AI is raising people from the dead

The Future. AI is putting the power of resurrection in people’s hands… and that could have some unintended consequences in the matters of mental health, consent, and copyright — for both the living and the dead. With so much at stake, as companies race to provide more and more powerful tools, everyone may need to protect their “likeness” to stay ahead of the curve.

Grave-generation
Moving on is hard. So, there’s an AI for that.

• Tools like Midjourney and ChatGPT are being used together to create avatars of deceased relatives to help people cope with grief.
• Some funeral companies, like China’s Shanghai Fushouyun, are even offering it as part of their memorial services… making for a very different type of viewing experience.
• But it’s also being used by people to bring back celebrities they miss — a move that family members are not cool with.

There’s been a fascination with generating lifelike replicas of the deceased for the past decade, starting with a Tupac hologram that played at Coachella in 2012 to ongoing “live” performances of artists like Roy Orbison and Buddy Holly.

And AI will only supercharge those capabilities. Avengers co-director Joe Russo even believes the tech will eventually let audiences generate a movie “starring [their] photoreal avatar and Marilyn Monroe’s photoreal avatar.”

That feels like a recipe for a whole new understanding of “consent,” which is exactly what Congress is trying to figure out now.