully, we at least have "Black Mirror" to remind us that this tech boosterism is only giving us half the story.
The sci-fi anthology series has struck a chord mostly because its little vignettes of technology gone awry don't feel all that removed from our current moment. Case in point: "Be Right Back." The inaugural episode of the show's second season explores grief and how technology might be used to help us through such a harrowing experience/make everything worse.
In what is one of the best "Black Mirror" episodes, Hayley Atwell plays Martha, whose husband Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car accident. Soon after, Martha's friend signs her up for a service that uses Ash's online profiles to create a virtual version of Martha's late husband, allowing her to interact with what is essentially a chat bot trained on Ash's online footprint. Martha, who finds out she's pregnant after losing her husband, eventually orders a physical replica of Ash, infused with the AI with which she's slowly formed a relationship. But as things progress, it becomes increasingly clear that this uncanny recreation is only a snapshot of who her husband really was, leading Martha to store him in her attic, allowing her daughter to only see him on weekends.
"Be Right Back" is at once moving and bleak, and remains one of the most memorable episodes of the entire series. Oh, and remember when I said how "Black Mirror" is so disturbing because it feels like the stories could happen? Well, this one kind of did.
Life imitating Black Mirror
Thanks to the recent arrival of "Black Mirror" season 6, we're once again able to head back down the wormhole of deeply unsettling and infinitely binge-able entertainment. But it'll be hard to top "Be Right Back," which remains a standout episode that has only become more relevant with time, as the current AI revolution continues to turn our world into an actual "Black Mirror" episode.
Of course, series creator Charlie Brooker takes many of his cues from the real world, and told Timeout that he based "Be Right Back" on his own experience of losing a friend and finding it difficult to delete their 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 emulating their thoughts?" Now, in the time since "Be Right Back" first aired on Channel 4 all the way back in February 2013, the real world seems to have taken some cues from Brooker.
As chronicled in a piece from The Verge, founder of Luka — a messenger app connecting users with bots — Eugenia Kuyda decided to use her expertise to build 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 exchanges with him from the Telegram app and more than 8,000 lines of text provided by his friends and family. This was fed into a neural network created by Kuyda's own artificial intelligence startup, and the resulting bot was eventually made available to Mazurenko's friends and family and was also added to Kuyda's Luka app.
Grey-area Mirror
While some friends of Eugenia Kuyda claimed they found the whole Roman bot project disturbing, many others seem to have gained something positive from the experience, including Roman Mazurenko's own mother. As she told The Verge, "There was a lot I didn't know about my child. But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I'm getting to know him more." This all prompted Kuyda to reflect:
"All those messages were about love, or telling him something they never had time to tell him. Even if it's not a real person, there was a place where they could say it. They can say it when they feel lonely. And they come back still."
Since digitally memorializing her close friend, Kuyda has founded Replika, which is described as a "chatbot companion powered by artificial intelligence" designed for "anyone who wants a friend with no judgment, drama, or social anxiety involved." That seems like a premise Charlie Brooker could easily warp to fit his sci-fi anthology. Otherwise, Mazurenko and Kuyda's story is nowhere near as bleak as "Be Right Back," with Mazuranko's digital afterlife ultimately being more about what others could say to the bot, rather than what the bot could give them — allowing friends and family to work through their grief perhaps more effectively than they could have otherwise.
Whatever you think of the whole thing, there's no doubt more and more of this kind of stuff will be cropping up in the near future, especially considering the huge developments in AI of recent months. So expect to see a hell of a lot more god-awful CGI resurrections of long-dead actors delivering lines from a chatbot trained on prior performances.