jOakin Oliver was 17 when he was shot in the hallway of high school. An older teenager who was exiled a few months ago fired with a powerful rifle on Valentine's Day, which became America's most deadly high school shooting. Seven years later, Joaquin says he thinks it's important to talk about what happened that day in Parkland, Florida.
But sadly, what happened to Joaquin that day was that he had passed away. The strange metallic voice that spoke to former CNN journalist Jim Acosta in this week's interview with Substack was actually a digital ghost voice. AI is trained on old social media posts for teenagers and trained at the request of their parents. Like many families, they told the children's stories over and over again, heartbreakingly of little use. It's no wonder they're trying so hard to pull with every possible lever right now.
But they also allowed his father, Manuel, to simply hear his son's voice again. His wife, Patricia, spends hours asking AI questions and hears her say, “I love you, mom.”
Their righteous parents will not judge the family. If it's comfortable to maintain a lost child's bedroom as a shrine, talk to the gravestone and sleep in a t-shirt that still smells faintly. It's not someone else's business. People hold what they can. After 9/11, the family listened until the tape was physically exhausted, answered phone messages left by their loved ones, and called the house to say goodbye from the tower and the hijacked plane. I have a friend who regularly rereads old WhatsApp interactions with my younger sister who is still deceased. I also have another friend texting a snippet of family news to the figures of his late father. Some people are paying psychics to the commune with the dead, vaguely purely suspicious. But that's precisely because it's very difficult to let go of sadness being vulnerable to exploitation. And there may be a big business in quickly recovering the deaths digitally.
Similar to the video rod stewart generated by Mawkish AI This week, performed on stage, with the late Ozzy Osbourne greeting various dead musical legends. Or maybe for temporary purposes, such as addressing a judge in a gunman's ruling, such as an AI avatar recently created by the families of Arizona shooting victims. But in time, it may be more profoundly challenging for the idea of self and mortality. Perhaps what if it was possible to create a permanent AI replica of a dead person in the form of a robot and continue a conversation with them forever?
The resurrection is a divine power, not to underestimate it to the high-tech comrades of the Messiah complex. However, while the legal rights of living to not steal their identity for use in AI deepfakes are more established, the rights of the dead are confused.
Although DNA is protected after death, our reputation with us will not die with us – (The birth of Dolly in 1996 was a gene clone copied from a single cell, causing a global ban on human cloning.) The law governs what respects human organizations, but not the body where AI is trained. Personally, when my father passed away, I didn't feel he was really in the co. He could clearly find it in his old letters, in the gardens he planted, in the box of recordings of his voice. But everyone is a different grief. What if half of the family wants to revive moms digitally, and the other half don't want to live with ghosts?
What Joaquin Oliver Ai can't grow up – he's 17 years old, trapped in the teenage social media persona Amber, but ultimately it's his murderer, not his family. Manuel Oliver says he knows well enough that the Avatar is not really his son and is not trying to bring him back. For him, it seems like a more natural extension of the way the family campaign is already evoking the story of Joaquin's life. However, there are times when you are worried about plans to provide AI access to your social media accounts, upload videos, and gain followers. What if it starts hallucinating, or if you're heading towards a topic that you don't know what the real Joaquin thinks?
For now, there is obvious glitchness about AI avatars, but as technology improves, it can become more and more difficult to distinguish it from real people online. Perhaps it's not long before even businesses and government agencies are already using chatbots to address customer inquiries, but they're wondering whether they can deploy PR avatars to answer journalist questions. By agreeing to interview someone technically nonexistent, Acosta would have definitely known better than muddy the already dirty waters of the after-truth world. But perhaps the most obvious risk for now is that they are conspiracy theorists who cite this interview as “evidence” that a story that challenges their beliefs could be a hoax.
However, journalists aren't the only professional challenges involved here. As AI evolves, we will all live with synthetic versions of ourselves. It's not just the relatively primitive Alexa in the kitchen or the chatbots on laptops, but there are stories of people who fall in love with anthropomorphized AI and chatGpt, but they're more detailedly adapted to human emotions. One in ten adults in the UK tell the researcher that they don't have close friends, and of course there is a fellow AI market for getting a cat or scrolling through strangers' lives in Tiktok.
Perhaps as a society, we ultimately decide that we are satisfied with technology that meets people's needs when other people are sadly not. However, there is a huge difference between reminding people of the common comfort for those who are lonely and waking up in order to those who have lost their loved one at once. According to poems often read at funerals, there are times when they are born and times when they die. When we are no longer sure which is which, how does it change us as a seed?
