More ghosts in the machines as legacy pixels create digital life after death
Experts on how technology may soon transform our afterlives
“Our dead are never dead to us, until we have forgotten them.” When George Eliot wrote about loss and grief, she could never have imagined that, just a few hundred years later, the ways in which we remember our lost loved ones would involve everything from resurrected holograms and lifelike avatars to moving photographs and interactive simulations that look, sound and even move like the dead.
In recent years, technological advances have meant an increasing number of people are choosing to create digital ghosts, using memories, social media data and artificial intelligence to, essentially, bring the dead back to life online.
It may sound like the plot of a sci-fi blockbuster or an episode of Charlie Brooker’s acclaimed anthology series, Black Mirror but the so-called digital afterlife industry is booming, with companies around the world offering a new, more modern way for people to preserve memories and, ultimately, grieve.
Website Afternote, for example, allows users to digitally store their life story and leave posthumous messages for loved ones while genealogy company Myheritage offers a “Deep Nostalgia” feature that turns photographs into short videos showing the subject smiling, winking and nodding.
Author and psychologist Elaine Kasket, who has written extensively about how the digital age is affecting how we live and die, says such services have been created to help users deal with a loss of control.
“The idea of keeping people around or reviving them using digital remains is kind of the ultimate extension of the utopian idea that technology can ultimately smooth out all the rough parts of our experience,” she explained. “Essentially, we’ll never be uncomfortable in any way because technology is going to solve all that for us.
“Grief and the loss of people that we love is one of the scariest and most difficult things that a lot of us have to confront so, of course, when the technology becomes available, we think, ‘Oh, wow, this is the cavalry that’s come to take away this ultimate discomfort’.
“But if we take away that experience of grief, what does that do to our experience and value of life itself?”
Novelist Sophie Cameron poses a similar question in her latest Young Adult book, Our Sister, Again, published next week.
Set on a small island in the Hebrides, the plot follows Isla who is grieving the loss of her older sister, Flora, when her family are offered the chance to be part of a top-secret trial, which revives loved ones as fully lifelike AI robots.
Although she was intrigued to delve further into the subject after watching TV shows like Humans, and 2001 blockbluster film AI Artificial Intelligence, Cameron admits she was always less interested in the technology aspect and more the natural human reaction to loss.
“I wanted to write a story where I could focus on how AI would impact a family, how they would react to having someone ‘return’,” said the writer, who is from the Highlands and now lives in Spain with her family.
“In the book, the characters’ grief is so strong because they loved their sister and daughter so much – but would you react to people and life in the same way if you knew that it was going to go on forever? How do we progress as people if our lifespan is infinite? The whole point of life is that it is fleeting, that’s what makes it precious. It would be different if you could potentially go on and on.”
In the book, Flora’s robotic replica is made through a combination of interviews with living relatives and friends, and videos posted to social media. The idea of using our digital data to bring people back to life, Cameron says, touches on the age-old question of what really makes us real.
“A lot of us leave massive online
footprints, but we’re not entirely ourselves online in the same way we are in person,” she said. “If you were to create someone based on their Tiktoks or Youtube videos, for example, that wouldn’t be exactly the same as the person who interacted with their friends or family.”
While technology may not be so advanced that we can create living, not quite breathing, robotic avatars – the kind of machine sentience required is decades, if not generations, away from being realised – hologram and projection science has been successful in creating lifelike versions of dead celebrities for use in concerts and live events.
Buddy Holly, Whitney Houston and Roy Orbison are just a few of the gone but not forgotten performers who have been resurrected – a trend that Kasket says raises the burgeoning ethical issues surrounding the data of the dead, which is sitting in memoriam on the world’s servers.
The author, who recently published All The Ghosts In The Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data, said: “It begs the question, who has the right to speak for the dead? Who has the right to make decisions about the use of the deceased person’s image? In the Anthony Bourdain documentary Roadrunner, for example, several sentences were constructed from Anthony’s voice that he never spoke when he was alive.
“They were created with AI for the purposes of the film, and there was an outcry. It doesn’t feel OK to me, to have somebody die, and to then have their personality, their personhood, their words, their images, cannibalised and deployed for different purposes.
“With data of the dead, you’re getting into the same kind of territory, in a way, as debates around rights for artificial intelligence.”
The data we leave behind raises not just ethical and moral questions about its use but environmental concerns, too. It has been estimated that Facebook could have as many as 4.9 billion deceased members by 2100.
In 2019, for example, Twitter announced it would delete accounts that had been inactive for six months, including those of deceased users but faced such a furious backlash that the plans had to be scrapped.
Kasket explained: “Facebook and Twitter profiles being memorialised by default has fed this notion that eliminating the person’s social media profile is kind of like eliminating the person themselves, like it’s the last vestige of the really real person.”
This need for immortality through data, she says, has farreaching consequences: “The data of the deceased is mounting up massively on the world servers, which of course have to be cooled down. I have just a fundamental, environmental and ecological issue with that, especially when it’s directed in service of solving a problem that isn’t a problem – grief.”
Comfort Shields, a Doctify-reviewed chartered psychologist, added: “In these very early days of grief-related AI, potentially damaging psychological as well as ethical implications are already arising.
“While the positive benefits of AI for the grieving include feeling comforted by an easily accessible loved one’s avatar, and being left with a gift of a loved one’s stories, for those more vulnerable to negative patterns of complex bereavement, AI can make it more difficult to accept death and to recover from loss.
“Additionally, it is unknown to what extent AI may be able to use and alter deceased people’s voices and images against their wishes and those of their loved ones. Lingering images, voices, and avatars of the deceased circulating online and potentially under-regulated may bring additional pain to the bereft.”
Maggi Savin-baden, a professor at the University of Worcester, who has given written evidence to the House of Lords Select Committee on Artificial Intelligence, said: “Generally, people are not good at making wills, but they’re even worse at creating any kind of digital will. You’re supposed to leave a person to deal with your digital legacy and not a lot of people do that.
“There are so many stories about what happens to people’s digital artefacts, whether it’s the music they’ve bought or digital pictures, which they can’t then pass on to their family. It’s a real mess and it’s just not legislated for either. We think we can control our data, but actually, we can’t.”
So, in a future world where our data could bring us back, would you want to live forever as a hologram, avatar or chatbot?
Cameron said: “Would I want to be brought back? I don’t think so. I just can’t see how a digital version of me would be... me.”