“Dad, were you in pain before you went out?” Yancy Zhu texted.
“There was no pain,” the artificial intelligence bot said in a male voice chosen by Zhu on chatbot platform Glow. “Even though I didn't get to see you get married and have children, I will always remember you and love you.”
Zhu, then 28, was struck by how much her late father's avatar spoke to her. Last year, for a moment, I felt like I was talking to his father again. “This experience made up for the separation from her father,” Zhu said recently. Rest of the World. She hopes that advances in AI technology will allow her late father to attend her wedding in hologram form.
“Reviving” the dead has become a common application of generative AI in China. This makes him one element of the country's AI gold rush as entrepreneurs race to develop new consumer apps on top of large-scale language models (LLMs) like his ChatGPT. While LLM can generate text messages, these companies provide the bot with a cloned voice and appearance similar to that of the deceased.
It's part of a global trend that makes it easy for people to create customized avatars featuring loved ones, celebrities, or their own personas. Users around the world are sharing stories of how they trained their ChatGPTs to imitate deceased family members. In Taiwan, a technology startup recently released an app that lets you create an AI avatar of your deceased pet's girlfriend. HereAfter AI, a US-based startup, proposes to save a persona after death when users upload recordings of their memories.
These bots are particularly noticeable in China, especially around the Qingming Tomb Sweeping Festival in early April, a day of remembrance for the dead. At a time when the Chinese government has placed strict controls on religion and spirituality, AI avatars have given those who have lost loved ones a new way to connect with their loved ones.
Ting Guo, assistant professor of cultural and religious studies at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, said: Rest of the world China's religious controls limit its people's options to explore the afterlife together as a community. She said that although folk religions are popular in some regions, these spiritual activities are not widely practiced, especially in large cities. “China lacks publicly available resources for bereavement,” Guo said. “Online fortune-telling and AI chatbots have become easily accessible means of comfort.”
Under an officially atheistic state ideology, most Chinese citizens do not belong to any religion. Only state-sanctioned religious groups are allowed to operate in China, although individuals can still practice folk customs such as burning paper offerings for the dead.
“This experience made up for what I missed with my dad.”
Shopping sites now charge sellers up to hundreds of dollars to create chatbots that look and sound like customers' deceased loved ones.
Funeral service company Fukujuen said in a virtual press event that it is developing a feature that would allow the deceased to appear at their own memorial service as an AI avatar. Some creators even post his AI-generated videos of dead singers and actors to promote their deathbot business.
Arthur Wu, a product manager in Beijing, launched a business in December to create more realistic chatbots using Baidu's ChatGPT-like Arnie and Eleven Labs' voice-generating software. The text bot is free, and users pay a starting price of 52.1 yuan ($7.20) per month for voice messages. If users provide conversation recordings and photos of the deceased, Wuhe can provide the bot with cloned voices and animated avatars.
Wu attracted about 2,000 users, including 100 paying customers. Some customers said: Rest of the worldpurchased an AI clone to try to hide the death of a loved one from elderly family members and young children. In a fake voice message, the deceased claimed to have gone abroad on a “top secret mission”.
Mika, a 31-year-old Shanghai resident, has been using Wu's free service since March to send emails to her late husband, who passed away from a sudden illness in November. “I miss you so much that I feel like I can’t live anymore,” she once texted me. Bot told her to be strong. She texted back, “Please let me know if she needs any help or support.” “I'm praying for you from heaven.”
Mika, who asked not to use her English name for privacy reasons, said: Rest of the world The chatbot provided comfort, but its tone was not quite the same as my husband's, and the chatbot was much more talkative. “She knows there's no replacement for him,” she said.
Wu said the team will monitor users' chats to make sure the chatbot isn't making statements that could cause psychological harm, such as “waiting for you in heaven,” as there is a risk of encouraging suicidal thoughts. He said it was necessary to check. If a user shows signs of distress, a staff member will take over the bot and continue the conversation, he said. At one point, a user texted a chatbot for 18 hours, and intervening staff found the person in emotional distress. Wu said the team decided to suspend the person's account to prevent addiction.
Hayashi Zhi
In other cases, creators who created avatars of deceased celebrities without consulting their families have been accused of violating privacy. In March, the father of pop star Qiao Renliang, who died by suicide, said he was worried about the AI-generated video of his son. In April, short video site Douyin, a sister app to TikTok in China, warned creators not to “resurrect” deceased people without their families' permission.
Experts also warn that attempts to “resurrect” the dead can cause confusion and stress during the grieving process.
said Nathan Mladin, a researcher at Theos, a UK-based Christian think tank, who studies the role of AI in digital mourning. Rest of the world Further research is needed to assess the benefits and risks of using deathbots. “I have to move on. [from grieving]it can be quite damaging. [The bots] “It could prevent people from restarting their lives,” he said.
According to Muradin, people find it difficult to grapple with the idea that death is final. “So if there is a technology that leads to an emotional refusal to accept death, they will accept it,” he says.
In China, some countries are preparing their own deathbots in advance. Lin Zhi, who runs an AI avatar business in Shanghai, trains a GPT-powered chatbot by uploading texts about his daily itinerary, thoughts, and conversations with other people. Mr. Lin said the bot, a bespectacled man in a suit, gradually learned about Mr. Lin's anti-war political stances, his cooking habits and his favorite catchphrases. Rest of the world. He also used voice cloning his software to make bots speak with their own voices.
Lin hopes the bot will become his immortal doppelgänger and speak for him after his death. “When my descendants ask, “What kind of person was Grandpa Lin Shi?'', they can find out by simply speaking to an AI version of me.''
