Hayley Atwell on the phone in Black Mirror
Movies - TV
This Chilling Piece of Black Mirror Season 2 Tech Already Exists
By JOE ROBERTS
Content Warning
The following story contains discussions of grief.
In the Season 2 episode of “Black Mirror,” entitled “Be Right Back,” Hayley Atwell plays Martha, a woman whose husband Ash (Domhnall Gleeson) is killed in a car crash.

Domhnall Gleeson as Ash in Black Mirror

Domhnall Gleeson as Ash in Black Mirror

Hayley Atwell using a laptop in the dark in Black Mirror
Martha's friend signs her up for a service that uses Ash's online profiles to create a virtual version of him, so Martha can engage with a chatbot trained on his online footprint.
Eugenia Kuyda in a room
Inspired by “Be Right Back,” Eugenia Kuyda, founder of Luka, a messenger app connecting users with bots, built a chatbot trained on texts from her late friend Roman Mazurenko.
A smartphone showing the Telegram app logo. (Photo by GEOFFROY VAN DER HASSELT / AFP)
Kuyda built a virtual version of Mazurenko using her Telegram app exchanges with him and more than 8,000 lines of text provided by Mazurenko’s friends and family.
Eugenia Kuyda, CEO of Replika, displays a photo of her friend Roman Mazurenko who was killed in an auto accident, at their office in San Francisco, Ca. on Monday October 30, 2017. (Photo By Michael Macor/The San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
These exchanges were fed into a neural network created by Kuyda's AI startup, and the resulting bot was made available to Mazurenko's loved ones and was also added to the Luka app.
Eugenia Kuyda talking on a microphone
While some friends of Kuyda found the bot project disturbing, many others had a positive experience, including Mazurenko's own mother, who revealed her feelings to The Verge.
A phone with a picture of Roman Mazurenko on it
She shared, “There was a lot I didn't know about my child. But now that I can read about what he thought about different subjects, I'm getting to know him more.”
Eugenia Kuyda sitting in a chair
Kuyda said, “Those messages were about love, or telling him something they never had time to tell him. Even if it's not a real person, there was a place where they could say it.”