{"id":2580,"date":"2021-01-26T20:17:33","date_gmt":"2021-01-26T20:17:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thenextweb.com\/?p=1335628"},"modified":"2021-01-26T20:17:33","modified_gmt":"2021-01-26T20:17:33","slug":"what-real-ai-developers-and-black-mirror-both-get-wrong-about-digital-resurrection","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.londonchiropracter.com\/?p=2580","title":{"rendered":"What real AI developers and Black Mirror both get wrong about digital resurrection"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
<\/div>\n

One day we\u2019re all going to die. Science and technology can put it off for awhile, but the march of time stops for no human. Sadly, most of us will be forgotten. It\u2019s a bleak prognosis but that\u2019s how things have always been. And that\u2019s unlikely to change, despite the best efforts of the AI community.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a new tech trend (that\u2019s actually a dumb old trope) sweeping through big tech, little tech, and South Korean TV stations: digital resurrection.<\/p>\n

The premise is simple. A person living in the modern world leaves tiny traces of who they are in everything they do. Our \u2018digital footprint,\u2019 if you will, has become so massive that we produce enough data for a clever AI to mimic us.<\/p>\n

Microsoft, for example, was recently granted a patent called \u201cCreating a conversational chatbot of a specific person<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

We\u2019ve seen similar AI systems such as this one<\/a> that, given a few articles from a specific author, can imitate their style. If you crank that up to 11 and imagine an AI that\u2019s been trained on thousands of personal texts, emails, and transcribed voice messages, it becomes easy to see how such a paradigm could be used to create a bot that imitates a person\u2026 living or dead.<\/p>\n

[Read: <\/span>How this company leveraged AI to become the Netflix of Finland<\/a>]<\/em><\/p>\n

Popular British TV series Black Mirror<\/em> aired an episode in 2013 called \u201cBe Right Back.\u201d The show took the idea of a chatbot trained on the deceased\u2019s data and added in what was basically a futuristic 3-D printed android that became a real-world living embodiment of that person. The big idea is that such a robot could help people find closure, especially if they lost a loved one unexpectedly.<\/p>\n

But, as is often the case, the reality is quite different. In the real world we\u2019ve almost exclusively seen digital resurrection used as a marketing tool or a gimmick. And that\u2019s because AI, no matter how much data it has, cannot actually \u201crecreate\u201d a person in any meaningful way.<\/p>\n

Recall the holograms of Tupac Shakur and Whitney Houston or the extra cringey insertion of Kurt Cobain into Guitar Hero 5 as a playable character who could be forced to perform any song in the game.<\/p>\n