Can we bring the dead back to “life” with AI?

In recent years, technology has been used to "resurrect the dead", most notably deceased celebrities. In order to reprise her role as Princess Leia in the latest "Star Wars" film, Carrie Fisher was digitally rendered. Kanye West famously gave Kim Kardashian a hologram of her late father for her birthday. In "Be Right Back", an episode from the Netflix series Black Mirror, bereaved Martha reconnects with her late lover after learning about a new service that allows people to communicate with the deceased. In typical Black Mirror fashion, the episode took a dark turn, demonstrating how such a situation could be harmful if mishandled. And don't forget the character McCoy Pauley, the famous Dixie Flatliner from William Gibson's seminal novel, Neuromancer!

The notion of digitally communicating with a construct of someone who has died is no longer science fiction. Researchers anticipate that within a decade, the technology to build convincing digital surrogates of the deceased will be mainstream. People are sharing more of themselves online, and it is now possible to build a pretty accurate chatbot based purely on their digital footprints: emails, texts, tweets, and more. Some experts believe that a zettabyte, or 1 trillion gigabytes of data, is sufficient to create a robust digital version of yourself. Before long, it's likely every millennial will have amassed zettabytes of data. Does this mean the recreated personalities of older people, with less captured data, will be less "real"?

Of course, many people only share so much information on social media, so algorithms that rely only on social media could be flawed. Humans are highly complex, and influenced by experiences that aren't always communicated through text messages or other digital forms. The computer software giant, Microsoft, has patented conversational chatbots based on specific people, living or dead.

In 2016, James Vlahos created an interactive chatbot based on his late father. This became hereafter.ai, a company that combines AI, captured questions, and data from a loved one to create a realistic digital avatar of them telling stories about their life. In the same year, Eugenia Kuyda digitally recreated her deceased friend using text messages he sent to pals prior to his death in an automobile accident. She now runs a startup called Luka which creates digital friends called Replikas. Luka envisions numerous applications for a Replika: a companion for the lonely, a living memorial of the deceased, and a version of ourselves that can perform all the mundane tasks that we humans must perform, but never want to.

A Canadian man, Joshua Barbeau, created a simulation of his deceased fiancée Jessica through a website called Project December. The Jessica simulation was uncanny, appearing to have a mind of its own. The AI helped him to remember Jessica and to feel she was close by. It felt real, not like a mere bot. Project December was created by Bay Area programmer Jason Rohrer and is driven by GPT-3, one of the world's most powerful artificial intelligence systems.

Deep Nostalgia employs deep learning algorithms to animate photographs with face expressions inspired by MyHeritage staff. Deep fake videos have also progressed tremendously in the last 5 years and offer the possibility to fully animate a loved one's face as if on a video call. It's not hard to imagine all this technology coalescing to create an incredibly life-like video or three-dimensional recreation that could even exist in your space through augmented reality (AR), or in the metaverse. Replika already allows for limited AR use, where its virtual Replikas can be with you in your space, though it's mostly limited to phone and handheld devices until AR technology matures.

But what about the ethics of bereavement? And the deceased's privacy? Should we really be simulating the dead? Stay tuned for our next episode to find out more!

Mentioned Projects:
https://projectdecember.net
https://www.hereafter.ai/
https://replika.ai/
https://www.myheritage.com/deep-nosta...

The team behind STSTW is even using AI avatars to create videos today -    • Live Longer in the Metaverse? The Ava...  

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