Whenever Sun Kai, co-founder of Silicon Valley Intelligence, feels stressed at work, he talks to the artificial intelligence avatar of his late mother.
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TAIPEI, Taiwan – Whenever work pressure mounts, Chinese technology executive Sun Kai turns to his mother for support. Or rather, he’s talking to her digital avatar on a tablet, rendered from the shoulder up Through artificial intelligence, he looks and sounds like his biological mother, who died in 2018.
“I don’t treat [the avatar] As a digital person. I really treat her like a mother,” said Sun, 47. at his office in Nanjing, a port city in eastern China. He estimates he talks to her avatar at least once a week. “I feel like this is probably the perfect person to talk to, bar none.
The company that produced Sun’s mother’s avatar is called Silicon Intelligence, and Sun is also a senior executive in the company’s voice simulation business. Headquartered in Nanjing The company is one of a growing number of tech startups in China and around the world that create artificial intelligence chatbots using people’s likenesses and voices.
The idea of digitally cloning the dead is not new, but it was only in recent years that it was relegated to the realm of science fiction. Now, increasingly powerful chatbots like Baidu’s Ernie or OpenAI’s ChatGPT have been trained on vast amounts of language data, which, coupled with massive investments in computing power, has enabled private companies to offer affordable digital “clones” of real people.
These companies have set out to prove that relationships with AI-generated entities can become mainstream. For some clients, the avatars they create provide companionship. In China they are also rolled up Catering to grieving families who are looking to create digital portraits of their lost loved ones, Silicon Intelligence calls the service Resurrection.
“It doesn’t matter whether she’s alive or dead, because when I think of her, I can find her and talk to her,” Sun said of her late mother, Gong Hualing. “In a sense, she is alive. At least to me, she is alive.
The rise of artificial intelligence simulating the dead (called “death robots” in academic circles) has raised ethical questions about simulating human death or life, but there are no clear answers.
In the United States, companies such as Microsoft and OpenAI have established internal committees to assess the conduct and ethics of the services they produce, but there is no centralized regulatory body in the United States or China to oversee the impact of these technologies. or their use of personal data.
Data is still the bottleneck
Browse China’s e-commerce sites and you’ll find dozens of companies selling “digital cloning” and “digital resurrection” services, which animate photos so they appear to be talking, for as little as less than $2 .
Silicon Intelligence’s most basic digital avatar service costs 199 yuan (about $30) and requires less than one minute of high-quality video and audio from a person’s lifetime.
More advanced interactive avatars that use generative artificial intelligence technology to move around the screen and talk to customers can cost thousands of dollars.
But there is a big bottleneck: Data, or rather, lack of data.
Zhang Zewei, founder of artificial intelligence company Ultrain, said: “The key is to clone a person’s mind and record a person’s daily thoughts and experiences.” Headquartered in Nanjing, it also provides cloning services.
Zhang asked customers to describe Essential memories and significant experiences of them or their loved ones. The company then feeds these stories into existing chatbots to support conversations between AI avatars and customers.
At Silicon Intelligence, a technician prepares to photograph a person in the studio. The person will read the script and perform specific gestures as directed. This footage will be used to create artificial intelligence avatars.
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(Due to the rise in AI-driven scams using deepfakes of a person’s voice or likeness, both Super Brain and Silicon Valley Intelligence will need to obtain authorization from the person being digitally cloned or, if the person is deceased, family and relatives certification authorization.
The most labor-intensive step in producing a person’s avatar is cleaning up the information they provide, Zhang said. Relatives often turn over low-quality audio and video that suffers from background noise or blur. Photos depicting multiple people are also bad because they confuse AI algorithms, he said.
However, Zhang admitted that for digital clones to truly come to life, more data would be needed, and clients would need to prepare “at least 10 years” in advance by keeping a diary.
The scarcity of available material is exacerbated when someone dies unexpectedly and leaves behind few notes or footage.
Fu Shou Yuan International Group, a Shanghai-based Chinese listed company that maintains cemeteries and provides funeral services, bases its artificial intelligence avatars largely on the social media persona a person maintains in life.
“In today’s world, the Internet may know you best. Your parents or family members may not know everything about you, but all your information is on the Internet – your selfies, photos, and videos,” said Fu Shou Yuan’s Fan Jun said manager.
Taboo against death
Fu Shou Yuan hopes that generative artificial intelligence can reduce traditional cultural taboos about discussing death in China, where mourning is accompanied by extensive rituals and rituals but daily expressions of grief are discouraged.
The company has built a cemetery in Shanghai that’s landscaped like a sun-dappled park, but it’s no ordinary cemetery. It’s digital: Visitors can hold up their phones to scan the QR code on a specific tombstone and access a multimedia record of the deceased’s life experiences and achievements.
“If we want to engrave these ideas and concepts as they were in ancient times, we need to provide everyone with a vast cemetery like the Eastern Tombs of the Qing Dynasty,” Fan said, referring to a large imperial tomb complex. “But now, it’s no longer necessary. All you may need is a cup-sized space with a QR code on it.
Fan said he hopes the experience will better “integrate the physical and spiritual” and that families will see the digital cemetery as a place to celebrate life rather than one that triggers fears of death.
In the digital cemetery created by Shanghai Fu Shou Yuan, there is a QR code on the tombstone. Visitors can scan the QR code to obtain information about the deceased and pay their respects online.
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So far, fewer than 100 customers have chosen to place digital avatars on their loved ones’ tombstones.
“For family members who have just lost a loved one, their first reaction is definitely one of comfort and a desire to communicate with them again,” said Jiang Xia, a funeral planner at Fu Shou Yuan International Group. “However, it can be challenging to say that every client will accept this because of the ethical issues involved.”
The Chinese company isn’t the first to try to recreate digital simulations of the dead, either. In 2017, Microsoft filed a patent application for simulating virtual conversations with deceased people, but an executive at the US tech giant later said there were no plans to make it a full-scale commercial service , calling it “disturbing.”
Project December is a platform originally built on ChatGPT technology that provides thousands of customers with the ability to chat with chatbots that mimic their loved ones. OpenAI quickly terminated the platform’s access to its technology, fearing it could be misused to cause emotional harm.
Ethicists have warned that lifelike artificial intelligence clones could cause emotional harm to family members.
“This has been a very big question since the beginning of mankind: What is good comfort? Can it be religion? Is it forgetfulness? No one knows,” said Michel Pouchi, professor of philosophy at the Sorbonne University in Paris. Michel Puech said.
“There is a risk of addiction, and [of] replace real life. So if it works too well, that’s the danger,” Puechi told NPR. “Having too many comforting and satisfying experiences with the deceased apparently takes away from the experience and grief of death.” But in fact, Puechi says, this is largely an illusion.
Most people who decide to digitally replicate a loved one are quick to admit that everyone grieves differently.
Sun Kai, the executive who digitally cloned his mother, deliberately disconnected her digital avatar from the internet, even if it meant the chatbot remained clueless about current events.
“Maybe she will always be the mother I remember, rather than a mother who has changed with the times,” he told NPR.
Others are more forthright.
“I don’t recommend that some people do this because they might see the avatar and feel intense sadness again,” said Yang Lei, a resident of the southern city of Nanjing, who paid a company to create a digital version of his late uncle’s body.
Use low technology to solve high-tech problems
When Young’s uncle died, he worried the shock would kill his ailing, elderly grandmother. Instead of telling her son of his death, Yang tried to create a digital avatar that was realistic enough to have a video call with her to maintain the illusion that her son was alive and well.
Yang said he grew up with his uncle, but their relationship became more distant after his uncle left the village. Find construction jobs.
After his uncle’s death, Yang worked hard to uncover more details about his life.
“His daily work is very simple because most of their work is done on construction sites. They work and sleep on site. Life is quite difficult,” Yang said. “It was just a place to make money, that’s all, no other memories.”
Yang used his phone to search for family group chats on various social media apps and came up with enough voice messages and videos of his late uncle to create a usable digital clone of his likeness. But there’s no getting around the lack of personal records, social media accounts, and the lack of data his uncle left behind.
Then Yang came up with a lower-tech solution: What if a company employee impersonated his uncle, but used his uncle’s artificial intelligence to disguise his face and voice?
In the spring of 2023, Young put his plan into action, but once his grandmother’s health improved, he confessed to her.
The experience made Yang think about her own mortality. He said he would definitely digitally clone himself before he died. However, he warned that doing so would not create another living version of himself, nor would such a digital avatar replace human life.
“Don’t overthink it,” he warned. “The artificial intelligence incarnation is not the same as the humans it replaces. But when we lose our flesh-and-blood bodies, at least artificial intelligence will preserve our minds.
Aowen Cao contributed research results from Nanjing, China.
