In a promotional video, Ryu Soon-yeon sits in front of a microphone and a giant screen, showing her husband, who died a few months ago. And he says to her: “My darling, it’s me”, so that her tears flow and that she begins what looks like a dialogue with him.
After learning he had terminal cancer, 76-year-old South Korean Lee Byung-hwal hired Deep Brain AI, which recorded videos of him for hours, to create a digital version of him. who could answer questions.
“We don’t create new content,” says Joseph Murphy, head of development at DeepBrain AI, of the program, called “ReMemory.” That is to say that this technology does not generate sentences that the deceased would not have spoken or written during his life. lifetime.
The same principle is adopted by the company “Story File”, which has hired 92-year-old actor William Shatner as a promotional face on its site.
“Our approach is to hold that person’s magick for as long as possible ‘in their lifetime’ and then use AI,” says Stephen Smith, head of the service, which is used by thousands of people, according to the report. ‘business.
In China, companies specializing in the organization of funerals offer the possibility of virtually interacting with the deceased during their funeral, thanks to artificial intelligence.
In early April, entrepreneur and engineer Prateek Desai caused a stir when he urged people to “start taking audio or video recordings” of “parents, elders and loved ones”, noting that from “the end of this year” , it will be possible to create a virtual character using the avatar technology ( avatar) of a deceased person, indicating that he is working on a project in this direction.
The message, posted on Twitter, sparked a storm of criticism, prompting him to confirm days later that he was not a “gravedigger”. “This is a very personal matter and I sincerely apologize for hurting people,” he said.
“This is an ethically sensitive area and we take great care,” Stephen Smith says of StoryFile.
“philosophical” challenges
After her close friend died in a car accident in 2015, Russian engineer Eugenia Kyuda, who resides in California, created a “conversational robot” which she named Roman in honor of her late friend, and provided him with thousands of short messages which he sent to his loved ones, with the aim of creating something like a virtual version of himself.
Then in 2017 I launched Replica, which has some of the most advanced personal chat software on the market, with some users spending hours a day talking to it.
But despite what happened with Roman, Replica “is not a platform designed to recreate a loved one,” a company spokeswoman warned.
London-based Somnium Space seeks to leverage metaverses to create virtual copies of users in their lifetime, who will have a private existence, without human intervention, in this parallel world after they die.
The company’s managing director, Artur Sychov, admits that this service “is not for everyone, of course”, in a video clip posted on YouTube about the company’s product called “Live Forever” (” Live Forever”), which he announced plans to launch at the end of the year. And he adds: “Do I want to meet my grandfather through artificial intelligence? It will be available to anyone who wants it.”
The question here is how plausible is it to have a hypothetical deceased loved one who, thanks to generative AI, could say things they didn’t say before they died?
Joseph Murphy acknowledges that “the challenges are philosophical, not technical”. “I don’t think the community is ready yet,” he said. “There’s a line we didn’t plan to cross.”
“This technology is aimed at a specific audience, not a growing sector, explains the director of the “ReMemory” service, which has a few dozen users. I do not expect enormous success.”
Candy Kan, a professor at Baylor University who is currently conducting research on this subject in South Korea, considers that “interacting with an AI version of a person in order to go through a phase of mourning can help (…) to move forward with minimal trauma, especially with professional help.
Mary Dias, a professor of medical psychology at Johnson & Wales University, has asked many of her grieving patients about virtual contact with their deceased loved ones.
She explains that the most common response was, “I don’t trust the AI. I’m afraid it will say something I won’t accept.”
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