AI and Immortality: The Ultimate Dream or the Worst Nightmare?

How AI is helping make immortality real — but not in the way you imagined

How AI is helping make immortality real — but not in the way you imagined

Image by author and Dalle-3

Have you ever thought about the end of your life?

How do you feel about it?

It's a touchy subject...

Some fear it and don't like to think about it. Others accept it as just one of those things.

When someone you know dies, as will surely happen, this can make you face this question again in a way that touches you, whether you like it or not.

A close relative of mine died recently, it was difficult, and it's forced me to think about this subject again.

Have you had a friend or relative die? How did you feel about it?

Photo by Anthony Tori on Unsplash

You read about immortality in fantasy stories, ancient stories about gods and mystical beings, or new stories about robots or immortal humans far off in the future.

You do this for entertainment, for escape, for fantasy, of course, it's fun to imagine these fantasies.

But what if I told you we are on the brink of making immortality real?

Using AI, we are on the verge of helping us to live on after death, and in ways that even sci-fi never imagined...

AI helps the dead live on in cyberspace

I've written recently about how AI is helping create digital holograms of pop stars in Elvis Lives! How AI Holograms Are Blurring the Lines Between Reality and Fantasy.

Elvis Lives! How AI Holograms Are Blurring the Lines Between Reality and Fantasy
How AI is Escaping the Screen and Entering the Real World & Why It Mattersgenerativeai.pub

But now this technology is becoming available for the rest of us, for you.

In a recent article by Popular Mechanics The Tech Breakthrough That Is Bringing Us Closer to Immortality they describe how some of this technology is helping create digital versions of loved ones who died.

Photo by Matt Bennett on Unsplash

They describe Journalist James Vlahos who's father was dying of lung cancer, who chose to create an AI version of his father using a service from a company Pullstring.

Vlahos recorded hours of his father speaking about his life, and then used that as data to help create the AI version of his father he called 'Dadbot'.

He wrote about his experiences in a Wired magazine article in 2017, well before even the most recent advances in AI such as ChatGPT.

The DadBot would produce consistent responses to the same questions over time, based on the voice recordings his father given.

Sort of like a digital clone of his father.

Photo by Growtika on Unsplash

More recent developments the article describes are going further.

For example, Only Virtual wants to allow the AI digital version of a person to be able to produce unique responses every time, they call a 'Versona'.

They use the most recent advances in Generative AI, to allow it to use previous voice recordings, text messages etc of a person to recreate a person's personality.

But this happens in such a way that it continues to produce unique responses and grow & develop over time.

As the article highlights:

A Versona doesn’t just generate new content; its underlying algorithm also changes with each conversation, updating what it knows about the person it’s talking to. When you chat with it, using text messages and voice memos, you won’t have to keep telling it about your new job or girlfriend, for example.

This video describes the service:

This is currently only using text to interact with the AI digital person.

One of the biggest advances coming this year, and to some extent already is here is what is called 'Multi-model AI’ which is an AI with which you can interact using more than just text, but voice, images and more.

ChatGPT is now multi-modal & allows you to use voice to chat with it, and you can give it images as part of your input, and it can generate images too.

We have also seen other ways Multi-Model AI is happening this year with the AI Elvis Hologram which I mentioned earlier.

So the potential for Multi-model AI to rapidly evolve the ability of these AI digital persons in the next few months and years is huge.

What would living forever as a digital AI avatar mean?

The development of this technology brings up many social, philosophical, legal and moral issues...

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