Digital eternity

WE’VE probably imagined some version of ‘I wish I had the chance to tell [someone] how much I loved them before they died’. I don’t have such thoughts for my mother who died unexpectedly in 1995. But since reading about the use of bots to create digital avatars of our dead loved ones, I have wondered if I’d be willing to turn to AI to help me grieve, 30 years on.
My instinct is a firm no because she would loathe it, not least because she was devout but also it seems a bit sci-fi and creepy and probably very upsetting. However, it’s has been very helpful for the innumerable families across China using ‘grief tech’.
I recently wrote about people using digital avatars for companionship but this is more personal. This is you holding onto someone you deeply loved in a bid to find closure and I wonder if it helps or prevents you from moving on. I also watched a short documentary on a 37-year-old woman in Singapore, mum to four kids, who was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer who chose to record videos for her children so they wouldn’t forget her. The company will interview her for say six to eight hours, record a data of memories to store in the cloud, which her children can then access over the years by asking ‘her’ a question about a memory. This is different to the tools available for posthumous work.
For around Rs800, you can create an animated avatar of any person on some of these Chinese sites. For more money, according to a report in NPR in July, you can choose options featuring AI-powered chatbots, conversational videos or interactive séance.
One 47-year-old man in Nanjing featured in NPR said he talks to a digital avatar of his mother — “rendered from the shoulders upby artificial intelligence to look and sound just like his flesh-and-blood mother” who died in 2018. He said it’s the best person to confide in, and he regards the avatar “truly like his mother”.
Many cultures build altars for their dead relatives in their homes or communicate with them through ceremony. Families honour the dead and maintain their graves at the yearly tomb sweeping ceremony in China; they also tell them what their year was like. This year, some brought moving digital avatars of their deceased relatives for a two-way conversation.
Is this the end of ‘rest in peace’ as we have known it all this time? And what about the ethics of replicating people, alive or dead; do we need their consent?
China has a robust e-commerce market, reports MIT Technology Review, and many brands would hire livestreams to sell their products. Now they use AI-cloned influencers that can stream 24/7. According to one estimate reported in The Guardian, the market size for “digital humans” was worth 12 billion yuan ($1.7bn) in 2022, and is expected to quadruple by 2025.
You can see this as technology that is profiting from death or offering people a chance to deal with the layers of grief. Technology has helped us grieve from afar, by attending funerals and prayer meets over Zoom and we find solace in pouring over photographs or home videos or social media posts of our loved ones; so what is different if we take all that material and feed it into large language models to create digital avatars? You need a one-minute video for a basic avatar (costs around Rs8,500) and ones that require generative AI to make the avatar move and talk to you costs a few thousand dollars.
Digital immortality has a dark side too. Fans recreated a digital avatar of Qiao Renliang, a pop star who died by suicide in 2016, and then made new content, including a video of him saying “I never went away”. This caused a great deal of pain to his family, who said it opened old wounds and did not have their consent.
One of these AI tech grief companies in China has built a cemetery in Shanghai where tombstones are digitised. You can scan a QR code on the headstone and access the deceased’s life through multimedia. A company representative told NPR they hoped this would allow people to see a graveyard as a place to celebrate life, not just mourn death.
Things once in the realm of sci-fi are becoming a reality due to investment in computing power. On one hand we are ploughing money in medical technology to allow us to live longer, or figuring out how to merge our brains with computers so we can have a digital version of ourselves in the cloud, and now digital immortality is advancing. Are we so afraid of death? Is grief so unbearable that some would rather stay in perpetual mourning by recreating our parents, partners, etc.?
The writer is a journalism instructor.
X: LedeingLady
Published in Dawn, September 29th, 2024