On June 18th, AI Image-Generation Company Midjourney released a tool that allows users to create short video clips using their own images as templates. A few days later, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian posted to X about how he uses technology to animate a photo of his late mother.
In the artificial video, she laughs, smiles before shaking her arms. “Damn, I wasn't prepared for how this would feel,” he wrote. “This is how she held me. I've rewatched it 50 times.”
A post from Ohanian, which has been seen almost 30 million times, rekindled long-standing debate on how technology mediates grief and memory, whether it is magic or dystopia. Time spoke with experts on sadness and memory to understand how this latest advancement in the “digital resurrection” is changing the relationship with the dead.
Fake memories
Human memories are always incorrect. Normally we remember the key points of the event, but the details are forgotten or distorted. Memory is not “a personal library of everything that has happened to you,” says Julia Shaw, a criminal psychologist specializing in false memories. “It was meant to help you survive.” The show feels positive about using AI to revive people, but she says the technology poses a risk of contaminating and overwriting our memories. “AI is the perfect fake memory machine,” she says.
Of course, people can distort their memories without technical assistance. “My grandfather would always scream at my grandmother, but after he passed away he was the most amazing man in the world,” recalls Elizabeth Loftus, a professor of psychology and law and a pioneer in memory research. And it's established that tools like Photoshop and doctor videos influence people remember about the past.
However, AI changes the ease and degree of change in content. A recent study conducted by Loftus at MIT Media Lab found that exposure even to a single Ai edited visual vision exposes the memories of the original people. Participants “reported a high level of confidence in false memories,” demonstrating that younger people were particularly susceptible to being affected.
Researchers also found that the technology can have beneficial uses, such as reconstructing traumatic memories and increasing self-esteem, but can create false memories in high-stakes contexts such as courtrooms and use technology to spread false information.
Sadness, interrupted
One possible harm can be complicating the grieving process of the deceased's involvement with digital simulation. Mary France O'Connor, neuroscientist and author A sad body, I explain that sadness is a process of learning to harmonize the reality of a person's death with the senses. She points out that for many people, the deaths continue to live among us, as long as people report experiencing their existence. “Many families explain how they see holes no one else sees each time they enter a room.”
O'Connor says, “Every culture uses every skill we can to connect with the loved ones of the deceased in all periods of history.” For example, when cameras were invented, people began to maintain photos of the deceased at home. In 2020, Korean documentarians used virtual reality to create a structured experience for mothers to reunite with their daughters. This experience helped mothers handle the death of their daughter, but they had concerns from the Western media.
Perhaps the key question is whether AI will help us connect with our deceased loved ones or help to reinforce the idea that they are eternal. Given the unprecedented nature of the present moment, it may be too early to convey.
“We are in a very novel situation. The dead have not been this chatter before,” says cyberpsychologist and author Elaine Caskett. All the ghosts of the machine. Between remaining traces online and the ability to digitize old text, photos and other records, you'll have access to more “digital ruins” than ever before. Kasket believes, for example, you can have access to sufficient material from friends. For example, you can talk to a machine “functionally indistinguishable” from your human counterparts. She wonders because human memories are already hallucinatory and reconstructive: “Is fiction from machines more unhealthy than fiction from within our own head?” It depends on which function it provides.
Dead Intelligence
With frontier AI companies investing billions of dollars to create “agents,” AI systems could be in an increasingly compelling position for the dead. For example, it's not difficult to imagine that you could quickly lead your grandparent simulations to video. “I think it's going to be a beautiful future,” Shaw says, but emphasizes the need to prevent AI from being weaponized against that person. “It feels like an atheist version of being able to talk to ghosts,” she says.
In addition to the question of whether this is good or bad, whether it really is different from what came before, it's also the question of who will benefit. O'Connor says he has long benefited from the bereaved families, from the media and seans of the Catholic Church, where the priests only prayed for the souls of the deceased at a fee.
Just as some people find value after texting or posting on someone's social media feed, there may be real therapeutic and emotional value to be able to reconnect with their lost loved ones and potentially achieve closure. “If people want to do this in their private world, what does it do harm because it makes them feel happy?” Loftus says.
For O'Connor, a cause of concern arises when someone is involved with the deceased to eliminate other important aspects of their lives, or when they become secret about their actions. But overall, she emphasizes the incredible resilience of humans.
Kasket sees the risk that relying on digital reincarnation can make us vulnerable. If all the “difficulties and confusion” related to relationships can be ousted, we can remain vulnerable to unexpected challenges in life. At the point when we “pathologize and problematize the natural achievements and nonpersistence of carbon-based life forms, such as ourselves, we need to think about what we are really doing here,” she says.
