Abstract: If you could use AI to “resurrect” your dead loved ones, would you be willing?
On Tomb-sweeping Day, few people will specially think about this question: why do we repair the graves of the dead and then visit them at a fixed time every year? When the color of farming culture faded, the sacrificial activities of Qingming Festival were more about mourning and missing their relatives, hoping that they would live in the hearts of the living forever.
This year, Tomb-sweeping Day in China falls on the same day as Easter in the West. But this is often a false proposition, one’s life is bound to face death.
But the rapid development of technology has opened up a new possibility: we can now use AI to keep our dead loved ones alive and “bring them back”.
The mother who lost her only child, the elderly writer, they all choose AI “resurrection”
Li Yang, a mother who lost her only child, couldn’t get over her daughter’s death for a long time. She wondered if she could use technology to keep her by her side. So Li Yang synthesized his daughter’s past audio into an AI voice assistant. The virtual AI restored her voice and way of thinking. Li Yang could say hello to her every morning when he woke up, and chat with her about family affairs when he missed her.
Eugenia, a Belarusian girl whose boyfriend died unexpectedly in a car crash, reread all the text messages they had sent in the seven years they had known each other and used the chat data to create her own AI boyfriend.
James Vlahos recorded his father’s conversations with a video camera during the last three months of his father’s life. He eventually recorded 91,970 words and trained his ai-trained dialogue robot, Dadbot. Whenever he missed his father, he would talk to Dadbot, who consoled him with his father’s similar pronunciation and speech habits.
It’s a way for AI to bring loved ones back to life: it collects a lot of personal data, mapping out their pronunciation habits, how they speak, how they use words, and so on. The second is data training, which will “feed” the collected daily personal data to the AI, and learn their “words and deeds” by constantly adjusting the data model, turning the deceased into “digital people”, retaining their voices and seeming to talk with each other.
Once, there was a foreign project called Eternime whose slogan was “Who Wantsto Live Forever? “, trying to build an AI based on the user’s personality, through a large amount of data training, to simulate the user’s personality, so as to replace the user after their death to interact with family and friends. “Our ultimate goal is to preserve the thoughts, stories and memories of an entire generation and to create a human memory bank in which you can ask people from the past about their personal and collective experiences and thoughts,” the authors write in the project’s introduction document. Eternime’s concept of digital immortality has attracted more than 3,000 volunteers in just two days.
When we discuss the serious subject of life and death, we are both secretive and have a hidden emotion that we wish there really was a way to do it. As a result, the endless revival of AI and the emergence of digital immortality projects, technology has quietly opened Pandora’s box.
AI “comes back” and gets better and better
“Do you give AI the memory of a loved one when he or she dies?” Instead of handing over your lover’s memory to AI, would you rather let your lover become “immortal” through AI, allowing him to accompany you forever? Yes or no, everyone has their own considerations. But iterations of technology will allow AI to “resurrect” loved ones even more perfectly in the coming decades.
In the pre-Internet era, it was difficult to master a large amount of digital information. However, in the Internet world full of big data, it is easy for a person to obtain digital information. The text and voice chat between you and your relatives and friends, the selfies and videos you post on various platforms may become the foundation of digital immortality. Among them, clear recording is a necessary material for personalized speech synthesis technology (TTS), and a large amount of structured text information is the best data modeling material for deep learning, natural language processing and other technologies.
Nature recently reported on a paper describing the performance of AI debater ProjectDebater in a wide range of debates. The author argues that although AI has lost out to human debaters, it has demonstrated excellent ability to construct arguments and make decisions, and AI is already capable of engaging in complex human activities.
At the same time, anthropomorphic language synthesis technology is giving AI emotional, sad, joy, fear language style. More about the latest progress of dialogue robot, can also read the article “the Turing test, 70 years, review the classic dialogue robot | practices and the latest progress in huawei cloud dialogue robots, for example, bbs.huaweicloud.com/blogs/19822…
Of course, the ideal digital eternal life also needs to restore the real human beings through motion capture, 3D modeling, speech synthesis and other technologies, and complete digital presentation and interaction with VR/AR. For example, a foreign start-up company is developing a 4D face capture solution. Combined with DI4D PRO, it can provide high-fidelity real-time face animation on a large scale through head-mounted HIGH-DEFINITION camera and new machine learning technology.
They know everything that’s going on between you, have the same personality, and the same voice as your loved one. He/she understands your emotions, gives you a familiar hug when you are sad, and is always by your side. But he didn’t eat, he didn’t sleep, he wore a cold machine casing…
The unbearable weight of technological “resurrection”
Technological utopia is beautiful, it can preserve our precious and unique memories, just like Eternime’s idea to build a memory bank of human civilization; It can soothe the pain of losing a loved one, but not everyone is willing to accept it. Someone asked: “Did AI make humans immortal?” or “Did AI, a new species, have human memories?” “After copying a person, is it two copies of one person or two people?”
Some people are worried about what to do if there is digital blackmail. Hackers say if you don’t pay, I will delete your father’s data and let him “die” again. Others fear that if I can’t afford to subscribe to an AI robot one day and lose a loved one again, that would be cruel.
These seemingly absurd doubts and concerns are all reflections on the ethical and moral controversies brought about by the application of technology. If we cross over the singularity of technology, how on earth should we face the relatives “resurrected” by AI?
A lot of science fiction suggests that technology is “icing on the cake” and that humans cannot rely on it for true emotional relief. What we need to think about the value of death to our lives may be the ultimate heart medicine.
One way is to learn to reconcile with yourself and understand what it means for you to have loved ones gone. Taiwan artist Tseng Po-yi once revealed her true feelings: “My grandfather’s passing was a huge gift to me. It helped me stop and take time to look at my life and sort it out. It was sad, of course, but I didn’t know how valuable it was until I realized it.”
Zhihu once mentioned that there is a concept in psychology called “gestalt therapy”, which can be understood as gestalt in cloze filling. The death of a loved one creates a void in our lives, the disappearance of someone who was essential to our lives. We who are alive are bound to be sad. How to fill the void in your heart? Build on the facts, continue and reconstruct the story, and reassign meaning to the event.
Such as passing on his kindness, recording his knowledge and teaching it to more people… You are always connected to each other, even to the world.
Technology is great. It is also great to be able to face death. The meaning of life is embodied through death. Thinking carefully about this question, at the intersection of tomb-sweeping day and Easter, may make us look at technology more rationally.
Let us leave technology to technology, emotion to emotion, ethics to ethics. I can preserve the unique souls of human beings, and the world has never forgotten me. Maybe this is a more gentle way of recording human civilization endowed by science and technology.
What comes to mind as you read this article right now? What do you think about the future of artificial intelligence? Do you have your own considerations for the form of “virtual immortality”? Click to enter the comments at the end of the article, we look forward to the exchange of views collision, look forward to the enlightenment of views. Xiaobian will select three wonderful comments, send the AI science fiction book “Life 3.0”.
Some cases are cited in this paper
1. A mother who lost her only child decided to make her daughter AI mp.weixin.qq.com/s/gY_KetYop…
2. Would you like to use AI to “resurrect” your dead loved ones? Finance.sina.com.cn/tech/2021-0…
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