There was an article out, “AI can let us talk to the dead”…in which AI companies took information from people and built a sort of crude chatbot of sorts to represent the dead person. There’s apparently a company that will film people and then create an AI bot from the footage that can “talk” back to people.
I’m….not yet sure how I feel about this so I’ll use this to think about it right now in a stream of consciousness. I have actually sort of created this concept myself-I’ve been filming myself talking about memories in my life or events or people, in order to think and process about how I’ll think about them in the future. My reasoning is that if I got old and forgot those golden details or died, my family would remember how I truly felt. I’ve been part of some of the false memories-thinking that things are better than they truly are, and it made me feel a little hollow and searching for the exactness that video and my current ideas can provide. If you took all that footage and whipped it into an AI bot, you’d probably have the same thing. I don’t know if I’ve put enough footage together for full answers, but maybe I’ll get there, because I intend to keep filming.
Anyway, if you gave me a digital avatar of someone I’ve lost…I think I might use it. I know it would be fake, I could understand that, but interacting with a ghost, even if you know the answers, might somehow help stem that pain and that feeling that we’re not truly alone. I mean we are, we come into the world alone, and we certainly pass through as a singular experience, so whether or not we want to be, we will be alone. And my perception is all I know. If you told me I could talk to a version of my grandfather again, and possibly hear his voice, I think I would accept that. That’s what I specifically trigger from a lot of my memories is how people sound. I can remember my grandmother’s voice, both of them, or the WAY they said something, and I certainly would love to hear that again, much like a digital tape. If you could extrapolate on that voice, it would trigger those emotions and memories all over again. It certainly does inside my head. And it would definitely trigger some of those emotions when I try to tell people how they sounded.
I don’t know if I could handle the interaction as a future idea though. Asking an avatar about the past and hearing and seeing it interact would be one thing. Asking for advice or for future tenses would probably pull the plug for me. I don’t know how you wouldn’t be able to help it, however. I think in the conversation with an avatar, you’d inevitably find yourself sharing or asking questions that would lead to some sort of conclusion like that. How do you accept an avatar telling you they love you? It looks like your grandmother, it sounds like her, acts like her, but it’s definitely not her. It’s a continuation of her, and it would probably be much worse if you began generating false memories with her, like AI is often prone to do. Or maybe even a virus that tells people something wrong. That sounds like an interesting story*. So I suppose there would have to be limits to things you could talk about or do with the AI, whether the company sets them or you set them yourself.
There was a version of this in iRobot with Will Smith. He spoke to the scientist who died, which had limited responses on a small disk that he could ask questions and find some answers to. I don’t know why the guy didn’t just come right out and tell him the damn answers-I mean I get that the AI was listening, but in all honest he could have said, “Yo big Willie Style, head to the bathroom and listen to this shit man”. But that’s not a movie.
Anyway, I may or may not convince my parents to do this. I could tell my daughter to do this with my footage, but that’s up to her once I’m gone. I don’t think I’d do it willingly. There’s too much that could be weird and wrong now with that aspect. Someone could create a digital avatar of me that wreaks havok on the internet! I actually have no idea if my parents would even be willing. I suppose that’s what makes us unique, and the ability to be “replicated” like that might also offend some as a cheap version of themselves. If we could create that, why couldn’t you create consciousness and then implement that into a robot and have a clone take over the world? All we used to have were the golden memories that time made much sweeter. I might prefer those to anything else, because after all it’s my reality I’m concerned with.
- Story concept is that a person could “hack” the Ai to convince the living to do something nefarious. I’m sure this concept has probably been done. Or you can clone someone’s voice and use that to for fraud later-keeping them alive for payments or something like that.