Grieving man uses AI site to 'chat' with dead girlfriend

A grieving Canadian man used pioneering artificial intelligence software to have life-like online "chats" with his girlfriend -- eight years after she died. Joshua Barbeau, 33, told the San Francisco Chronicle how he paid just $5 to use a beta test of GPT-3, AI software first developed by a research group co-founded by Elon Musk. Still overwhelmed by grief after losing 23-year-old girlfriend Jessica Pereira in 2012, Barbeau said he used her old text messages and Facebook posts to help the chatbot mimic his late lover's writing voice. In scenes from an episode of "Black Mirror" or the movie "Her," Barbeau broke down in tears during a 10-hour, all-night chat in September that at times eerily mimicked the woman he had lost to liver disease. "Of course it is me!" the chatbot he named after Pereira told him at the start of their talk, according to transcripts the freelance Dungeons & Dragons writer from Bradford, Ontario gave the California newspaper.