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.
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37970 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
If you have to pay a college athlete when you use their "name, image, likeness" in a video game, you will have to pay to create and use a chatbot of a living person or of someone with an estate that can sue you. I think this will be a legal no-brainer.
historical figures are another matter, but defining "historical" will be for the courts.
Posts: 12550 | Location: Williamsburg, VA | Registered: 19 July 2005
I have a complex set of reactions to that story. Martin Seligman's book Learned Optimism marked a significant milestone in my personal mental approach to life and I've valued much of the work he and his associates have accomplished in the field of positive psychology. Thus, I like the idea of his thoughts having even greater circulation.
On the other hand, I find it difficult to fully trust an AI bot to reliably respond precisely as he would. It could drift off track or be deliberately manipulated.
I think that some mechanism needs to be implemented, presumably in law, to make it clear that you are dealing with an AI-generated product and not a human being.
Big Al
-------------------------------- Money seems to buy the most happiness when you give it away.
Why does everything have to be so complicated, all in the name of convenience. -ShiroKuro
A lifetime of experience will change a person. If it doesn't, then you're already dead inside. -MarkJ
Posts: 7420 | Location: Western PA | Registered: 20 April 2005
Interesting. I'll have to play with that a bit. I am a fan of Seligman. He certainly has left a mark on the treatment of depression. I'll need to create a psychological crisis to try with his AI.
-------------------------------- We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love… and then we return home. - Australian Aboriginal proverb
Bazootiehead-in-training
Posts: 37970 | Location: Somewhere in the middle | Registered: 19 January 2010
