The dead can be revived as AI clones

Do you want to talk to a deceased family member and get answers from them? Soon it will be possible. With the help of AI clones, it will soon be possible to build “necrobots,” copies of people who have lived. But do we really want to do that?

In 2021, Microsoft announced that it had patented a computer program that should be able to train a chatbot based on information about individuals.

It doesn’t matter whether a person is dead or alive – and so technology can make it possible to “resurrect” the dead, as digital versions of themselves.

Human clones

Microsoft chose to call everything “human” cloning, that is, copies.

Simply put, an AI clone is created by taking data from a person – for example from an activity on social media – and feeding it into a computer program so that the chatbot learns how the person in question was behaving and expressing themselves, he writes. forskning.se

“It’s about training AI functions. If you have data from a person, for example how it behaves in a text, it is possible to create a bot that behaves like that person. Some of these treatments may certainly make sense, but they also challenge our view of what is appropriate ” Stefan LarsonLecturer in Technology and Social Change at Lund University of Technology, LTH.

weak and difficult to explain

Stefan Larsson leads a research group on the role of artificial intelligence in society. The purpose is to investigate ethical and legal issues related to necrorobotics (necrorobotics in English), the robots of a person who has died.

“The law on how information about the dead is handled is weak and difficult to explain. Data protection, for example, was not developed with this need for protection in mind. At the same time, the act of grieving and how we deal with the dead is a very private matter governed rather by social norms and cultural beliefs.” Larson notes.

There are challenges

In an upcoming book, Stefan Larsson has written a chapter on cloning the dead using artificial intelligence called “Necrorobotics: The Ethics of Resurrecting the Dead,” which is about the ethical challenges that arise with technological development.

There are cases where a robot has been trained to look like a deceased family member in order to access the money. Another example is a South Korean woman who built a robot to “resurrect” her dead daughter in virtual reality. But who really has the right to make these decisions and what happens if Didn’t everyone agree?

“old mission”

But even if AI technology itself is a new medium ruin itProfessor of Philosophy at the University of Södertürn, that necrotic bots are based solely on our tradition of trying to remember the dead.

“The urge to keep the dead alive is an ancient aspiration. As soon as a new technology appeared, people started thinking about how they could use it to communicate with the dead. For example, it wasn’t long after the invention of photography before people started taking pictures of the dead, and when People learned to record sound, and soon realized that it was a way to preserve the voices of the dead.

“Could be revived soon.”

There are already genealogy sites that offer an AI service where you can upload pictures of relatives which are then animated so that they appear to be moving.

There are also several companies that say they will soon be able to resurrect the dead with the help of sounds or animated images, including Google and Microsoft.

However, in most cases the technology is still in development and it is still required that the user has some technical proficiency in order to be able to use it.

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