How is AI giving a voice to the dead?

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**Joseph Chance** (1:55)
How is AI giving a voice to the dead?
Thanks for asking.
Have you ever seen the Black Mirror episode called Be Right Back? It first aired in February 2013, and sees a character called Ash die in a car accident near the start, leaving behind his pregnant wife Martha. During Ash's funeral, Martha's friend Sarah tells her about a company which creates AI versions of dead people by using personal data they had shared online. Initially reluctant, Martha eventually caves in and tries the service. As a result, she's able to chat with an android, Ash, as if he was alive. Now, Black Mirror is well known for delving into possible future technological developments, which are sometimes purely the stuff of fantasy. But the scenario portrayed in that particular episode may become widespread in the near future. Are we saying this may actually be possible then? Perhaps not in physical android form, but we have seen cases where virtual avatars have been created in the form of a chatbot or moving video like a deep fake. These have come to be known as deadbots. Just like in Black Mirror, deadbots are created from personal data that's collected online. That could be call recordings, emails, text messages, voice notes, videos or photos, for example.
The idea is that grieving people can have a text, chat, audio call or video call with their deceased loved ones. One prominent example was reported on in 2021 Canadian author Justin Barbeau created an artificial version of his fiancée Jessica, who had died from a rare liver disease eight years earlier. He used a website called Project December, which was built using an API of OpenAI's GPT-3 language model. Do businesses see a lot of potential in dead bots? Definitely. There are many out there currently racing to develop them. After all, a lot of people would love to be able to speak to their deceased friends or relatives given the opportunity. South Korean AI company DeepBrain has already created a paid service called Rememory, which is for people who want to live on virtually after they die. They're filmed in a studio for seven hours in order to create a virtual human. Then when the real person passes away, their relatives can go to the studio to see and talk to the deadbot in a kind of private cinema screening. Somnium Space founder Arthur Sikoff has also gone on record saying he wants to create a form of AI that can pass the touring test, meaning a person can't tell if they're having a conversation with another real human or a computer.
Is talking to a deadbot really a healthy way to grieve? The first instinct for a lot of people is to find the use of deadbots creepy, with some commenters calling them disturbing or unhealthy. Writing for the conversation.com in May 2022, Spanish researcher Sara Suarez Gonzalo looked into some of the key ethical questions on the subject. For example, is it right to use someone's data after they die without having gotten their prior consent while they were alive? Or say consent was given by a person prior to them dying? What if the deadbot's use doesn't end up corresponding to what the mimicked person actually agreed to? Or ended up causing damage to their reputation? Suarez Gonzalo's conclusion was that deadbots could be ethical, but only under certain conditions.