Death is a certainty, it comes for all of us and everyone we know. Its finality is complete and terrible unless that is you use AI to transform the period-like end into a comma.
According to a new report from NPR, there is at least one Chinese company, Silicon Intelligence, that’s building life-like digital avatars of deceased relatives that can converse and engage with you in a sort of FaceTime from beyond.
Yes, it’s as creepy as it sounds, but based on this and other reports, the concept is growing in popularity.
The quality of such a deceased clone is, as much of AI often is, dependent on data. The system needs photos and videos of the deceased, as well as voice clips. In some cases, the systems rely on social media data to help inform the “deadbot’s” personality.” This part struck me as comical because no one is their authentic selves on social media, and it’s unlikely that a deadbot based on “grandma’s” Instagram posts would be anything like your real “maw-maw.”
Some of these deadbots can be connected to the internet so they understand current events and then converse with you about them:
Deadbot Grandma: “So Joe dropped out…wow”
Grandson: “Yes, Grandma. He was getting too old.”
Deadbot Grandma: “But he’s still alive, which is more than I can say for myself.”
Grandson: “…*…”
If you look at the five stages of grief, “denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance,” the last one is probably the most important. It means you’re letting go, accepting the finality. You can move on. That doesn’t mean you won’t miss that person, maybe every single day of your life, but you can also function without them and have long stretches where you’re not thinking about them. At least that’s the hope.
Rise of the deadbots
With these digital avatars or deadbots, you never move on. I’ve lost people and usually, in the early going, I think about telling them something until I remember they’re gone. If I had a deadbot of my grandmother, that thought would be followed by action. I’d open the iPad and launch a call from the great beyond or at least from Silicon Intelligence servers somewhere in China, and we’d have a nice and probably pretty weird chat.
In the NPR report, one Silicon Intelligence exec, Sun Kai, who regularly talks to the deadbot version of his late mother, describes the technology as almost transcending death: “Whether she is alive or dead does not matter, because when I think of her, I can find her and talk to her. In a sense, she is alive. At least in my perception, she is alive.”
Of course, Kai’s mother is not alive, but maybe he’s right. As more and more of us converse with AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Copilot, and Google Gemini, the difference between human and digital conversation blurs. Some believe we’ve already solved the Turing test, which basically says that someone observing a conversation between a human and a machine might no longer be able to tell which is which.
It’s not clear that any of the best AI chatbots have actually reached this threshold, and talking to a digital recreation of a dead person probably doesn’t meet that standard, either. However, I don’t think that matters. People anthropomorphize hardware and software all the time (think about how you talk to Alexa or Siri). For some reason, humans are actually quite comfortable talking to inanimate objects and digital personas and, sometimes, developing relationships with them.
If the use of deadbots becomes widespread and they do start showing up on our tablets and at funeral homes, where we can scan a QR-Code to bring up the digital likeness of Uncle Al and start chatting, I think people may embrace them – even if they can’t still embrace their long-dead relatives.
A corpse made of data
The major sticking point here, though, is data. All these systems require significant amounts of potentially private data to build these deadbot personas. In our current political and new cold war climate, the Chinese-based Silicon Intelligence has essentially zero chance of establishing a foothold in the US. Not that this will stop other companies from launching similar services.
Just this week, Meta launched new AI tools in Meta AI on Instagram that let you feed images of your face into the system and then apply them to fantastical images. There’s not much distance from that to holding those images and possibly video in an archive that combines with all the other data you shared on Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp to build deadbots for grieving families, ones that can live on Facebook and in Messenger. I do not doubt that we will soon see dead-relative Facebook Messenger bots.
“To die will be an awfully big adventure,” said Peter Pan in JM Barrie’s eponymous adventure. Depending on what you believe, death is an adventure for the dead and those left behind. One is full of certainty. What happens beyond death is anyone’s guess, but our perception of it is unchanging: a person is here, and now they’re not. The adventure for the living, though, is varied right through those five stages of grief. But now, with this potential sixth stage (digital resurrection), the adventure continues, though I don’t know that it’s a journey any of us should take.