MeBo’s older participants wanted a say in the story their AI companion kept

A 70-year-old participant in the MeBo study recalled a Vietnam War protest near Seattle: walking on the freeway, then arguing with his father afterwards. Midway through the remembering, he asked the AI companion to make a journal entry. The paper reproduces the exchange under his participant code, PB8.[1]

The September preprint describes a prototype co-designed with 11 older adults and evaluated with 20 US adults aged 66–78. Each 90-minute remote session included about 45 minutes with MeBo. Eight scenarios compressed a fictional user’s year into one sitting; participants supplied their own memories within that setup.[1]

That brief encounter poses an interesting design question: what should happen to a story after someone tells it? Conversation invites digression and unfinished thoughts. Keeping those words creates a second task—deciding what the speaker wants the account to become.

The conversation and the account

MeBo asks follow-up questions and can organise conversations into journals with the user’s agreement. People can inspect, correct and delete stored memories; edits feed later recall.[1]

These controls make memory something a person can work on. A speaker might correct a name because it was transcribed wrongly, or rewrite a passage because the first telling gave the wrong emphasis. Both edits matter, for different reasons. One repairs the record; the other expresses what its owner means.

Consider a hypothetical family story told while its narrator is still annoyed about an old argument. A faithful transcription could preserve every complaint. On reflection, the narrator might decide that the reconciliation deserves more space. A companion helping with that account would need to make room for this change of emphasis while letting the person keep the earlier version if they wished.

Choosing the version to share

Participant PB20 called the conversational record “the rough draft of me” and wanted to polish it before sharing. Other participants distinguished what relatives should see from what they wanted to keep private, including after their death.[1]

That phrase gives the draft a useful status. It can catch a detail before it slips away without making the first telling final. For someone considering a family record, the value would lie partly in being able to return: to add context, change the order, or decide that a story belongs only to them.

PB8’s request gives that process a starting point: a memory its teller has decided is worth keeping.

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