The growth of 'death capitalism' offers a way to reconnect with lost loved ones.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of everyday life, enabling activities that were previously impossible with older technology. For instance, people can now use AI to create animated videos from old family photos and craft stories from them.
According to a new report by The Metro, now it's the turn of researchers and technologists to explore new ways to communicate with the dead with the help of artificial intelligence. For Sherry Turkle, an MIT professor and long-term observer of the human relationship with technology, the impetus to communicate with the dead is deeply human. It moves across history, from seances and Ouija boards to the technological innovations of the modern day, just at the bleeding edge of new advances in AI. Even Thomas Edison himself had considered creating a "spirit phone".
That quest for connection has just taken an interesting turn with the announcement of Apple Intelligence by Apple CEO Tim Cook. According to Turkle, AI is going to be buried in everyday life much faster than social media was, if not more. Coupled with money at stake, she warns that these emotional risks may ensue even faster when it comes to the rapid integration and allurement of new technology, as explored in her documentary Eternal You.
As per The Metro, the documentary Eternal You brings viewers face-to-face with people like Christi Angel from New York, who used AI to chat with a long-lost friend who had passed away named Cameroun. Angel found out that Cameroun had died due to the pandemic and wanted to reconnect with him through a service known as Project December.
This $10 AI simulation occurred to the point where it was inputting information about Cameroun's life and having a conversation with a digital version of her. After that, things only turned really creepy when it said that it was in "hell" and was going to "haunt" her.
In fact, to Jason Rohrer, creator of Project December, this sort of unpredictable AI response is more akin to an AI "black box" problem: something developers themselves cannot predict. While these results fascinate Rohrer himself, he doesn't take responsibility for potentially influencing the moods of users like Angel. That has engendered frustration in some who believe creators should be more responsible.
An example of it being able to evoke such strong reactions was in 2020 in the Korean television show *Meeting You.* One of those mothers was Jang Ji-sung, who lost her seven-year-old daughter, Nayeon. She finds a digital recreation of her child, an event that feels deep in technology, grief, and closure. That only goes to show how much these matters, on the question of interacting with a digital simulation of a beloved human, are deeply personal.