Digital Immortality

“Can grandma finish reading me The Wizard of Oz?” a young boy asks as the tech demo begins to play. “Okay,” Alex responds in her typically cheery, artificial voice. Then, a second later, a different voice emerges from the machine, this one much more human-sounding. But it’s not. It’s an AI-generated replication of the kid’s dead grandma.

Speaking onstage, Amazon senior vice president and Head Scientist for Alexa Rohit Prasad explained that the voice was generated using “less than a minute of recording” of the grandmother’s actual voice. The implication is obvious.

“These attributes have become more important in these times of the ongoing pandemic when so many of us have lost someone we love,” Prasad said. “While AI can’t eliminate that pain of loss, it can definitely make their memories last.”

For now, this is just a tech demo. Little else is known about the project except for the fact that Alexa’s engineers pulled it off by treating this as a “voice conversion task and not a speech generation task.” Amazon declined to comment on questions about how the feature works, when it will be rolled out, or who will have access to it.

“We are unquestionably living in the golden era of AI, where our dreams and science fictions are becoming a reality,” Prasad said at the conference. But will that technology actually improve our lives, or will it lead to new nightmares?

In 2020, Microsoft was granted a patent to create a similar system using images, voice data, social media posts, electronic messages, and written letters to create a chatbot that can act in the voice of somebody, replicating how they would behave. The patent reads: The specific person may correspond to a past or present entity (or a version thereof), such as a friend, a relative, an acquaintance, a celebrity, a fictional character, a historical figure, a random entity etc. It also mentions using 2D or 3D models to make these bots come to life. However, it seems Microsoft doesn’t actually have any plans to follow through with this project. After the patent made news in 2021, Tim O’Brien, ethical AI Advocacy at Microsoft, posted on Twitter that it was filed in 2017, meaning it “predates the AI ethics reviews we do today.” He added, “and yes, it’s disturbing.”

Angeliki Kerasidou, an associate professor at the Ethox Centre at University of Oxford points out another simple issue with using AI to replace individual people.

“A person does not stop growing,” she says. “The bot will forever be static, even if you can learn from the interactions. We’re not talking about some kind of super intelligence here. So we might be able to reproduce certain active actions, but I don’t think that we will be able to reproduce the person in itself.” Culled from HORIZONS