The ethics of using AI to immortalize the dead
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What is the emerging industry of AI simulations for deceased loved ones?
The ethics of raising the dead digitally. From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
There's an emerging industry that uses artificial intelligence to create simulations of people who've died. These post-mortem avatars are also called grief bots. Some people say this practice raises a number of ethical issues, including Tomasz Holonek, a researcher at the University of Cambridge. I had him walk me through the mechanics of how this technology works. There are services that allow us to preserve ourselves for future generations. So this first type of service really is centered around your decisions regarding what it is that you think should be fed into a system, what it is that you think represents you. And there are services that allow people to simulate their deceased loved ones, for instance.
Usually it involves uploading different types of data that we all leave behind. Could be WhatsApp messages that you send to someone, emails, could be videos that, again, are then meant to be compiled in a way, processed and productive of a particular representation of you. What's your sense of how popular this is as a service? It's really hard to say. Well, what we can definitely say is that there are more and more companies offering these types of services. It's very hard to speak about numbers in part because while I've told you about these dedicated services, so we know that there are people who are willing to pay to either preserve themselves or resurrect, again, quote, unquote, their loved ones.
But we know that there are ways of instructing other services, including ChatGPT, to essentially facilitate for us sort of like a conversation with someone that is no longer there. And so we know that there is a lot of interest. We know that the number of companies that are interested in developing this type of service is growing, but it's very hard to speak about specific numbers of users. Tell me about the ethical concerns you have about this technology. We could think about a person's post-mortem dignity, for instance, if their representation is used to sell products without their consent, or their post-mortem privacy, when these services are fed with the kind of data that the person themselves might not be comfortable with sharing with a technology company.
We could also then, of course, related to this letter point, talking about a person's consent, which is quite central and can be very easily violated. And there are no laws that really meaningfully protect our consent for this time after we die. Then when it comes to service interactants and data recipients, so in other words, those who stay behind, the biggest concern that is raised not only by us at Cambridge but by multiple other researchers and ethicists is the potential psychological impact of these services on especially vulnerable groups. We could be thinking here, about one child might feel very comfortable, indeed might want to interact with their deceased parent's image in this new way, while the other child might feel very awkward about it, might find it traumatizing in some ways.
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How does the technology behind griefbots work?
Built for you. You're listening to Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes. We're back with Tomasz Holonek, researcher at the University of Cambridge. What happens to us as a society when people and ideas linger? Absolutely. I mean, when you really think about the scale of what this could mean for future generations, you realize that you might be burdening these future generations with more and more data, more and more information to uphold.
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