When missing a loved one who has passed away, you might look at old photos or listen to old voicemails. Now, with artificial intelligence technology, you can also talk with a virtual bot made to look and sound just like them.
The companies Silicon Intelligence and Super Brain already offer this service. Both rely on generative AI, including large language models similar to the one behind ChatGPT, to sift through snippets of text, photos, audio recordings, video and other data. They use this information to create digital “ghosts” of the dead to visit the living.
Called griefbots, deadbots or re-creation services, these digital replicas of the deceased “create an illusion that a dead person is still alive and can interact with the world as if nothing actually happened, as if death didn’t occur,” says Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence at the University of Cambridge who studies how technology shapes people’s experiences of death, loss and grief.
She and colleague Tomasz Hollanek, a technology ethicist at the same university, recently explored the risks of technology that allows for a type of “digital immortality” in a paper published May 9 in Philosophy & Technology. Could AI technology be racing ahead of respect for human dignity? To get a handle on this, Science News spoke with Nowaczyk-Basińska. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
To read more, click here.