Woman trains robot to read her diaries so that she can speak to her childhood self

A woman created an artificial intelligence chatbot that allowed her to speak to her childhood self, and the results were wild.

Without literal time travel, the second-best way to chat with your younger self has been revealed by Twitter user Michelle Huang, who revealed she trained a chatbot by inputting her diary entries.

In a thread, Huang explained that she inputted 10 years' worth of diary entries as a data source for the OpenAI language model Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3).

Huang explained: “I kept diaries for about 10+ years of my life, writing almost everyday — about my dreams, fears, secrets

“The content ranged from complaining about homework, to giddiness I felt from talking to my crush. Some days were very mundane, some rather insightful."

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She continued: “I used gpt-3 as my playground, and ended up taking samples of text from a bunch of different entries that I felt were representative of my personality and values during that time.”

After inputting the source data, Huang explained she was then able to “engage in real-time dialogue with my ‘inner child’”.

She did indeed engage in conversation with her younger self and also set tasks, such as writing a letter to her future, older self.

In one conversation, Huang asked her younger self about her worldview. In another, she asked the bot if it had any questions for her, leading the bot to say it was “glad to hear you’re happy now” and was “proud” of older her for everything she has accomplished.

Huang described the whole endeavour as “a very trippy but also strangely affirming / healing experience” and credited it for reminding herself about parts of her younger self she had forgotten about, but also of the parts that have remained the same over the years.

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