Lumen Wirltuti:Warltati 2025 - Flipbook - Page 22
Essay
The future
of death
Now, a veritable congregation of chatbots is available to users
to communicate with a digital recreation, including StoryFile,
HereafterAI, You, Only Virtual, Forever Identity, and SeanceAI.
In 2022, Amazon demonstrated a scenario that included its Alexa
smart home device reading a story to a child in the voice of his
deceased grandmother.
Is death still the end? Or does
advancing technology provide us,
already, with ways to live on?
Futurist Scott Smith – a visiting
research fellow with MOD. for the
creation of its FOREVER exhibition
– examines a new possible artificial
intelligence afterlife and questions
its implications.
Even generative AI tools like ChatGPT can be transformed into
a personalised griefbot if trained with sufficient text from the
deceased to provide tone of voice and word choice. This has
enabled technically savvy individuals to create chatbot personas
of loved ones. As this class of technology is increasingly integrated
into everyday technology like office software and smartphone
apps, building such chatbots is becoming more accessible to a
non-technical public.
Not surprisingly, the new frontier of death tech, particularly the
digital re-construction of real individuals post-death as a way to
maintain a semblance of contact, or use of imaginary figures
intended to help with emotional trauma or grief, has not been
without complication and controversy. Poor quality recreations,
unexpected service shutdowns that delete digital loved ones,
unauthorised depictions or reproductions, or bots that amplify
undesirable aspects of personas drawn from life are among the
actual challenges that have been reported in recent years.
Throughout history, humans have sought to communicate with the
dead across cultures, from spirit-raising rituals to Victorian séances
and Edison’s spirit phone.
Today, as with nearly everything else, AI seeks to continue this
tradition. There’s growing interest in using AI to create chatbots
or virtual avatars that mimic the deceased, enabling “naturalistic”
interactions with digital models of the departed.
This is leading to the development of additional services that
offer to protect an individual’s likeness, anticipatory copyright
of likeness as a way to lock out competitors in the case of some
celebrities, and, of course, attempts to extend image rights after
death. In the future, memories of some people may be more
valuable by orders of magnitude than their live presence could be.
Applications like Replika, launched in 2017, allow users to create
or recreate avatars trained on datasets to respond as desired, such
as a friend or romantic partner. A segment of these adapted
general chatbots has more recently become focused on specific
replication of the deceased, giving us an array of terms, including
“deathbot”, coined by Patrick Stokes in his 2021 book Digital
Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death, and “griefbot”.
The frontier is moving quickly. Applications of this approach are
also being used controversially as a form of activism. In early 2024,
parents of children killed in several high-profile school shootings in
the US collaborated with voice Al company ElevenLabs to recreate
the voices of their lost loved ones in automated phone calls to
Congress members in their campaign for stricter gun controls in
that country. Each uses samples built from recordings of children,
delivering posthumous messages to legislators about how they died.
While this approach will undoubtedly stir heated debate, it will
also likely drive demand for voice clones of the dead more broadly.
Ethics in an AI afterlife
Some of us take for granted that fragments of our actual as well
as digital lives will remain visible online for an indeterminate time.
This includes everything from photos reposted across various
social media to articles, profiles, comments, podcasts, tweets,
WhatsApps, doorbell videos, or chat messages, to images of now
passed loved ones captured, and found, on Google StreetView.
22
