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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
For those who know that questioning everything includes questioning this show's existence. The Last Show with David Cooper. Facebook for the living, and maybe soon, death book for the dead.
Chapter 2: What is the AI technology that Meta patented for posthumous posting?
Meta, Facebook's parent company, just patented AI tech that could keep you posting after you've expired. That's grim, I know, because it would seem that even the afterlife needs engagement metrics and comment replies. But do not worry, Facebook says they have no plans to move forward with this technology, yet. Anyway, we're here to discuss all of this with someone who's recently written about it.
Her name is Sydney Bradley. She's a media and tech reporter at Business Insider. Sydney, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
This patent, it seems a little ridiculous to me. When you saw it, were you just purely excited about it? You thought, wow, this is innovative? Or were you just like, oh, no, not this?
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.
No offense to you, but diving into a patent sounds incredibly, well, let's use a kind word here. You know what? Boring. But for someone who hasn't read your article, like what's going on here? Is this just like a polite auto reply? I can message a deceased one. They'll message me back quick. Or is it going to be like a full profile that posts and comments and it seems like a living person?
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.
Great. So I can't even be convinced that the people I follow online now are necessarily real. You know, there's this show on Amazon called Upload, and it's about like uploading your dead loved ones to like a VR world. I know this tech in the next 10, 15, 20 years, there's going to be companies that do it.
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Chapter 3: How does Sydney Bradley feel about the implications of this technology?
Should we be comforted by that? Or is that them just saying, not yet, we reserve the right to release this at any time?
I mean, that's the thing is they do have the patent and it's now been granted. It was filed in 2023. So it's been a couple of years of this being in the system. They could pursue this. They could not. Meta also made it clear that just because they have a patent doesn't mean it will be implemented.
But it could be one of those things I can imagine if the moment is right, the ethical debate around grief tech evolves rapidly. Maybe people are way more comfortable with this type of thing right now. It does not feel like we're there yet. So I think they would definitely want to wait some time before releasing this to the masses.
But I do think that taking a break feature would have a much more easy way to implement that with the general public.
Yeah, for someone who's highly active online, maybe it's a part of their income to be able to go on a two week vacation, but still be able to reply to comments and stuff. Here's a novel use. I'm always like, I would not recognize myself from my early 20s. You know, I'm 39 now.
I wonder if I could like use this tech to kind of train on my younger self, everything I posted 15 years ago and have a conversation with a younger me. I wonder if it could be used for something novel like that.
Actually, in the patent, there is some sort of language around technology. having it at a certain different time of when your account existed. So I think that would be potentially a use case, which would be fun if you could have different, it'd be a new take on the Finstub, sure.
Certainly it would. Of course, there are legal and ethical concerns here. I mean, it seems ridiculous to the idea that I'd be dead and a platform could do this without my consent or my estate's consent. What do you think the thorniest issues are here?
Definitely around consent. In the patent, there is explicit language about how meta would get permissions from users. And that would definitely probably be a priority in any big rollout of technology here. But the biggest, thorniest issues are really around consent. we don't really know how to have discussions about digital rights yet for the deceased.
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Chapter 4: What will the AI do to mimic a deceased person's social media presence?
One person I spoke to as well for the story who had started his own company around this technology told me that the grieving process is already bad. Why not make it a little bit better for people? But then at the same time, a sociologist I spoke to said the most important element of grief is the permanence of it all. Will tools like this disrupt that process of grief?
There's so, so many existential questions on this topic that it's an endless rabbit hole of yes, but...
Yeah, I guess there's two camps. For me, it's sort of like this cultural line that we should not cross, but I think there are people. And how do you speak to a grieving person who really wants this and tell them, no, I don't think you can do that, can you?
Yeah, and in ways we've always been talking to the dead. We go to funerals, we go to gravestones, people's Facebook walls, people post every year on their birthdays, even if they do know that they have passed. I think for a technology like this, a really important detail would have a requirement to have the accounts be labeled as gravestones.
some sort of bot that would be it could be deeply traumatic for some people if you didn't know that they were dead but they were continuing to post i remember spitting into a test tube for that company 23andme when it came out only for them to go under and sell their assets to another data company or whatever i wonder maybe you trust the company with the data now but if they go under who's the data being sold to there's all kinds of thorny questions here and i appreciate you tackling them with me and discussing this topic sydney thanks for being on the show yeah thanks for having me
Sydney Bradley is a media and tech reporter at Business Insider.
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