Mourners employ artificial intelligence (AI) to digitally revive deceased individuals

Seakoo Wu, a grieving father in eastern China, visits a serene cemetery where he takes out his phone and plays a recording of his son on a gravestone.

They are words that were never spoken by the late student, but were developed by artificial intelligence.

“I know you are in great pain every day because of me and feel guilty and helpless,” Xuanmo says in a slightly robotic voice.

“Even though I can never be by your side again, my soul is still in this world, with you through life.”

Grief-stricken, Wu and his wife have joined a growing number of Chinese people who are turning to artificial intelligence technology to create lifelike avatars of their dead.

Ultimately, Wu wants to build a fully realistic replica that behaves just like his dead son, but lives in virtual reality.

“When we synchronize reality and the metaverse, I will have my son with me again,” Wu said.

“I can train him…so he can see me, he’ll know I’m his father.”

Some Chinese companies claim to have created thousands of “digital people” from just 30 seconds of audiovisual footage of the deceased.

Experts say they can provide much-needed comfort to people devastated by the loss of a loved one.

But they also bring to mind a disturbing theme from the British sci-fi series “Black Mirror,” in which people rely on advanced artificial intelligence to help them die.

– “The needs are growing” –

Wu and his wife were devastated when their only child, Xuanmo, died of a sudden stroke last year aged 22 while studying at the University of Exeter in the UK.

The accounting and economics major, avid athlete and posthumous organ donor “had such a rich and varied life,” Wu said.

“He always carried with him this desire to help people and a sense of right and wrong,” he told AFP.

After the boom in deep learning technologies like China’s ChatGPT, Wu started researching ways to bring her to life.

She collected photos, videos and voice recordings of her son and spent thousands of dollars hiring artificial intelligence companies to clone Xuanmo’s face and voice.

The results so far are preliminary, but she has also set up a task force to create a database containing vast amounts of information about her son.

Wu hopes to feed it into powerful algorithms to create an avatar that can copy his son’s thought and speech patterns with extreme precision.

Several companies specializing in so-called “ghost rats” have appeared in the United States in recent years.

According to Zhang Zewei, founder of artificial intelligence company Super Brain and Wu’s former partner, the industry is booming in China.

“In artificial intelligence technology, China is at the highest level in the world,” said Zhang from a workspace in the eastern city of Jingjiang.

“And there are so many people in China who have emotional needs, which gives us an advantage in terms of market demand.”

Super Brain charges 10,000 to 20,000 yuan ($1,400 to $2,800) to create a basic avatar in about 20 days, Zhang said.

They range from the dead to living parents unable to spend time with their children, and – controversially – the ex-boyfriend of a heartbroken woman.

Customers can even have video calls with a member of staff whose face and voice are digitally overlaid with the missing person.

“The significance … for the whole world is huge,” Zhang said.

“A digital version of someone (can) exist forever, even if their body is lost.”

– “The New Humanism” –

Sima Huapeng, who founded Nanjing-based Silicon Intelligence, said the technology “brings about a new kind of humanism.”

He compared it to portraiture and photography, which helped people remember the dead in revolutionary ways.

Tal Morse, Visiting Research Fellow at the Center for Death and Society at the University of Bath in the UK, said ghost bots can provide comfort.

But he cautioned that more research is needed to understand their psychological and ethical implications.

“The key question here is … how ‘faithful’ ghostbots are to the personality they are designed to mimic,” Morse told AFP.

“What happens if they do things that ‘taint’ the memory of the person they are supposed to represent?”

Another problem stems from the inability of dead people to consent, experts said.

While the permission was probably unnecessary to imitate speech or behavior, it might be needed “to do certain other things with that simulacrum,” said Nate Sharadin, a philosopher at the University of Hong Kong who specializes in artificial intelligence and its social implications.

For Super Brain’s Zhang, any new technology is a “double-edged sword.”

“As long as we help those who need it, I don’t see a problem”.

He doesn’t work with those who may have negative effects, he said, referring to a woman who had attempted suicide after her daughter’s death.

Grieving father Wu said Xuanmo “probably would have been willing” to be digitally resuscitated.

“One day, son, we’ll all be united in the metaverse,” he said as his wife broke down in tears before his grave.

“Technology is getting better every day…it’s just a matter of time.”