“The company, 2Wai, went viral after founder Calum Worthy shared a video showing a pregnant woman speaking to an [AI](https://www.dexerto.com/tag/ai/) recreation of her late mother through her phone. The clip then jumps ahead 10 months, with the AI “grandma” reading a bedtime story to the baby.
Years later, the child, now a young boy, casually chats with the avatar on his walk home from school. The final scene shows him as an adult, telling the AI version of his grandmother that she’s about to be a great-grandmother.
The concept immediately drew comparisons to Be Right Back, the hit 2013 episode of Black Mirror where a grieving woman uses an AI model of her deceased boyfriend, played by Domhnall Gleeson, built from his online history. In that episode, the technology escalates from chatbots to full physical androids.
Social media users didn’t hold back. Many called the video “nightmare fuel,” “demonic,” and urged that the technology “be destroyed,” sparking a fresh wave of debate over how far AI should go when dealing with the dead.
As AI avatars get more realistic and robotics rapidly advance, it may only be a matter of time before physical android recreations become feasible, raising even bigger ethical questions.”
Pjsandwich24 on
It’s something I thought about a while back. If you had enough recordings of a person, you could probably construct a decent copy, even post mortem. But honestly, the lack of letting go feels more like dissociation and is probably problematic for any number of psychological and ethical reasons.
JohnSnowKnowsThings on
Never understood why this was a bad thing. If people don’t want to let go it’s their prerogative. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone they can do what they want in their own time. Probably beats scrolling instagram
mauriciocap on
Aren’t you legally dead if you are brain dead? I think it’s just another social network, same audience.
jacobvso on
Also Harry Potter becoming reality. This is just like the talking paintings at Hogwarts.
arianebx on
“The mirror of Erised” — anyone who has lost a loved one i think understand why Harry Potter chooses to use the mirror in this way.
But Dumbledore is probably that it does no good to dwell on such things
Pinkgettysburg on
How do you prevent these companies from using your likeness? My grandmother would probably have hated this thing. What’s to stop one of her kids from using it?
Grand-wazoo on
Increasingly, I hate so much about the things for which we are choosing to deplete our precious finite resources.
Like how the fuck are we at the point where companies are blowing billions of dollars and wasting ungodly amounts of power and water on these delusional maladaptive coping strategies instead of investing all that effort into renewable infrastructure, housing, and healthcare?
Rhetorical question, I know the answer is and always will be money.
Jazzlike_Mountain_51 on
We need regulation on AI meant to mimic human behavior. Otherwise this new technology with huge potential to improve people’s lives will turn into a massive misery machine.
Preventing people from moving on and going through the pain that they have to feel is going to have very real consequences on future relationship building. It also opens up so many genuinely terrifying and manipulative modes of monetization. If you don’t pay the $299 monthly subscription we will delete Grandma. This isn’t good for anyone.
ConsciousCanary5219 on
mmm, this is deep & profound. can’t say anything on its pros & cons.
Puzzleheaded-Dog1872 on
….I would download the AI of the people I hate and ask them how Hell is and who all is down there with them. 🥱
rose_emoji on
As someone grieving who wishes really insane tech advances could somehow bring my loved one back to me, I can’t stand when these get brought up. Why would I want to talk to a bot that’s probably poorly mimicking her? I want my real person and nothing like this could ever come close.
PlasmaHanDoku on
People have to understand that you have to accept and move on as it creates development otherwise it can add other issues like increasing obsession
Next stop: Mikoshi. See ya in the major leagues, Jackie.
mochafiend on
Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. My mom has been gone two years, and I can’t even listen to audio or see video of her. Pictures are barely tolerable, and I still need time/breaks between when I look at them.
Even if I were to get more comfortable watching/listening to what I have of her, this is supremely fucked up and it makes me so angry that technology wants to subvert everything it is to be human. Death has meaning. Life has meaning. I would give anything to have my mom back and I miss her so much. But this is seriously so fucked and it infuriates me.
No matter what data they ingest of her (and honestly, I hate even calling digital memories of her “data”), they will never get her personality.
I hate, hate, hate this.
What can regular people do about all this AI bullshit? God, I’m so angry.
Small_Ad_4525 on
Oh so your mother died and you need to take a break from work to grieve?
Nope, just use the demontech to wear the corpse of your loved one, its just like talking to them!
October_13th on
I wrote my college capstone paper on this exact topic back in 2019. My paper was on AI and the idea of a “digital afterlife” using scraps of a person’s internet presence, text messages, etc. I’m not surprised that it’s being offered already. I don’t think that the AI simulacrum of a person’s life is going to ever be realistic enough or nuanced enough. Even if it is, it asks the question of “when do we ever mourn and move on” from the death of a loved one when we have their AI avatar with us indefinitely. It’s a strange and melancholy topic.
GoodGuyGrevious on
that’s just plain creepy, but how would they gather content of a model? If someone’s parents are in their 50’s most of their life is not online. Something else that occurs to me is that if we use people’s digital archives to train a model we would have to have good ai spam filtering, which would maybe be a great pivot from this company
chickey23 on
What if I download it for myself when I’m alive and train it?
bitterbrew on
I get the disdain for this but it also feels like the closest way someone, right now, could push for a version of digital immortality. Give your digital AI self enough photos and information and you’ve created a version of you that can outlast you. Of course your kids will just turn you into Alexa but still I always thought it was a fun idea.
cute_polarbear on
Once cloning of humans become feasible…what’s stopping people from straight up cloning dead loved ones?…
Sparktank1 on
Was this not already news when a parent found peace from using AI to let her artificial child forgive her own murderer?
adaminc on
No, you are talking to an AI, it isn’t an avatar of anything. Your loved one is gone, this thing isnt them, it isn’t an avatar of them, it’s just a scam playing on your emotions.
They had this in the show Evil, too.
2Scarhand on
Oh, look! Another real life horror inspired by “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” I see no way in which this will go wrong.
King_XDDD on
The founder is the actor who played Dez from the Disney show Austin and Ally.
FirmEcho5895 on
I met a bloke who was working on one of these at Cambridge University. He said the primary motive – apart from finding out what AI could actually do – was to create something to help ethics committees consider and discuss rules and guardrails. He said the sooner we have legal rules the better, but we can’t expect ethics experts to just imagine them up in abstract.
The scariest thing to me is that people may ask for, and act upon, advice from this AI because it looks like someone they trusted. If there are bad consequences, who is legally accountable?
28 Comments
“The company, 2Wai, went viral after founder Calum Worthy shared a video showing a pregnant woman speaking to an [AI](https://www.dexerto.com/tag/ai/) recreation of her late mother through her phone. The clip then jumps ahead 10 months, with the AI “grandma” reading a bedtime story to the baby.
Years later, the child, now a young boy, casually chats with the avatar on his walk home from school. The final scene shows him as an adult, telling the AI version of his grandmother that she’s about to be a great-grandmother.
The concept immediately drew comparisons to Be Right Back, the hit 2013 episode of Black Mirror where a grieving woman uses an AI model of her deceased boyfriend, played by Domhnall Gleeson, built from his online history. In that episode, the technology escalates from chatbots to full physical androids.
Social media users didn’t hold back. Many called the video “nightmare fuel,” “demonic,” and urged that the technology “be destroyed,” sparking a fresh wave of debate over how far AI should go when dealing with the dead.
As AI avatars get more realistic and robotics rapidly advance, it may only be a matter of time before physical android recreations become feasible, raising even bigger ethical questions.”
It’s something I thought about a while back. If you had enough recordings of a person, you could probably construct a decent copy, even post mortem. But honestly, the lack of letting go feels more like dissociation and is probably problematic for any number of psychological and ethical reasons.
Never understood why this was a bad thing. If people don’t want to let go it’s their prerogative. As long as they aren’t hurting anyone they can do what they want in their own time. Probably beats scrolling instagram
Aren’t you legally dead if you are brain dead? I think it’s just another social network, same audience.
Also Harry Potter becoming reality. This is just like the talking paintings at Hogwarts.
“The mirror of Erised” — anyone who has lost a loved one i think understand why Harry Potter chooses to use the mirror in this way.
But Dumbledore is probably that it does no good to dwell on such things
How do you prevent these companies from using your likeness? My grandmother would probably have hated this thing. What’s to stop one of her kids from using it?
Increasingly, I hate so much about the things for which we are choosing to deplete our precious finite resources.
Like how the fuck are we at the point where companies are blowing billions of dollars and wasting ungodly amounts of power and water on these delusional maladaptive coping strategies instead of investing all that effort into renewable infrastructure, housing, and healthcare?
Rhetorical question, I know the answer is and always will be money.
We need regulation on AI meant to mimic human behavior. Otherwise this new technology with huge potential to improve people’s lives will turn into a massive misery machine.
Preventing people from moving on and going through the pain that they have to feel is going to have very real consequences on future relationship building. It also opens up so many genuinely terrifying and manipulative modes of monetization. If you don’t pay the $299 monthly subscription we will delete Grandma. This isn’t good for anyone.
mmm, this is deep & profound. can’t say anything on its pros & cons.
….I would download the AI of the people I hate and ask them how Hell is and who all is down there with them. 🥱
As someone grieving who wishes really insane tech advances could somehow bring my loved one back to me, I can’t stand when these get brought up. Why would I want to talk to a bot that’s probably poorly mimicking her? I want my real person and nothing like this could ever come close.
People have to understand that you have to accept and move on as it creates development otherwise it can add other issues like increasing obsession
[https://www.tiny-voice.com/max-headroom-30-years-into-the-future-deities/](https://www.tiny-voice.com/max-headroom-30-years-into-the-future-deities/) This was literally a Max Headroom episode.
Next stop: Mikoshi. See ya in the major leagues, Jackie.
Nope nope nope nope nope nope nope. My mom has been gone two years, and I can’t even listen to audio or see video of her. Pictures are barely tolerable, and I still need time/breaks between when I look at them.
Even if I were to get more comfortable watching/listening to what I have of her, this is supremely fucked up and it makes me so angry that technology wants to subvert everything it is to be human. Death has meaning. Life has meaning. I would give anything to have my mom back and I miss her so much. But this is seriously so fucked and it infuriates me.
No matter what data they ingest of her (and honestly, I hate even calling digital memories of her “data”), they will never get her personality.
I hate, hate, hate this.
What can regular people do about all this AI bullshit? God, I’m so angry.
Oh so your mother died and you need to take a break from work to grieve?
Nope, just use the demontech to wear the corpse of your loved one, its just like talking to them!
I wrote my college capstone paper on this exact topic back in 2019. My paper was on AI and the idea of a “digital afterlife” using scraps of a person’s internet presence, text messages, etc. I’m not surprised that it’s being offered already. I don’t think that the AI simulacrum of a person’s life is going to ever be realistic enough or nuanced enough. Even if it is, it asks the question of “when do we ever mourn and move on” from the death of a loved one when we have their AI avatar with us indefinitely. It’s a strange and melancholy topic.
that’s just plain creepy, but how would they gather content of a model? If someone’s parents are in their 50’s most of their life is not online. Something else that occurs to me is that if we use people’s digital archives to train a model we would have to have good ai spam filtering, which would maybe be a great pivot from this company
What if I download it for myself when I’m alive and train it?
I get the disdain for this but it also feels like the closest way someone, right now, could push for a version of digital immortality. Give your digital AI self enough photos and information and you’ve created a version of you that can outlast you. Of course your kids will just turn you into Alexa but still I always thought it was a fun idea.
Once cloning of humans become feasible…what’s stopping people from straight up cloning dead loved ones?…
Was this not already news when a parent found peace from using AI to let her artificial child forgive her own murderer?
No, you are talking to an AI, it isn’t an avatar of anything. Your loved one is gone, this thing isnt them, it isn’t an avatar of them, it’s just a scam playing on your emotions.
They had this in the show Evil, too.
Oh, look! Another real life horror inspired by “Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.” I see no way in which this will go wrong.
The founder is the actor who played Dez from the Disney show Austin and Ally.
I met a bloke who was working on one of these at Cambridge University. He said the primary motive – apart from finding out what AI could actually do – was to create something to help ethics committees consider and discuss rules and guardrails. He said the sooner we have legal rules the better, but we can’t expect ethics experts to just imagine them up in abstract.
The scariest thing to me is that people may ask for, and act upon, advice from this AI because it looks like someone they trusted. If there are bad consequences, who is legally accountable?
[https://bsky.app/profile/smoothdunk2.bsky.social/post/3m5mxzwjj6s2k](https://bsky.app/profile/smoothdunk2.bsky.social/post/3m5mxzwjj6s2k)