This artist created an AI chatbot to talk to her younger self

Tapestry13:47This artist created an AI chatbot to talk to her younger self

Would your eight-year-old self be proud of you? 

It's a question that plagued Michelle Huang. Since she couldn't go back in time to ask her real self, she decided to try the next best thing: create an AI chatbot based off of years of her childhood journal entries. 

Once the program was ready, Michelle named herself Present Michelle, and the chatbot Young Michelle and typed out her first message: "How are you?" 

"And then right before pressing submit, I was just like, 'Oh, man, I have no idea what's gonna happen,'" Huang told Tapestry. 

When Young Michelle replied almost immediately, Huang felt she was "reaching into the past in some sort of time portal through my computer."

Huang, a creative technologist and multimedia artist, says many of her projects meet at the intersection of art, technology and mental wellness. 

"I created the chatbot because I wanted to further my inner-child work, as well as push the frontiers of whether or not AI can be used for my own mental health," she said. 

Inner-child work is a therapeutic practice that involves "reconnecting" with the younger self that may hold trauma or, in Huang's case, a sense of wonder that she lost in adulthood. 

Huang said she selected journal entries that felt closest to the essence of who she is and fed the text into an artificial intelligence model called GPT-3. 

"So ones that were focused on values, kind of like my emotional world, my inner thoughts, my insecurities, my dreams — and the AI was able to construct a persona that would have responded in the same way that my younger self would."

The most emotionally moving part of the experience for Huang was when she asked the chatbot to write a letter to her present-day self. 

"When she wrote me the letter, it was really kind and understanding," she said.  

"I was really, I think, moved, and part of me wasn't surprised because I think I knew that my inner child and my eight-year-old, 10-year-old self, she had a lot of love for other people. And being able to receive that love in such a visceral form — even though it was representative of a chatbot — was so healing."

The entire experience left Huang feeling "inspired" about the potential uses for AI for mental health. 

"It's kind of the same feeling you get when you finish a therapy session that was really productive and allowed you to see a part of yourself that maybe wasn't clear before."

When Huang shared the project's results to Twitter, the thread went viral. Eventually she added a step-by-step tutorial for those who wanted to try to replicate the experiment for themselves.