(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Kitchen Table Kibitzing 11/19/22: Bring out your dead! [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-11-19

As reported by Caren Chesler, for the Washington Post:

People have always craved post-death contact with their loved ones. Efforts to remain in touch with the dead have existed for eons, such as photographing deceased children, holding seances and even keeping a corpse in the house for posterity. But artificial intelligence and virtual reality, along with other technological advances, have taken us a huge step closer to bringing the dead back to life.

Disclaimer: I’ve always favored the “keeping a corpse in the house,” method, but I acknowledge times can change, and we should all be open to new ideas.

For instance, Hossein Rahnama, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and a research affiliate with MIT Media Lab, has been building a platform called Augmented Eternity, which allows someone to create a digital persona from a dead person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, public statements and blog entries that will be able to interact with relatives and others.

Obviously, if there is no online presence to be swept up into the AI’s re-created consciousness, your ability to communicate with dead relatives, for example, will be limited. I would be unable to have a productive discussion with my deceased great-grandmother, for example, that goes beyond what few Jehovah’s Witnesses’ Watchtower tracts from her late 70’s time frame are currently posted online (talking with a reasonable verbal facsimile of my deceased grandmother would be easier, as Marx’s Communist Manifesto is widely available; even so, I suspect the visual images would be rather static as she was a latecomer to Facebook).

As for me, I have a vast pile of journals that I will be able to have to input online (I’ll get on that right away, I promise) to recreate a reasonable facsimile of my verbal and mental self. But predominantly this will be a joy experienced beginning with Millennials and Generation Z, as AI in its current state generally relies on “scraping” existing data off the web or otherwise transcribed on the web or through personal efforts from archived materials.

The Post article cites the experience of a gentleman involved in the development of this technology who effectively recreated his father as a chatbot using existing data he put online. He interacts with his “father” (called “Dadbot”) through this means “every month or so.”

Vlahos transcribed those conversations and gathered his own memories of his dad. He then used a software platform called PullString to program the Dadbot. Vlahos spent a year inputting strings of conversation and teaching the bot to interpret what people said to it. When sent a message or asked a question, the Dadbot would respond similarly to how his father would, either with a text message, audio of a story or song, or even a photo.

But, as implied above, this technology goes well beyond interacting with chat-bots, which already (as you read this) are going the way of the flip-phone. Soon you will be able to access a realistic, animated visual image of your preferred deceased conversation partner, who you may even be able to interact with in a virtual reality environment.

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/11/19/2137166/-Kitchen-Table-Kibitzing-11-19-22-Bring-out-your-dead

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/