Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

[Pluvious]

This type of service is a concept used in some SciFi I have read - it's so shocking how fast we are
out-pacing our creative future-thinkers...

Personally, this is not something I could ever imagine doing myself, but I'm not a qualified psychologist;
I have seen some stories about "comfort robo-doggies" being therapeutically helpful for some elderly people...

People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away

There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

...

Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it’s not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence’s other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, “Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that’s still a huge market.”

AI resurrection
Avatars of the dead are essentially deepfakes: the technologies used to replicate a living person and a dead person aren’t inherently different. Diffusion models generate a realistic avatar that can move and speak. Large language models can be attached to generate conversations. The more data these models ingest about someone’s life—including photos, videos, audio recordings, and texts—the more closely the result will mimic that person, whether dead or alive.

...

Jonathan Yang, a Nanjing resident who works in the tech industry, paid for this service in September 2023. His uncle died in a construction accident, but the family hesitated to tell Yang’s grandmother, who is 93 and in poor health. They worried that she wouldn’t survive the devastating news.

https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/05/07/1092116/deepfakes-dead-chinese-business-grief/?

[cayugafalls]

1. this has been predicted in sci-fi for many decades.

A lot of it predicted back in the 80's by William Gibson and others.

Makes sense for some people...others not so much.

[Renew Deal]

2. The real move is consciousness cloning of the living.

People living on hard drives, getting to partake in the artifacts of life like news, sports, etc. Create virtual avatars to live on with other consciousnesses.

[getagrip_already]

3. Thinking the jarred heads of presidents on futurama...

What would Nixon do?

Lol

?feature=shared

[Irish_Dem]

4. My thoughts:

Retired mental health professional here.

We don't yet know if this is going to be a good or bad way to deal with grief.
It is new and we have no research or clinical experience with it.

I would have to evaluate it on a case by case basis at this point.

What we would look for is how it impacts a person's mood, behavior, relationships, work, etc.

Some examples:

First example: 80 year old man, his wife died 6 weeks ago and she was cremated. The man is carrying around the urn with her ashes everywhere he goes. Family insists he be evaluated, it is upsetting the family.

Despite this unusual coping mechanism the man is doing fairly well. He is grieving and sad within normal limits and is to be expected.

Eating and sleeping well. Still doing his volunteer work, attending social and church activities, interacting with family and friends.

So we have an idiosyncratic coping mechanism that is doing no harm. And the man is in the early stages of grieving. I would predict he will decrease the urn carrying over time.

The biggest problem is that it is upsetting the family, so patient is advised to be aware of that. Don't scare the grandchildren, etc.

Second example: family brings in grandpa who lost wife two months ago and visits the grave every day. On the surface doesn't sound too bad. But the man is spending 6 hours a day at the gravesite. Is not eating or sleeping well. No longer attends social or family events. So we have a problem which needs to be dealt with.