Sydney Bradley

Thanks so much for having me.

I immediately could not wait to die until and so I could continue posting forever.

No, it was incredibly interesting to see in the patent log on the database something about death.

And immediately I was diving into the patent and trying to understand exactly what Meta is trying to build here.

Yeah, so it'll be a sort of modified version of the account that you once had.

They'll use LLM technology to train a model based on your historical activity on your social media accounts.

So any comments, likes, the way that you interact with posts, and even potentially training on DMs sent between you and other people, it can then...

learn what you might say and keep that going after you die.

But also in the patent, it talks about if someone's taking a long break from social media, which is also a really interesting use case, especially if you're an influencer and you need to take a break or maybe take PTO and you want to still keep all the engagement happening on your account.

Meta is not the first big tech company to file a patent and get it approved for some sort of postmortem technology.

Microsoft in 2021 also had a patent around being able to make simulations of real people, whether they're living or even fictional characters.

And

Are they swashing the tech?

It doesn't seem like they have it as their intention right now, especially since Meadow is adamant that they have no plans to pursue this technology.

And there's also a lot of growing technology around technology.

death and how to actually build better grief tech.

I don't think Meta would be the go-to product everyone would seek for handling the loss of loved ones, but it also wouldn't be the first time that Meta's entered into this grief category.

Facebook years ago launched legacy contacts for their Facebook profile feeds, and you could put someone down as your legacy contact if you were to pass away.

I mean, that's the thing is they do have the patent and it's now been granted.

It was filed in 2023.