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Chapter 1: 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,
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Chapter 2: 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. So there is this question of is everything really worth preserving? So this is why actually we see some interventions in this space.
For instance, the Google inactive account manager feature that essentially deletes your account after a number of months. So that's one side of the coin, but there's the other, which is how do we
make sure that there is equitable access to this new form of memorialization, to make sure that the stories of our populations are preserved in a fair way, so that we don't end up with only the stories of those who can afford these services to linger. the best use cases for this technology? You know, I'm imagining I have a seven year old.
I'm imagining a classroom where they bring Benjamin Franklin in and the kids are able to talk to him. And that's kind of neat. I hear you on all the concerns about he didn't give consent to that when he was alive. But, you know, could there be interesting use cases here?
Well, first of all, I think it's very important to stress that we're not saying that people should not be experimenting with these technologies. And this is because we, I mean, at least I believe that we should have the right to shape our own legacy.
So there are different ways in which you could see this being potentially useful, including if you're an older adult who is essentially starting to think more and more about what will happen after you pass away. and to preserve some of your memories for your loved ones, especially for younger generations, could be beautiful.
There could be this intergenerational family bonding experience that is inscribed into these services if they're designed ethically. And then when we think of societal scale, there already are projects that experiment with preserving testimonies of survivors of different atrocities. So Holocaust survivors, there are fewer and fewer of them that are still alive.
And some of them are willing to allow specific projects to actually preserve their own testimonies, their own memories, their histories in this new format because they believe that that there is something very powerful in this interactive directness of what these services offer. How do you expect this industry to develop?
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