Future You: An AI Engaging in Conversation with Its 60-Year-Old Self

New models of artificial intelligence regularly see the light of day. After the Chinese manus that promises to generate concrete actions, here is “future you” (or “future you”). Developed by MIT researchers with international collaborators, future You is a conversational agent of old age.

Future you: a photographic avatar for a realistic experience

It is the first chatbot that allows you to talk about your life and your future aspirations with an older you. The avatar is also photographic to strengthen realism. It is an “aged” version of the portrait of users with wrinkles and white hair.

The researchers gave more information on their new conversational agent in an article published on Arxiv.

“By discussing with a virtual and accessible version of their future self via a personalized language model and an evolutionary portrait, users have found a reduction in negative emotions such as anxiety and lack of motivation, and a significant improvement in their personal future,” they explain.

Personalized advice to consider the future with more optimism

The goal of future you is therefore to give users the impression of being connected to their future self. As Hal Hershfield, study co-author and marketing teacher explains, receiving advice from an older version rather than a generic chatbot makes it possible to consider the future with a better mood.

“The interactive and living components of the platform offer the user an anchor point and transform an element likely to arouse anxious reflection into a concrete and productive element”, specify the researchers.

Future You first collects data before designing the older versions of users. Thus, each user must answer a questionnaire on his current life, his demographic data, his objectives and his concerns for the future.

Future you are based on GPT-3.5 and Styleclip to age users

It is also required to provide a selfie before you can use future you. An image generation tool called Styleclip uses age progression models to predict the appearance of users at 60.

Then, the responses provided by users are transmitted to Openai Chatgpt which executes GPT-3.5. An architecture that researchers have described as “memory of the future” combines predictions on the future of each user using training data from a wider set of people.

This therefore makes it possible to offer a feeling of continuity and personalization to the user. The avatars thus become credible and relevant characters.

The importance of avoiding negative and pessimistic exchanges with its future Self

Of course, confrontation with an idealized version of oneself in the future could also have an unexpected negative effect. Pessimistic exchanges between the user and AI could strengthen feelings of anxiety and regret.

MIT researchers have ensured that this cannot happen. They made sure that future you have no negative twists and turns during conversations.

Moreover, the conversational agent also constantly recalls that the avatar is only a fictitious character based on the responses to the questionnaire. Each answer is able to produce completely different results.

Participants who tested future You have found a drop in their anxiety

To test future You, the researchers recruited 344 English speakers aged 18 to 30. They interacted with older representations of themselves for 10 to 30 minutes.

Most of them have confirmed that interactions have reduced their level of anxiety while increasing their motivation. They also felt a special connection with their avatar.

In the long term, the objective is that future You is able to positively influence the decisions of individuals.

“This work opens a new path by exploiting a well -established psychological technique to visualize the times to come – an avatar of the future self – thanks to a cutting edge AI,” says Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab of the University of Stanford.