The death tech industry is booming but will it help or hinder how we grieve? And what happens to all that data?
The idea of an autobiographical interactive legacy, driven by markets, publicity, creative technologies, and years of digital grieving is finally upon us. The technology to speak to our dead relatives has been reintroduced to consumers by death tech companies like StoryFile and other market-driven startups.
I use the term ‘reintroduced’ because similar services have been around for more than a decade but the technology was limited and more importantly, consumers were not ready. Eternime founder Marius Urschache started his company in 2014 and although it gained a lot of publicity, it failed to ignite the imagination of enough customers to sustain it and by 2018, the company had expired.
Even ten years ago, death tech seemed like a science fiction nightmare that had been fictionalized in popular culture. Think of the Black Mirror: Be Right Back (2013) episode, where a widow purchases a replica of her dead husband, starting at the cheapest service with a bot until she gives way to her grief and is locked into owning an exact body and mind replica. The company knows what it’s doing and feeds on the human need to stay connected with our dead loved ones at any cost when we are in the thick of bereavement.
Sound familiar? Well, Be Right Back aired in 2013 and a number of startups have cited that episode as the instigator, together with the founder’s personal experience with loss, to start a death tech company. Just look where we have come in ten short years.
What would have been seen as creepy uncanny valley territory even five and ten years ago when some death tech startups struggled to win customers, today is a different story. The death tech industry is a $100 billion industry and growing.
There have been rapid advances in AI since Alexa and Siri have infiltrated all our homes. They are a perfect example of a consumer-driven product turned from extraordinary to ordinary. These AI voice technology machines are a normal and everyday part of our lives.
Charlotte Jee in MIT Technology was given access to a new service called Hereafter AI and asked if we were ready to talk to our dead loved ones through our communication devices. Hereafter’s goal is to let the living communicate with the dead with technology that lets you “talk.”
The digital replica is an authentic representation of the deceased and uses data from interviews while still alive. After their death, those left behind can communicate with their dead loved ones through Alexa, an app, or an Amazon Echo device. Startups working in the death tech or grief tech industry have different approaches but similar promises that enable users to talk by video, chat, text, phone, or voice assistance with a digital version of a dead person.
When Jee trialed Hereafter AI, she used her still-living mum and dad, whose voices lived inside an app on her phone as voice assistants. California-based company Hereafter AI is powered by more than four hours of conversations her parents each had with a real human interviewer. Jee’s parents were asked questions about their lives and memories. In a space of a year, advances in AI and voice technology replaced human interviewers with a bot.
The smartphone has revolutionized our lives for good or bad depending on your point of view. This ubiquitous device is used to communicate, document, and share our lives, and together with social networks, it has normalized all aspects of human behavior. Why not death?
Hereafter AI and video-only Storyfile aim to preserve someone’s life story rather than create new conversations and because of this, videos and audio are generic because anyone can ask a question. Technology doesn’t differentiate between family and strangers. It doesn’t recognize the familiar connection that makes us all human. Replicas sound and look like someone you love but like my mother who suffered from dementia, it doesn’t know you.
Why not save zoom calls with parents and loved ones? These videos would convey personal communications between families. You, Only Virtual, founded by Justin Harrison, will have its launch in 2023 and aims to address these personal connection issues and to “build individual virtual personas (Versonas) tailored to the unique complexities of a relationship.” Harrison says:
“Recounting memories won’t capture the fundamental essence of a relationship.”
And essence is an essential ingredient to who we are as individuals. One hundred and fifty years ago, portrait artists and photographers aimed to capture the essence of the subject. Artists experimented with lighting for mood and props to indicate the individual’s vocation, and pose to convey stature and importance in society. As technology advances and our dead traces become almost exact copies of our dead, how will we grieve?
Grief is personal and individual. We deal with it in our way. Digital clones of the people we love could forever change how we grieve. Could these digital replicas help or hinder the grieving process? The technology is so new that researchers have a hard time keeping up with the latest developments and applying its impact on human society.
Humans need interaction and hold on to memories and objects, like photographs but in the past, communication has always been one way. Now the bereaved turn to digital replicas for comfort.
The ethics of creating a virtual version of someone are complex. Who owns the data and what about consent? There’s also a real risk for the recently bereaved that this kind of communication could prolong grief and they could lose their grip on reality.
In June this year, Amazon introduced Alexa reading the Wizard of Oz in the voice of a boy’s dead grandmother. Her voice was artificially recreated. Alexa’s senior vice president, Rohit Prasad said:
“While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make the memories last.”
For young children who believe in Santa Clause, would this mess up a child’s sense of reality when they are led to believe that their dead relative is in fact alive and communicating from a device in the kitchen?
Project December uses GPT3 to create a bot of the founder’s dead girlfriend. My first thought was about permission. Did he have permission from the deceased next of kin and if not, why does he think he has free reign, morally and legally to share the bot on Reddit and on social media?
A service that creates a digital replica of someone without their participation raises complex ethical issues regarding consent and privacy. Companies are not obliged to check that the users of their services are consensual or in fact, have died. There is no law stopping anyone from creating an avatar of another person. These are the new norms around legacies we leave behind in the digital world.
There are also family concerns. Not all families are in agreement about how they want their loved ones remembered. My sister was adamant that she never wanted to see our mother resurrected as a bot or some other digital entity because she felt it was far too creepy and painful at the same time.
Grief psychologists look at this new technology as a healthy way to connect to an avatar but emphasize that bots will not replace human relationships. They warn that putting too much weight on technology could develop a phantom of personhood that immediate grief could cause.
Creating an avatar and chatbot needs time, motivation, and effort. My mother died in 2018 and I have stacks of photos and plastic bin bags full of keepsakes belonging to my parents. I have started and stopped sorting and scanning my parent’s legacy on numerous occasions. The drive to preserve and protect their legacy is paramount but it is painful and daunting in equal measure.
Does digital privacy continue after death and how safe is our data from cybercrime? What happens to social media accounts when we die? Most people don’t know what to do with their data or that social media accounts like Facebook, can be memorialized and legacy executors can be appointed.
A digital will is a new type of inheritance to control which loved ones have access to digital data, passwords, storage, devices, and subscriptions. But wills can be contested. Different countries have different legal systems and laws. Britain has no digital inheritance laws. The EU GDPR only applies to the living. Canada has Digital Executors. Germany has a radical approach and heirs receive social media accounts as tangible belongings passed to inheritors.
Does any of this matter once we are dead? There is no guarantee that those who are left behind will hold on to your legacy. And perhaps all that effort and money you put into creating an AI video legacy will one day end up in a flea market amongst Victorian post-mortem photographs in a container marked, “Creepy.”
Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.
