The practice is particularly popular in China, where cultural traditions involve communicating with the dead. The AI replicas are seen as a modern twist on these traditions. However, there are concerns about whether interacting with AI replicas is a healthy way to process grief. There are also legal and ethical implications to consider, such as the issue of consent from the deceased and potential disagreements among family members. Despite these concerns, the demand for such technologies continues to grow.
Key takeaways:
- AI technology is being used in China to create digital replicas of deceased loved ones, allowing people to interact with these avatars as a form of grief therapy. This is a growing market with several companies offering such services.
- The technology involves creating deepfakes using diffusion models and large language models, which are trained on data such as photos, videos, audio recordings, and texts. The more data these models ingest, the more closely the result will mimic the deceased person.
- There are ethical and legal concerns surrounding this technology, such as the issue of consent from the deceased and the potential negative effects on clients' mental health. Critics argue that interacting with AI replicas of the dead may prevent people from properly processing their grief.
- Despite these concerns, the demand for this technology is growing in China, partly due to cultural traditions of communicating with the dead. Companies are working to improve the quality of the avatars and make the technology more affordable and accessible to the general public.