A family in China has utilized "grief tech" to create an AI digital avatar of their son, who died in a car crash last year. Fearing the shock would harm his elderly mother's fragile health, the family uses the AI, which mimics his voice, appearance, and mannerisms, to conduct regular video calls with her.
https://www.livemint.com/news/world/i-miss-you-mother-speaks-to-ai-son-regularly-unaware-he-died-last-year-artificial-intelligence-creates-digital-twin-11775967278951.html
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The situation in this article is a lot more practical than it looks at first. Because the mother is in her 80s with a heart condition, the family is basically using this AI as a protective measure to keep her from a fatal shock. They are prioritizing her physical safety over the truth by letting the digital twin take over. It is a really interesting example of how these tools are being used in the real world to manage family trauma and health risks. We usually talk about AI for work or art, but using it to maintain a lie for someone’s well-being is a much more complicated ethical shift for the near future.
It’s straight up better for that old lady to die than for society to normalize this
This feels like a black mirror episode and I want to know how this turns out.
That is horrifying what the… Jesus Christ okay. I mean…
Hard pass personally. The embarassment and horror that I would feel to think I didn’t recognize my son was replaced by a computer, that I was talking to a robot, that I failed to share in the grief of my family or even worse made the grief worse every time I talked about my son with them. The idea that my family is talking behind my back whenever I talk about the conversation I just had with that son. To think that the mother’s memory of her son is tainted by the weak immitation of that personality, that the son never visits her, especially when those dying days come. I can’t speak for others, I just know this seems like a nightmare all around.
“Grief Tech” is a ridiculous term for this considering it literally doesn’t allow her to grieve as they’re kept unaware of a loved one’s passing in the first place. This is cruelty under the guise of kindness.
I see some comments on the effect that “lying to the elderly is unforgivable”, I have a different perspective.
My grandmother had alzheimers, extremely bad, couldn’t remember details from moment to moment and remembered almost no one including her children and grandchildren.
The one person she ***always*** remembered, at all times, was my grandfather, and his voice or his hand on hers could always calm her when she was most agitated.
He died a few years before she did.
She could not remember that he was dead, and would constantly ask anyone around her where he was, when he was coming back, etc, and reacted extremely negatively if told he was gone, to the point where she would experience the fresh loss of her husband of 60 years every time she was told.
We decided to stop telling her.
He was in another room, or he was out shopping, or he’d be right back, etc.
In what can only be described as a genuine miracle, one of my uncles had a voicemail he got from my grandfather a few weeks before he died saying he was 10 minutes away, and would be there soon, which we played for her multiple times a day to help calm her.
If this technology had existed, if we could have given her the comfort of his voice telling her things would be alright, that he was there with her, that he’d see her soon, that he loved her, we would *absolutely* have done so.
This is not some black and white, simply awful issue.
If or when the mom finds out, she’ll be left with three heartbreaking realizations.
1) Her son is dead.
2) Her entire family spared no expense in lying to her.
3) She didn’t recognize an imitation of her own child.
This last point is something that would irreparably BREAK a whole lot of people.
Forget the part where deepfake videos will be used for all sorts of absurd forms of identity theft, propaganda and mass manipulation.
We’re creating a culture where natural grief will be sanitized, profited over by self-serving vultures, and covered up with deception… while an entire civilization finds themselves talking to chatbots instead of fellow human beings.
This shit’s more Black Mirror than an actual Black Mirror episode.