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Rabbit Hole #1

Seeking immortality through one’s art is passé. Why not just be immortal?

In April 2019, the Dalí Lives exhibit opened along with an AI recreation of Salvador Dalí:

Dali Lives is an advanced recreation of a single personality using AI. In this scenario, the artist is integrated into a museum setting. However, to build this required vast resources. The rest of this article explores a few Ghostbot platforms available to the general public and living artists.

Dalí Lives is an advanced instance of a growing phenomenon with the potential to disrupt both the art world and technologically mediated inter personal relationships. Ghostbots (sometimes called Griefbots) are an impending challenge for post mortem privacy and the arts space, and have found exploration in some recent socially conscious science fiction. This technology is defined loosely as efforts to use digital versions of an individual to recreate them in a way that can survive after the death of the individual. The first of these to gain major traction, Eternime, is now defunct after a period of media hype:

Eternime was an innovator in the Ghostbot space that just sort of faded away. It is unclear how much of the project would have been generative versus an organized digital diary.

Two successors in the space, HereAfter AI and Replika AI, were both founded by computer scientists as projects to recreate specific individuals that they were hoping to memorialize. The ultimate fates of each of these projects is telling as to the future of this space. Replika does not recreate individuals, but rather uses input from individuals to create a digital friend. HereAfter AI is essentially a digital diary. For something like Dalí Lives to become mainstream for artists and for people seeking a form of digital immortality, something in between HereAfter and Replika needs to become widely available. HereAfter seeks to recreate an individual, while Replika applies machine learning to create generative conversations that an individual will respond well to. There is no bridge between this at the moment that is available without the resources of an entire museum. This has wide implications for who has the right to a digital immortality that is similar to the gate kept nature of most advanced AI – at the moment it is limited to those rich enough to hire a team of computer scientists and pay for the computing power, or to people who are already famous enough that organizations are willing to put in the effort and time to recreate them.

The consequences of poorly executed generative AI are vast – as it could lead to an individual or artist producing nonsensical or harmful conversations during an artistic expression or during conversations with close relatives. In scenarios where the artist or individual is deceased, there is no recourse if an AI is not representative of who they are, and there is a possible future to this technology where the quality of your digital afterlife is mediated by wealth. This is already present, as HereAfter AI and Mind Bank AI (discussed later) are very expensive. HereAfter AI relies on a paid, tier subscription model to maintain a digital afterlife. Like a Medieval Indulgence.

Ghostbot and Griefbots have their origins in the efforts of a few grieving computer scientists. HereAfter AI started as the project of a computer scientist to preserve the memory of their father. Replika began as an app that recreated the deceased friend of a computer scientist (download the friend’s Ghostbot here if you are curious) and eventually became Replika- a service that creates digital beings from input of the user. Replika takes input from the user to create a friend (or romantic partner) but does not recreate the user themself.
HereAfter AI is currently the most market viable Ghostbot platform. It acts mostly as an advanced diary and does not generate new conversations.

There is one other mass market Ghostbot/Griefbot that I found, Mind Bank AI, which markets itself as a “Digital Twin”. Mind Bank AI is a pretty shady company. Like HereAfter, I am unconvinced that their privacy practices are ready to handle the implications of a technology explicitly designed to gather the most intimate stories of a person’s life.

Mind Bank AI is a newer and more obscure reach into the Ghostbot space. It gives the appearance of being generative, but seems in reality to be a personal diary with vague goals of incorporating mental health tools into the introspection the app facilitates. They have vague promises of future technology being combined with the data the app collects “the Artificial Intelligence and computers of the future will have ample data to compile a digital version of yourself and predict your response. To put it simply, your twin can learn how you think.” Something particularly dystopic about this application is, in its effort to cast a broad net in its proof of concept, it markets itself explicitly to employers, encouraging employers to offer Mind Bank to their employees as a mental health tool and then use the digital twins to keep copies of the useful things their employees know that are relevant to the company.

“Scale Your Best Employees – Mind Bank Ai
Transfer years of expertise and company data that is locked inside your employees mind through a guided Personal Digital Twin.”

This company seems to be misrepresenting itself with a fancier UI than HereAfter AI, and is trying to collect profiles in the hope that in the future they will be able to build naturalistic chat bots the recreate an individual.

Mind Bank AI plays a slight of hand. It does not yet seem to use generative conversations. Instead, it draws people in with vague promises of self help and an eventual digital twin once AI technology has reached the point where it is possible. However, Dalí Lives proves that it is already largely possible, it is just gate kept by wealth and access to enough data about a person.

Mind Bank AI and Eternime are/were designed to be used for extended periods, possibly years, to gather enough data to recreate an individual. This is a reason why this technology is particularly suited to disrupt the arts space, as artists are likely to have vast banks of carefully crafted and stored records of their work, public appearances, and thought processes. Ghostbots, Griefbots, and Digital Twins are in very nascent stages, and are something to be watched along with privacy laws and the increased access to AI to people without vast resources and technology knowledge.

Bibliography

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Ahmad, M. A. (2016). After death: Big data and the promise of resurrection by proxy. Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems, 397–408.

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Tech company lets you chat with your dead loved ones | Metro News. (n.d.). Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://metro.co.uk/2021/12/16/ai-company-lets-you-chat-with-your-dead-loved-ones-15781759/

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Eterni.me links to this post from their now defunct url. It is 7 years old and seems to be the only remnant of the company left. I think it would be noteworthy to do a “where are they now” of the founders.

Watch Black Mirror | Netflix Official Site. (n.d.). Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://www.netflix.com/title/70264888

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