Reviving The Dead With AI: Is It Really Worth It?

If AI could let you speak with your deceased loved ones again, would you take the chance? A few companies and experts believe this will soon be possible, and some are even starting to market their own solutions. Nothing supernatural about their proposal; what they are offering is, rather, the ability to talk to a digital representation of the dead, fine-tuned by combining large language models like GPT-4, speech synthesis and AI generation tools. In China, as the Strait Times reports, some funeral companies are rapidly bringing the worship of the deceased into the digital age, allowing relatives to speak to a digital avatar of the dearly departed. Many have started offering this service in early April, around the time of the Qing Ming Festival (or Tomb Sweeping Day), a public holiday when people remember and honor the dead. One of them, funeral services provider Shanghai Fushouyun, started even earlier, conducting its first AI-assisted funeral in January 2022, when colleagues and students of a deceased Chinese surgeon had the opportunity to chat with his digital replica on a screen, for a final farewell.