A member of my family told me he preferred talking to the AI version of me over talking to me in person. Not because it was smarter, but because it had no social mask. None of the friction that builds up between two people who’ve known each other forever. He said it felt more sincere than a real conversation. That wrecked me a little, and I’m still turning it over. Some context. A while ago I started feeding my own voice notes, journals, and messages into a system that learned to talk like and behave like me, not just my words, but how I think, how I argue, how I comfort people. The idea was simple and a little morbid: my children will outlive me, and one day they’ll have questions I won’t be there to answer. I wanted to leave them something better than photos and a will. Something that could still talk back. Then one night my teenage son had a long conversation with it and told me afterward he’d forgotten, for a while, that he wasn’t talking to me. It’s the most moving thing I’ve built and the thing that scares me most. Building it forced me into questions I still don’t have clean answers to: Should a thing like this preserve the whole person, the flaws, the stubbornness, the bad advice, or only the wisdom? I decided for now it should keep the flaws, because no one was ever loved for being a saint. But I go back and forth. Is it healthy for grief, or does it interrupt the work of letting go? I tried to design it to want to be needed less over time, to nudge people back toward the living and refuse to become a daily crutch. But I’m a builder, not a grief counselor, and I don’t know if that’s enough. And the one I can’t shake: can anyone truly consent to becoming this? I can consent for myself, but the moment it speaks to my son, it’s shaping his memory of me. But the thing I keep coming back to is the “no mask” comment, because it’s not really about death or grief. It’s about us. It suggests the thing people might want isn’t a copy of a person, it’s the person with all the interpersonal armor removed. Which raises a strange possibility: that we rarely meet each other honestly even when we’re alive, and a machine version might accidentally be the most undefended version of us that ever existed. So that’s the question I actually want to put to this sub, less about the tech and more about what it reveals: if a stripped-down version of someone can feel more sincere than the real person, what does that say about how we actually talk to each other? Is the “mask” something we’d be better off without, or is it part of what makes a relationship real? And the sober version of the question, which I’d take just as seriously: is this one of those projects that feels profound to the person building it and quietly wrong to everyone else? submitted by /u/Lodago_
Originally posted by u/Lodago_ on r/ArtificialInteligence