Autobiographer’s app uses AI to help you tell your life story

Can AI show you how to inform your story? That’s the thought behind a startup known as Autobiographer, which leverages AI expertise to interact customers in significant conversations in regards to the occasions of their lives and the way they felt about them, after which turns these into prose, successfully creating your individual autobiography.

The startup is dabbling in an space that’s been fraught with debate — many individuals have rebelled in opposition to the concept that AI might exchange artwork, writing and different inventive endeavors. However in Autobiographer’s case, the AI guides the person to inform their very own story, in their very own phrases, then organizes that into output that may be exported as a PDF, and maybe, sooner or later, sure and printed as effectively. In different phrases, it really works extra as a collaborator relatively than the only creator.

The app could not exchange professionally handwritten tales, but it surely might function a method to doc household historical past or a friendship, or create a memento in your kids.

Autobiographer co-founder and CEO Matt Bowman sees the app as a method to go away behind a story for his godchildren. Earlier than working at Fb within the Bay Space, Bowman beforehand served within the Military Particular Forces, the place he was deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Consequently, he’s lived by losses which have formed his worldview.

“I’ve a bunch of nice tales about my pals within the army — so many humorous occasions, so many distinctive and wonderful occasions — loads of which we heard on the funerals for a few of my finest pals. Now it’s my job to determine learn how to synthesize these and provides them to my godchildren,” Bowman says. He desires them to have the ability to discover out extra about their dad, his life within the army and what he was like as an individual.

“The expertise has now come to a spot the place it’s attainable to do that,” Bowman explains. “We are able to truly inform these tales, converse them verbally after which flip them into lovely keepsakes that we will present to these round us.”

Bowman teamed up with James Barnes, who had additionally labored at Fb by the 2016 and 2018 elections, the place he was notably one of many first folks to note the problems with the info harvesting scandal Cambridge Analytica — an occasion that led to his involvement in a number of subsequent depositions and subpoenas. He later left Fb to begin a Tremendous PAC to combat Trump. As he was enjoying round with OpenAI’s GPT-3, he discovered that synthetic intelligence might assist him course of the issues he had been by in his personal life, together with these milestones.

“Synthetic intelligence had this unimaginable reflective capability to see myself, my story and my occasions,” Barnes says.

Whereas Barnes and Bowman didn’t overlap at Fb, they met up final yr in San Francisco, as Barnes was in search of somebody with army experience to assist the group (which additionally contains co-founders Luke Schoenfelder and Ivan Almaral) experiment with this concept of utilizing AI for storytelling. The 2 bonded over their shared targets and different experiences, together with their curiosity in psychedelic drugs.

“Exploring consciousness was a key level of connection for us,” explains Barnes. “As we work on these actually tangible issues, we’re additionally ready to consider the capability of our platform to permit folks to introspect and to do extra summary, private work,” he says.

To make use of the app, you interact in conversations with an AI agent, constructed on Anthropic expertise, that prompts you to inform a narrative. As an example, the preliminary immediate could ask you to inform a narrative about an journey you had, reminding you there’s no proper or improper reply. You can begin talking, pause and resume recording, or transfer on to a different query, should you want.

The recollections are saved in a vault, a biometrically protected, encrypted area that even Autobiographer employees can’t entry.

“One of the vital vital values as James, Luke, Ivan and I got here collectively, was the plain understanding that nobody’s going to inform their cherished recollections or their very emotionally delicate tales to one thing that’s marketed — or {that a} bunch of engineers can see on the again finish,” says Bowman.

The app helps you to revisit matters, discover your recollections after which finally flip them into several types of prose — like a brief story or a gratitude letter for a liked one. For now, these are exported as PDFs, however the group wish to provide a printed ebook sooner or later.

Autobiographer prices $199 per yr — cheaper than a ghostwriter, actually, but additionally costly sufficient to discourage some.

The corporate has now additionally partnered with journalist Katie Couric, who will function a promotional associate for the startup. Her position continues to be being outlined, nonetheless.

The corporate behind Autobiographer was based three and half years in the past, however has undergone a number of pivots. The newest model of the app, launching at this time, was began a yr in the past.

Autobiographer is backed by $4 million in pre-seed funding from numerous companies.