'Future You' AI lets you speak to a 60-year-old version of yourself — and it has surprising wellbeing benefits

For the first time, people can talk with an older version of themselves about their lives and aspirations, using an advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbot, complete with a photographic avatar of their future face.

The Future You project, created by researchers at MIT Media Lab and international collaborators, uses AI to create a simulation of a user's 60- to 70-year-old self. They detailed the project in a paper published Oct. 1 to the preprint database arXiv.

Users can converse with the AI through a text interface on topics such as how to achieve what they want in life based on their circumstances, beliefs and outlook. It was devised to give people a sense of being connected to their future self, scientists said in the paper.

Study co-author Hal Hershfield, a professor of marketing, behavioral decision-making and psychology at UCLA, said the ability to take advice from your older self instead of a generic AI chatbot makes us feel much better about the future. "The interactive, vivid components of the platform give the user an anchor point and take something that could result in anxious rumination and make it more concrete and productive," he said in a statement.

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The first component of Future You is an image generation model called StyleClip. After the user uploads a selfie, the system uses age-progression models to predict what they'll look like at age 60, adding features like wrinkles and gray hair.

The training data for Future You's chatbot comes from the data a user provides when asked questions about the current state of their life, their demographic details, and their goals and concerns for their future.