You will soon be able to communicate with friends and relatives who have passed away on your computer.
Dr. Prateek Desai, a Silicon Valley computer scientist who has founded multiple artificial intelligence platforms, boldly predicts that by the end of the year a human’s “consciousness” could be uploaded to a digital device.
“Start recording your parents, elders and loved ones regularly,” he said urged in a tweet on Friday thread that has received over 5.7 million views and hundreds of thousands of responses so far.
“With sufficient transcript data, new voice synthesis and video models, there is a 100% chance that they will live with you forever after leaving the physical body,” Desai continued. “It should be possible by the end of the year.”
Uploading a person’s consciousness involves saving videos, voice recordings, documents, and photos that you want to recreate on your computer. These compiled assets will then be uploaded to an AI system that will learn as much as possible about the deceased.
The ultimate goal: for users to create an avatar that resembles their loved one before they passed — so that person can, in a sense, live on your screen forever.
Amid growing concern over AI’s growing global dominance — marked by everything from “destructive” bot behavior to obsolete jobs to false criminal charges — a company called Somnium Space is offering an AI-based “live forever” mod.
“Literally, if I die – and I have this data collected – people can come or my children, they can come, and they can have a conversation with my avatar, with my movements, with my voice,” founder and CEO Artur Sychov Vice said.
He added, “You will meet that person. And maybe for the first 10 minutes when you’re talking to that person, you don’t know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.”
Another company, DeepBrain, has developed a program called “Re;Memory” that allows users to walk down a memorial hall dedicated to a deceased loved one and even interact with the person “through an actual conversation.”
Meanwhile, similar weirdly futuristic technology is already being used on celebrities.
Deepfakes use AI to manipulate videos and replace a person’s original likeness with an impossible-to-identify imitation, often to alarming effect.
An AI platform has created a “digital twin” of Bruce Willis — who suffers from aphasia, a brain disorder that affects his ability to communicate — allowing the actor’s likeness to appear on screen despite his retirement from acting.
The “Die Hard” actor’s deepfake has already debuted, in an August 2021 ad for Russian telecommunications company Megafon, which “penned” his face with Konstantin Soloviev for an ad for Megafon.
The Willis estate reportedly has final say over what is created with her likeness and has licensed the rights to use her face in advertising campaigns.
In Entertainment Weekly’s “Around the Table” video series last December, award-winning actresses Jean Smart and Margot Robbie spoke about their concerns about potential pornographic deepfakes.
“After you die, they’ll go, ‘Oh, put Margot Robbie in that movie,’ a hundred years from now, doing God knows what. And your estate will sue them. That would be terrible, Margot,” Smart, 71, said. said.
At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, many still argue that AI advances — including ChatGPT — can be beneficial to humanity.
However, a group of technology experts – including Elon Musk – have called for a six-month hiatus on training advanced AI models, arguing that the systems could have “profound risks for society and humanity”.
The CEO of Twitter and Tesla joined more than 1,000 experts in signing an open letter organized by the nonprofit Future of Life Institute, which is largely funded by the Musk Foundation, the billionaire’s charitable giving organization.
The letter calls for an industry-wide pause until proper security protocols are developed and verified by independent experts — and details the potential risks that advanced AI could pose if not properly supervised.
The risks include “propaganda and untruths”, loss of jobs, “the development of a dehumanized mentality that will eventually outnumber, outnumber, obsolete and replace us” and the risk of “losing control of our civilization”.
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