Now AI can keep you alive after youre gone, and its as creepy as it sounds

Date:
Thu, 19 Dec 2024 03:00:00 +0000

Description:
Lifes Echo offers way to make AI persona to mimic users after they pass away.

FULL STORY

Imagine going to a family reunion and reminiscing about a loved one who has
passed away, only for someone to open an app to reveal an AI-fueled replica 
of the departed you can have a conversation with. 

You ask about their childhood, first job, or their emotions on their wedding
day, and they answer correctly, in their own voice and words. That's the
vision of a new company called Lifes Echo, which offers a suite of AI tools 
to enable you to produce a digital ghost of yourself capable of conversing
with your loved ones after youve died. 

Lifes Echo is designed to capture the essence of who you are before you
shuffle off this mortal coil. The idea is that your stories, voice, and
personality dont have to vanish. Instead, they can be preserved in a digital
format with which your friends and family can interact, even when youre long
gone. Its a way to keep a version of you alive  in the most uncanny valley 
way possible. 

Heres how it works: you sit down with an AI interviewer named Sarah, who
conducts five 45-minute interviews. Sarah asks about your childhood, family,
career, love life  all the big stuff. She digs deep with over 1,000 questions
in her database, encouraging you to share your most personal stories and
details. These interviews are casual and conversational, almost like therapy,
but with a digital afterlife twist. 

Once the sessions are complete, the conversations are transcribed, and the AI
builds a unique model of you. Its not just a recording; its a digital clone 
of your voice, stories, and personality. This is your AI Echo. Your family
members can then ask this AI version of you questions, and it will respond
with answers drawn from the life stories you provided. Imagine your daughter,
decades from now, asking, How did you feel when I was born? and your AI Echo
delivering a heartfelt answer as if you were right there. 

AI tools like Character.AI have enticed users by offering to simulate the
personalities of current and historical celebrities. Then, there are AI voice
cloning tools like ElevenLabs and Respeecher that have demonstrated that AI
can mimic people's voices incredibly well. At the same time, MyHeritage turns
old still photos into moving videos . But Life's Echo is going for something
deeper. 

"Like most people, I am familiar with the lives of my parents and 
grandparents but I know nothing about my great grandparents. After three
generations, knowledge of our existence almost completely vanishes," CEO Ruth
Endacott said. Lifes Echo will help to preserve a lasting record that allows
future generations to engage with and learn intimate and very important
details about our lives, key experiences, and perspectives."

AI Eternity 

Ruth co-founded Life's Echo with her husband, Steve Endacott. Appropriately,
Steve Endacott is already known for his efforts to bring AI into the public
sphere thanks to creating "AI Steve," the UKs first AI candidate for
Parliament. 

The sentiment behind Life's Echo is touching and could be very heartwarming
for the right people. But, it's undeniably an eerie concept too. Picture your
virtual self relying on those interviews to convey who you were and what you
were like to people who won't be born for a long time. It's uncomfortable to
envision your voice, your memories, and your personality all distilled into 
an algorithm available for a posthumous chat at any time. 

But, if you're really into the idea, you can use the same AI tools and
interviews to produce a personalized autobiography for your funeral, record
your own eulogy to be delivered by the AI version of yourself, and even a
whole script for the person running the funeral based on your stories and
preferences. Its like having a ghostwriter who knows precisely what youd want
said at your send-off. 

Of course, this isnt the first time tech has tried to offer a digital
afterlife. Other services, like Eternos and Project Lazarus, have explored
similar ideas, where AI models of deceased loved ones can answer questions 
and share memories. But Lifes Echo goes beyond them with the voice mimicry 
and depth of its interviews. 

There are other questions, of course. Even if you like the idea, will talking
to a digital version of a loved one help people grieve, or will it keep them
stuck in the past? How do you explain it to kids? And if your AI Echo exists
in the cloud, who controls it after youre gone? Regardless of whether you're
curious or queasy imagining it, you may be having conversations with deceased
loved ones before you know it.

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Link to news story:
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/now-ai-can-keep-yo
u-alive-after-youre-gone-and-its-as-creepy-as-it-sounds

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