Whizbang Dustyboots
Gnometown Hero
Although EGG doesn't have quite the volume of published writing that some prominent psychologists have, he's probably got more out there (including posts on ENWorld and Dragonsfoot) than one might think.
From Politico:
This is probably not doable for EGG's work in 2024. (Although, how many podcast episodes did it take to recreate Esther Perel?) But I wouldn't bet against it being doable in 2025 or 2026.
So, would you buy such a work? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to his estate? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to just the people publishing it?
And what other works along these lines would you buy, once the technology was good enough that the quality was on par with a human author's below-average day? Would you buy The Winds of Winter by an AI-generated George R. R. Martin? Would you buy new Lord of the Rings works by an AI-generated Tolkien?
From Politico:
Politico said:Martin Seligman, the influential American psychologist, found himself pondering his legacy at a dinner party in San Francisco one late February evening. The guest list was shorter than it used to be: Seligman is 81, and six of his colleagues had died in the early Covid years. His thinking had already left a profound mark on the field of positive psychology, but the closer he came to his own death, the more compelled he felt to help his work survive.
The next morning he received an unexpected email from an old graduate student, Yukun Zhao. His message was as simple as it was astonishing: Zhao’s team had created a “virtual Seligman.”
Zhao wasn’t just bragging. Over two months, by feeding every word Seligman had ever written into cutting-edge AI software, he and his team had built an eerily accurate version of Seligman himself — a talking chatbot whose answers drew deeply from Seligman’s ideas, whose prose sounded like a folksier version of Seligman’s own speech, and whose wisdom anyone could access.
Impressed, Seligman circulated the chatbot to his closest friends and family to check whether the AI actually dispensed advice as well as he did. “I gave it to my wife and she was blown away by it,” Seligman said.
The bot, cheerfully nicknamed “Ask Martin,” had been built by researchers based in Beijing and Wuhan — originally without Seligman’s permission, or even awareness.
Politico said:In Southern California, tech entrepreneur Alex Furmansky created a chatbot version of Belgian celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel by scraping her podcasts off the internet. He used the bot to counsel himself through a recent heartbreak, documenting his journey in a blog post that a friend eventually forwarded to Perel herself.
Perel addressed AI Perel’s existence at the 2023 SXSW conference. Like Seligman, she was more astonished than angry about the replication of her personality. She called it “artificial intimacy.”
Both Seligman and Perel eventually decided to accept the bots rather than challenge their existence. But if they’d wanted to shut down their digital replicas, it’s not clear they would have had a way to do it. Training AI on copyrighted works isn’t actually illegal. If the real Martin had wanted to block access to the fake one — a replica trained on his own thinking, using his own words, to produce all-new answers — it’s not clear he could have done anything about it.
This is probably not doable for EGG's work in 2024. (Although, how many podcast episodes did it take to recreate Esther Perel?) But I wouldn't bet against it being doable in 2025 or 2026.
So, would you buy such a work? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to his estate? Would you buy it if the proceeds went to just the people publishing it?
And what other works along these lines would you buy, once the technology was good enough that the quality was on par with a human author's below-average day? Would you buy The Winds of Winter by an AI-generated George R. R. Martin? Would you buy new Lord of the Rings works by an AI-generated Tolkien?