An elderly Korean man named Mr. Lee, wearing a blazer and a slack man grabbed the arm of the chair and leaned against his wife. “Dear, it’s me,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
“I never expected this to happen to me,” she replied in tears. “I’m very happy now.”
Mr. Li is dead. His legacy is similar to the AI-powered projected onto the wall.
“Please, never forget that I’ve been with you all the time,” the prediction said. “Keep healthy until we meet again.”
The conversation is part of a promotion for RE;Memory, an artificial intelligence tool created by Korean startup Deepbrain AI, which provides professional-grade studio and green screen recording (and relatively cheap ways to self-record) to create life-style representations of the dead.
It is part of a growing AI products market that provides users with an experience that is close to impossible: communicating with the dead or even “reunion.” Certain representations (such as those provided by AI and Storyfile) can also be programmed with that person’s memory and voice to create a realistic hologram or chatbot that family or others can talk to.
The desire to bridge life and death is a natural human being. For the millennium, religion and mysticism provide a way for this – blurring the logical lines to support the belief in immortality.
But technology has its own, relatively new history, trying to connect the living and the dead.
More than a century ago, Thomas Edison announced that he had been trying to invent an “institution” that “persons who allow the earth to communicate with us”.Edison is known for his contributions to telegraphs, incandescent light bulbs, and films.
The same is true of the way they try to go beyond death as science and technology develop. In the 19th and early 20th centuries, with the invention of these AI avatars, we are now entering a new era of Techno-Spiperitalism.
Machines have mediated most of our lives and have made many of our decisions. The algorithm provides us with news and music. Targeted advertising predicts our desires. Sleep tracking apps and smartwatches can keep our bodies healthy. But until recently, sadness and death remained one of the few aspects of modern life and were not fully covered by a stable social drumbeat of optimization, efficiency and productivity.
With the so-called death technology industry beginning, artificial intelligence has become increasingly ubiquitous, but grief may not have existed for a long time.
Artificial intelligence for mental health has become relatively mainstream. These tend to come in the form of mental health chatbots or “peers”, such as Replika, which some people use to create avatars that they rely on emotional support. However, this latest wave of technology has been particularly sad and lost in fork hair.
Many companies that produce AI avatars and chatbots have adopted an optimized language, suggesting that their tools can better lose by providing opportunities for postmortem conversations and ending opportunities. This statement plays the wrong but mainstream idea that sadness moves in a linear or discrete phase, which one can foresee and can progress clearly.
What is highlighted on Re;Memory’s website is their quote attributed to Confucius: “If you don’t feel sad for the huge loss, then what else can evoke your sorrow?” This means that grief can only be appropriately grieved by bringing dead loved ones back to themselves.
The potential risks of AI tools are enormous, especially because the companies that produce them are profit-driven – incentivizing the exploitation of desires and delusions that can be unhealthy for users. For example, the University of Cambridge’s latest research evaluates the ethics of the “digital source industry” and believes that these businesses may soon realize that money can be made by asking people to pay for subscription fees or watch ads in order to continue interacting with dead loved ones’ avatars, especially when hanging them on their abilities. They may also have Decterbot’s proposal for sponsorship – such as ordering the deceased’s favorite food through a specific delivery service.
Another possible dystopian scenario that Cambridge researchers consider is a company that fails (or refuses) to deactivate its “stalemate”, which could lead to survivors receiving “unsolicited notifications, reminders and updates” and instilling their sense of being “stalked by the dead.”
This mix of reality, fantasy and business hurts sadness.
If the Victorian Séance offers temporary fantasy of otherworldly communication, today’s AI-driven afterlife offers something even more sinister: Ongoing, interactive discussions with the dead prevent or delay real losses.
In some cases, chatbots and avatars can be useful tools for dealing with death, especially if they are considered as reflection spaces, such as journals. But in our culture of efficiency obsessed with, we are encouraged to skip the unpleasant, painful and messy aspects of life because we think we can use the healthy use of these tools, which are only possible if a firm understanding of the firm understanding of a robot or hologram is basically not real. The incredible authenticity of many such avatars complicates it, which makes their end result more likely to not help people deal with grief but rather allows them to avoid it.
The more we use these tools to avoid, the greater their potential for harm – freeing us from our own pain and the public mourning that our society should strive for. If we’ve ever seen using these tools as a Necessary In short, part of sadness.
The popularity of these grief AI tools is unclear, but the huge number of competition to create and market them – primarily led by industry leaders in the United States, China and South Korea – can be assumed to be an important part of our shared future.
Instead, what does it mean to stop and embrace the most tempting feeling surrounding the loss? Consider that while efficiency and optimization may be useful in the market, they don’t have any place in their hearts?
As we enter a new era of techno-spiritism, when optimizing culture brings sorrow, this question is not a question, but how we will choose to work in the inevitable situation.
From Spirit Phone to Deadbot, there are and always try to connect with the dead. The most worrying thing is that the AI possibilities we have today represent only the tip of the big iceberg. The near future will provide a more realistic and tempting way to ignore or completely create our own reality and isolate us in grief.
As individuals, we may not be able to control the advancement of technology. What we can control is how we face the unpleasant and painful things, and even embrace those feelings in the most difficult situations.
