Sep 21, 2023 03:10 AM
https://theconversation.com/digital-necr...ces-213396
INTRO: Generative AI – which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT but also image and video generators like DALL·E 2 – supercharges what has come to be known as "digital necromancy", the conjuring of the dead from the digital traces they leave behind.
Debates around digital necromancy were first sparked in the 2010s by advances in video projection ("deep fake" technology) leading to the reanimation of Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, and Tupac Shakur. It also led to posthumous film appearances by Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, among others.
Initially the preserve of heavily-resourced film and music production companies, the emergence of generative AI has widened access to the technologies that were used to re-animate these and other stars to everyone.
Even before ChatGPT burst into public consciousness in late 2022, one user had already used OpenAI's LLM to talk with his dead fiancée based on her texts and emails.
Seeing the potential, a series of startups like Here After and Replika have launched drawing on generative AI in order to reanimate loved ones for the bereaved.
This technology, for some, seems to cross a cultural and perhaps even ethical line with many experiencing a deep unease with the idea that we might routinely interact with digital simulations of the dead. The dark magic of AI-assisted necromancy is viewed, as a result, with suspicion.
This may have some people worried.
But as sociologists working on cultural practices of remembrance and commemoration, who have also been experimenting with raising the dead using generative AI, we think there is no cause for concern.
[...] we should remember that we do not ordinarily treat our personal messages, photographs or videos of the dead as if those records themselves were our loved ones. Instead, we use them as conduits to their memory, standing in for them as proxies for us to think of or communicate through. To suggest we routinely get confused or delude ourselves about such media is a misconception.
That's why general worries about digital necromancy are wildly overblown... (MORE - details)
INTRO: Generative AI – which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT but also image and video generators like DALL·E 2 – supercharges what has come to be known as "digital necromancy", the conjuring of the dead from the digital traces they leave behind.
Debates around digital necromancy were first sparked in the 2010s by advances in video projection ("deep fake" technology) leading to the reanimation of Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson, and Tupac Shakur. It also led to posthumous film appearances by Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing, among others.
Initially the preserve of heavily-resourced film and music production companies, the emergence of generative AI has widened access to the technologies that were used to re-animate these and other stars to everyone.
Even before ChatGPT burst into public consciousness in late 2022, one user had already used OpenAI's LLM to talk with his dead fiancée based on her texts and emails.
Seeing the potential, a series of startups like Here After and Replika have launched drawing on generative AI in order to reanimate loved ones for the bereaved.
This technology, for some, seems to cross a cultural and perhaps even ethical line with many experiencing a deep unease with the idea that we might routinely interact with digital simulations of the dead. The dark magic of AI-assisted necromancy is viewed, as a result, with suspicion.
This may have some people worried.
But as sociologists working on cultural practices of remembrance and commemoration, who have also been experimenting with raising the dead using generative AI, we think there is no cause for concern.
[...] we should remember that we do not ordinarily treat our personal messages, photographs or videos of the dead as if those records themselves were our loved ones. Instead, we use them as conduits to their memory, standing in for them as proxies for us to think of or communicate through. To suggest we routinely get confused or delude ourselves about such media is a misconception.
That's why general worries about digital necromancy are wildly overblown... (MORE - details)
