Chinese company offers to create AI avatars of deceased loved ones

Silicon Intelligence, a tech start-up based in Nanjing, China, is offering to create digital clones of people’s loved ones with the help of AI software for as little as 199 yuan ($30 USD).

After payment, customers gain unlimited access to an AI chatbot and moving, talking avatar that resembles their deceased friend or family member. Silicon Intelligence has dubbed this service ‘resurrection’.

The Chinese company says it is determined to usher AI-generated relationships into the mainstream, promoting their use for general companionship or an alternative method of coping with loss.

This business raises a slew of ethical questions, especially those related to simulating a person who can no longer consent to such activity. Psychological implications are being raised too, with some worried that this technology could be ‘addictive’ or detrimental to grieving processes if not executed properly.

The legal boundaries of using generative AI for this purpose is also murky, with no centralised or comprehensive regulatory body yet established to oversee it. It seems that AI companies will need to discern whether they want to be involved in these kinds of projects.

 

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Speaking to NPR, Silicon Intelligence customer Sun Kai explains how he uses ‘resurrection’ technology to communicate with his deceased mother.

‘I do not treat [the avatar] as a kind of digital person. I truly regard it as a mother,’ he says.

‘Whether she is alive or dead does not matter, because when I think of her, I can find her and talk to her. In a sense, she is alive. At least in my perception, she is alive.’

Combining visual and audio data to create a moving avatar of a person may be the easy part, but building a humanly-accurate ‘personality’ of a chatbot is tricky.

Using digital data alone, it’s difficult to fully encapsulate what a specific person may have replied to a question, comment, or situation, as this would be guided by their own thoughts and experiences.

In that vein, it seems avatars of deceased loved ones may be realistic, but riddled with limitations. Looking to the future, though, it wouldn’t be surprising if it became normal for people to program their own avatars with information before they pass away – just in case their friends and families wanted to speak with them.

At face value, the concept is profound and somewhat creepy. Yet, human empathy makes the desire to keep a loved one digitally immortalised weirdly understandable.

I guess it goes without saying, it’ll be interesting to see where we’re at with this technology in just a few years’ time.