So I'm already joking with my friends (who tend to be physically distant, so I don't see them often) that we are just LLMs vicariously writing to each other.

I've been talking to these friends for decades now, with digital records. I think someone already trained an LLM on their IM records.

How many people do you suppose have two-way LLM substitutes that occasionally write to each other with articles from the news to discuss?

There's already services that use this kind of thing to pretend dead people are alive.

Now here's the question: are you in some sense living forever? Say you have a number of friends, who have over time been trained into AI, and they live on various servers (it ain't expensive) forever. They're trained as you, so they read the kind of article you would read. They know your life story, they know their history with their friends. They will be interested in the controversial offsides goal in the 2250 world cup final. They are just made of calculations in data centres that go on, forever.

I'm already assuming we will see a creepy AI service emerge that will take the contents of a recently deceased person's cellphone and let you carry on texting them as if they were still alive, if it hasn't already (I haven't seen one yet).

For many of us a cellphone has incredibly detailed records of who we were and how we spoke, going back decades now. I have already left a note in my will instructing that all my compute devices be destroyed, regardless of AI I simply don't want my private thoughts and records to pass to my kids.

I inherited my mother's cellphones and iPads recently, mainly because no-one knew what to do with them, along with the passcodes. I'd much rather remember her the way I do now than have her private messages color my perception of her, and destroyed them immediately.

how many friendships do i suppose are replacing actual interaction with their log informed llms? you could be the first i suppose

Your finite life makes u special. Might as well be a beanplant otherwise.

Reading this kind of thing makes me wonder how much other people really write down and talk to others about. There is nobody at all that knows my life story and nobody ever will. It would take the next 20 years doing nothing but talking just to tell my own wife all the things I've never told her, but since she's hard of hearing and I'd have to repeat most of it, really more like 40.

In reality, I don't even know my own life story. I have the illusion that I do, but thanks to moving away from where I grew up pretty early into my 20s, and having the experience repeatedly of going back and talking to people who regularly remembered things I'd completely forgotten, having my mom continually correcting false memories I have, or even completely forgotting entire people I only remember after meeting again, I at least know it's an illusion.

What another person remembers of me can surely be simulated to at least satisfyingly convince them that text coming from the simulation is actually coming from me, but that isn't even remotely close to the same thing as actually being me.