Meta's AI Patent Keeps You Posting After Death
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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.
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. Do you think Meta is just trying to like squat on the tech before anyone else gets to it because they have the data set to train these models?
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.
Now, the company, like you say, says they have no plans to move forward. But in big tech language, is that corporate reassurance?
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.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:18
2
What is the AI technology that Meta patented for posthumous posting?
0:18–3:56
3
How does Sydney Bradley feel about the implications of this technology?
3:56–7:43
4
What will the AI do to mimic a deceased person's social media presence?
7:43–9:23
Speakers
2 identifiedMore from The Last Show with David Cooper
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