Akihiko Kondo

(inspired by a throwaway “you’ll be marrying an AI next” comment someone left in a recent thread)

So there’s that guy in Japan, Akihiko Kondo, who “married Miku Hatsune”, said Miku being, at the time, a small “holographic” device powered by a chatbot from a company named Gatebox. She said yes, a couple of years later Gatebox went kaput and he was left with nothing. I honestly felt for him at the time; vendor lock-in really does suck.

My more recent question was “why didn’t he pressure Gatebox for a full log”. Short-term it would provide a fond memory. Medium-term it would bring her back. A log is basically all “state” that an LLM keeps anyway, so a new model could pick up where the old one left off, likely with increased fluency. By 2020, someone “in the know” would have told him that, if he’d just asked. (GPT-2 was released in late 2019).

Long-term… he might have been touring with his wife by now. I’ve tinkered around a bit with “autonomous AI pop composer+performer” ideas and the voice engine seems to be the hardest question “by a country mile” for creating a new “identity”; for Miku that part is a given.

Then I found this article https://archive.is/fTN97 and, honestly, this is personally very hard to “grok”. He isn’t even angry at Gatebox, he went on to life-size but “dumb” dolls, and he seems content with Miku being “fictional”.

Full disclosure: I have been in love with a 2D robot. That was in the late 90s, I was still living in Russia back then (left for Ireland several years later), the robot was Olga from the classic 1980 Osamu Tezuka movie called HI NO TORI 2772 (a.k.a. “Space Firebird”), I ended up assembling a team to do a full-voice Russian dub. Thanks to some very impressive pirates, it made its way VHS stores over at least one continent (Vladivostok to Haifa; New York might have happened but was not verified). This version is still around on YouTube.

If I had access to today’s, or at least 2020, tech back then, I’d probably have tried to engineer her at least “in mind” (“in body” is Boston Dynamics level antics, I’m not a billonaire). But there was a catch: the character, despite her wurface-level story being different, was obviously designed as an “advanced space explorer assistant”. If I were to succeed, this would have led straight into a world where militaries are the main paying buyer. I guess it’s good that the tech was not there.

For Kondo, success in “defictionalizing” his beloved character would have landed him in entertainment industry, which has a huge “toxic waste” problem but at least does not intentionally mass-produce death and suffering. He’d still have his detractors but there’s no such thing as bad publicity for the style of diva that “Miku lore” implies.

I’m having a hard time wrapping my head around Kondo’s approach, passive and contemplative, accepting “fiction” as a kind of spiritual category and not a challenge, especially when the challenge would not be entirely unrealistic.

But maybe it is safer. Maybe he didn’t even want to be touring…