Artificial intelligence allows Holocaust survivor to speak at her own funeral
Artificial intelligence is changing the way we live, connect, and grieve but will digital immortality allow us to live forever? Digital immortality refers to uploading, storing, or transferring a person’s personality into a digital entity or cyberspace, or a computer. As the technology of digital immortality becomes more popular and available, people will find new ways of using AI-generated digital personas.
Researchers Maggi Saven-Baden and David Burden define digital immortality as an active or passive digital presence of a person after death with two categories of digital immortality. One-way immortality is passive and a read-only presence like Facebook and bots. Two-way immortality is an interactive digital persona. Think of chatbots based on real people or interactive digital personas trained on real people. Replika is an interactive chatbot and is a bit like having a text conversation with a friend. At the other end of the scale is AI technology like StoryFile which use prerecorded videos of the soon-to-be departed answering questions posed to them by their loved ones, allowing real-time conversations. Savin-Baden and Victoria Mason-Robbie are currently studying human-AI social relationships and the psychological impacts are not yet known.
StoryFile is based in Los Angeles and was founded by CEO Stephen Smith. If their technology looks familiar it’s because the same company was responsible for the interactive holograms of Holocaust survivors at the USC Shoah Foundation. Smith’s mother, Marina Smith passed away in June and he attended her funeral in Nottingham, England. The 87-year-old Mrs. Smith MBE was a lifelong holocaust campaigner and her family wished that her message and education continued after her death. The holographic experience is produced by twenty synchronized cameras recording answers to 250 questions. Answers were Mrs. Smith’s own words, recorded while she was alive. The data was then fed into StoryFile. There are about 75 answers to a bank of 250,000 potential questions and each video answer is around two minutes. The AI system selects the appropriate clips to play in response to questions from people viewing the remembrance video. The deceased in the video appears to listen and reply. The answers are in real-time and Mrs. Smith is seen pausing and listening to questions to give the elusion of a live conversation. StoryFile calls it a Holographic Conversational Video Experience.
A Venture Beat article says:
“it feels like a Zoom conversation with a living person.”
In an interview with The Telegraph, Stephen Smith said:
“Mum answered questions from grieving relatives after they had watched her cremation. The aspects of her life that were most important to her and to the people who loved her most. And it was very meaningful to them.”
StoryFile uses real responses to answer questions, unlike deep fake which makes stuff up and can pose ethical, moral, and criminal issues.
Recent celebrity StoryFile users have been the late actor Ed Asner and the very much alive William Shatner. AXIOS reported that mourners “conversed” with the holographic representation of Ed Asner.
“Nothing could prepare me for what I was going to witness when I saw it,” Matt Asner.
You can watch Mr. Shatner’s videos and ask him questions on the StoryFile website. I made the mistake of asking him a loaded question about his belief in God and boy did he go on. I asked him about his age, the meaning of life, Star Trek, and what it was like to go into space. That man can talk and it was wonderful. Mr. Shatner’s fascinating life and legacy live on for future generations.
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. practice research student in photography and artificial intelligence, journalist, author, artist, and filmmaker. Specifically, the digital afterlife and the death tech industry.
