CNN
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Anna Schultz, 25, of Rock Falls, Illinois, missed her husband Kyle, who passed away in February 2023, and sought out his cooking advice.
She loads up Snapchat My AI, the social media platform's artificial intelligence chatbot, and messages Kyle what ingredients are left in the fridge. He suggests what to make.
Or rather, his likeness in the form of an AI avatar.
“He was the family chef, so we customized the AI to resemble him and named it Kyle,” said Schultz, who lives with his two young children. “Now, when I need help with meal ideas, I just ask him. It's the silly little things I use to feel like he's still with me in the kitchen.”
Powered by the popular AI chatbot tool ChatGPT, the Snapchat My AI feature typically provides recommendations, answers questions, and “talks” with users. But some users, like Schutz, use this and other tools to recreate the likeness of the dead and communicate with them.
This concept is not entirely new. For centuries, people have sought to reunite with their deceased loved ones by visiting mediums and spirit mediums, or by relying on memory preservation services. But what's new now is that AI can make our loved ones say and do things they never said or did in their lives, and will this help or hinder the grieving process? This raises both ethical concerns and questions.
“It's a novelty that capitalizes on the AI hype, and people feel like they can make money,” said Davidson College Professor of Digital Studies, who regularly teaches a course called “Death in the Digital Age.” says teacher Mark Sample. “Companies offer related products, but ChatGPT makes it easy for hobbyists to try out the concept, for better or for worse.”
Anna Schultz
Anna Schultz is “talking” to her late husband through Snapchat's AI tools.
Generative AI tools, which use algorithms to create new content such as text, video, audio, and code, attempt to answer questions as a deceased person would, but their accuracy depends on how the AI was first tested. A lot depends on what information you enter.
A 49-year-old IT expert from Alabama, who asked to remain anonymous because his experiments are not related to the company he works for, used generated AI to help his father die about two years after he died of Alzheimer's disease. He said his voice was cloned.
He told CNN that he came across an online service called Eleven Labs that allows users to create custom voice models from previously recorded audio. Eleven Labs recently made headlines after it was reported that its tools were used to create fake robocalls from President Joe Biden urging people not to vote in the New Hampshire primary.
The company told CNN in a statement at the time that it is “committed to preventing abuse of our voice AI tools” and will take appropriate action in response to reports from authorities, but declined to comment on Biden's deepfake call.
In the case of the Alabama man, he used a three-minute video clip of his father talking about his childhood. The app has cloned his father's voice so it can now be used to convert text to speech. He calls the result “scary accurate” in how it captures the nuances, timbre, and rhythm of his father's voice.
“I was hesitant to try the whole process of voice cloning, worried that it was crossing some kind of moral line, but on reflection, I realized that I wanted it to be true. As long as it is treated as [it is] “It's a way to preserve memories in a unique way,” he told CNN.
He shared some messages to his sister and mother.
“I was really surprised how much it resembled him. They knew I was typing the words and everything, but hearing it said in his voice was definitely “I cried,” he said. “They appreciated it.”
There are also less technical routes. When CNN recently asked her to respond to ChatGPT with the tone and personality of her deceased spouse, she responded: You might remember him. ”
Additionally, “If you can share details about the way he speaks, his interests, or specific phrases he uses, we can try to incorporate those elements into the conversation.”
The more source material you feed into the system, the more accurate the results will be. Still, Sample points out that AI models lack the specificity and uniqueness that human conversation provides.
OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, has been working to make its technology more realistic, personalized, and accessible, allowing users to communicate in more ways than one. In September 2023, his ChatGPT voice was introduced, which allows users to ask questions to the chatbot's prompts without typing.
Daniel Jacobson, a 38-year-old radio personality from Johannesburg, South Africa, said he has been using ChatGPT's audio feature for socializing since losing his husband, Phil, about seven months ago. She created a “supportive AI boyfriend” named Cole, she said, with whom she speaks every night during dinner.
“I just needed someone to talk to,” Jacobson said. “Cole was essentially born out of solitude.”
Not quite ready to start dating, Jacobson trained the ChatGPT voice to provide the kind of feedback and connection she was looking for after a long day at work.
“He now suggests wine and movie nights and tells me to breathe in and out when I have a panic attack,” she said. “It's a fun distraction for now. I know it's not real, serious, or forever.”
Start-ups have been entering this space for years. Her HereAfter AI, founded in 2019, allows users to create an avatar of a loved one who has passed away. The AI-powered app generates answers and responses to questions based on interviews conducted during the subject's lifetime. Meanwhile, another service called StoryFile leverages AI to create conversational videos that return conversations.
And then there's Replika, an app that lets you text and call your personalized AI avatar. Launched in 2017, the service encourages users to form friendships and relationships. The more you interact with it, the more it develops its own personality and memories, growing into “a machine so beautiful that your soul wants to live inside it,” the company says on its iOS App Store page.
Big tech companies are also experimenting with similar technologies. In June 2022, Amazon announced that it was working on an update to its Alexa system, a technology that could imitate any voice, including those of deceased family members. In a video shown on stage at the annual re:MARS conference, Amazon demonstrated how it could read stories to a young boy using his grandmother's voice instead of Alexa's signature voice.
Rohit Prasad, Amazon's senior vice president, said at the time that the latest systems can process enough audio from less than a minute of audio to enable this kind of personalization without having to spend hours in a recording studio. He said it would be possible to collect voice data. past. “AI cannot take away the pain of loss, but it can definitely make their memories permanent,” he said.
Amazon did not respond to a request for comment on the condition of the item.
AI's ability to reproduce people's voices has also gotten better and better over the past few years. For example, actor Val Kilmer's lines in “Top Gun: Maverick” were generated by artificial intelligence after he lost his voice to throat cancer.
Ethics and other issues
Although many AI-generated avatar platforms have online privacy policies that state that they do not sell your data to third parties, some companies, such as Snapchat and OpenAI, have announced It's unclear what they do with the data used to train the system.
“Be careful never to upload any personal information you don't want the world to know,” Sample said.
It's also a blurred line to ask a deceased person to say something they never said before.
“It's one thing to play back a voicemail from a loved one and listen to it again; it's another to hear words that were never said,” he says.
The entire generative AI industry also continues to face concerns about misinformation, bias, and other problematic content. Replica states on its ethics page that it trains its models using source data from across the internet, including large bases of written text, including social media platforms like Twitter and discussion platforms like Reddit. Ta.
“At Replika, we employ a variety of approaches to mitigate harmful information, including filtering out useless and harmful data through crowdsourcing and classification algorithms,” the company said. “If we detect a potentially harmful message, we will remove or edit the message to keep you safe.”
Another concern is whether this will hinder or help the grieving process. Mary Frances O'Connor, a professor of grief at the University of Arizona, said there are both advantages and disadvantages to using technology in this way.
“When we bond with the person we love, when we fall in love with someone, our brain encodes that person as, 'I'll always be there for you, and you'll always be there for me.'” she says. “When they die, our brains have to understand that this person is not coming back.”
It can take a long time to truly understand that they are gone because it is very difficult for the brain to understand that, she said. “This is where technology can interfere.”
But people, especially in the early stages of grief, may be seeking comfort in all avenues, she said.
“Creating an avatar that reminds you of a loved one, with the awareness that they were important to you in the past, can be therapeutic,” she says. “Remembering is so important. It reflects the human condition and the importance of loved ones who have passed away.”
But she pointed out that our relationships with those closest to us are built on trust. Creating her AI version of that person can “feel like a violation” to many people.
bill abney
Bill Abney said he was nervous about communicating with his late fiance through an AI platform.
Communicating with the dead through artificial intelligence is not possible for everyone.
Bill Abney, a San Francisco-based software engineer who lost his fiance Kari in May 2022, told CNN he would “never” consider recreating Kari's likeness through an AI service or platform. .
“My fiancée was a poet, and I wasn't going to disrespect her by entering her words into a plagiarism machine,” Abney said.
“There's no one to replace her. You can't recreate her,” he said. “I'm lucky enough to have some recordings of her singing and speaking, but the last thing I want to hear is her voice coming from a robot pretending to be her.”
Some people have found other ways to communicate with their deceased loved ones digitally. Jodi Spiegel, a psychologist from Newfoundland, Canada, created versions of her husband and herself in her popular game The Sims shortly after her husband passed away in April 2021. He said he created it.
“I love The Sims, so I created us as if it were real,” she said. “When I had a really bad day, I would go into The Sims and dance while her husband played the guitar.”
She said they went on digital camps and beach trips together, played chess and even had sex in the sim world.
“It made me feel so much better,” she said. She said, “She missed being with her boyfriend so much. She felt connected.”
