A Chilling Piece Of Tech From Black Mirror Season 2 Already Exists

Thanks to the recent arrival of “Black Mirror” season 6, we’re once again able to head back down the wormhole of deeply unsettling and infinitely binge-able entertainment. But it’ll be hard to top “Be Right Back,” which remains a standout episode that has only become more relevant with time, as the current AI revolution continues to turn our world into an actual “Black Mirror” episode.

Of course, series creator Charlie Brooker takes many of his cues from the real world, and told Timeout that he based “Be Right Back” on his own experience of losing a friend and finding it difficult to delete their name from his contacts. That and the time he was “up late and on Twitter, thinking: what if these people were dead and it was software emulating their thoughts?” Now, in the time since “Be Right Back” first aired on Channel 4 all the way back in February 2013, the real world seems to have taken some cues from Brooker.

As chronicled in a piece from The Verge, founder of Luka — a messenger app connecting users with bots — Eugenia Kuyda decided to use her expertise to build a chatbot trained on thousands of text messages from her late friend Roman Mazurenko. A tech entrepreneur himself, Mazurenko was tragically killed in 2015 after being hit by a car in Moscow. Inspired by “Be Right Back” and her own work with AI and chatbots, Kuyda built a virtual version of Mazurenko using her own exchanges with him from the Telegram app and more than 8,000 lines of text provided by his friends and family. This was fed into a neural network created by Kuyda’s own artificial intelligence startup, and the resulting bot was eventually made available to Mazurenko’s friends and family and was also added to Kuyda’s Luka app.