TAMARA KNEESE IDEAS AUG 21, 2023 10:00 AM

Using Generative AI to Resurrect the Dead Will Create a

Burden for the Living
AI technologies promise more chatbots and replicas of people who have passed. But giving voice
to the dead comes at a human cost.
PHOTO-ILLUSTRATION: WIRED STAFF; GETTY IMAGES

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GIVEN ENOUGH DATA, one can feel like it’s possible to keep dead loved ones alive. With ChatGPT and
other powerful large language models, it is feasible to create a more convincing chatbot of a dead person.
But doing so, especially in the face of scarce resources and inevitable decay, ignores the massive amounts
of labor that go into keeping the dead alive online.

Someone always has to do the hard work of maintaining automated systems, as demonstrated by the
overworked and underpaid annotators and content moderators behind generative AI, and this is also true
where replicas of the dead are concerned. From managing a digital estate after gathering passwords and
account information, to navigating a slowly-decaying inherited smart home, digital death care practices
require significant upkeep. Content creators depend on the backend labor of caregivers and a network of
human and nonhuman entities, from specific operating systems and devices to server farms, to keep digital
heirlooms alive across generations. Updating formats and keeping those electronic records searchable,
usable, and accessible requires labor, energy, and time. This is a problem for archivists and institutions, but
also for individuals who might want to preserve the digital belongings of their dead kin.

And even with all of this effort, devices, formats, and websites also die, just as we frail humans do. Despite
the fantasy of an automated home that can run itself in perpetuity or a website that can survive for
centuries, planned obsolescence means these systems will most certainly decay. As people tasked with
maintaining the digital belongings of dead loved ones can attest, there is a stark difference between what
people think they want, or what they expect others to do, and the reality of what it means to help
technologies persist over time. The mortality of both people and technology means that these systems will
ultimately stop working.

Early attempts to create AI-backed replicas of dead humans certainly bear this out. Intellitar’s Virtual
Eternity, based in Scottsdale, Arizona, launched in 2008 and used images and speech patterns to simulate a
human’s personality, perhaps filling in for someone at a business meeting or chatting with grieving loved
ones after a person’s death. Writing for CNET, a reviewer dubbed Intellitar the product “most likely to make
children cry.” But soon after the company went under in 2012, its website disappeared. LifeNaut, a project
backed by the transhumanist organization Terasem—which is also known for creating BINA48, a robotic
 version of Bina Aspen, the wife of Terasem’s founder—will
purportedly combine genetic and biometric information with
personal datastreams to simulate a full-fledged human being
once technology makes it possible to do so. But the project’s
site itself relies on outmoded Flash software, indicating that the
true promise of digital immortality is likely far off and will
require updates along the way.

With generative AI, there is speculation that we might be able

to create even more convincing facsimiles of humans,
including dead ones. But this requires vast resources, including
raw materials, water, and energy, pointing to the folly of
maintaining chatbots of the dead in the face of catastrophic
climate change. It also has astronomical financial costs:
ChatGPT purportedly costs $700,000 a day to maintain, and
will bankrupt OpenAI by 2024. This is not a sustainable model
for immortality.

There is also the question of who should have the authority to

COURTESY OF YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
create these replicas in the first place: a close family member,
an employer, a company? Not everyone would want to be
Buy This Book At:
reincarnated as a chatbot. In a 2021 piece for the San Francisco
Amazon Chronicle, the journalist Jason Fagone recounts the story of a
Bookshop.org
Target man named Joshua Barbeau who produced a chatbot version of
his long-dead fiancée Jessica using OpenAI’s GPT-3. It was a
way for him to cope with death and grief, but it also kept him
invested in a close romantic relationship with a person who
If you buy something using links in our stories, we was no longer alive. This was also not the way that Jessica’s
may earn a commission. This helps support our
journalism. Learn more. other loved ones wanted to remember her; family members
opted not to interact with the chatbot.
In the end, though, it is developers and companies, not loved ones, who have control over how long
chatbots persist. The experimental program used to create Jessica Bot planned mortality into the system; to
save on operating costs, the developer intentionally built it to decay and die. Barbeau had to be judicious
with his time with Jessica, and stopped interacting with the chatbot before its battery drained too far so he
wouldn’t have to directly confront another form of death.

In some cases, developers might want to believe that chatbots can go on indefinitely, helping the dead
replace living workers altogether. For example, the SAG-AFTRA strike raises questions about the personality
rights of the dead, as generative AI can potentially be used to revive dead actors. Similar issues have already
played out with various deepfake versions of dead celebrities, including the controversial use of Anthony
Bourdain’s deepfaked voice in a documentary about his life, and in a more mundane, low-tech case, a
professor’s recorded lectures allowing him to continue working at a university after his death. But such re-
creations, in addition to potentially harming living workers, may also upset the surviving loved ones of the
dead and cause new bureaucratic headaches for them as they attempt to seek control over the replicas of
their dead family members. AI versions of people may be created without the knowledge or consent of
living kin.

The revival of the dead through AI reveals the power relations, infrastructures, and networked labor behind
all forms of digital production. We can create lifelike replicas of the dead, but these replicas rely on the
work of the living to persist: As is the case with digital legacies in general, someone has to pay for domain
names, delete spam messages, answer emails to dead accounts, update file formats, or move files from one
hard drive to another as websites and companies disappear. For those who are left behind to care
indefinitely for these creations, the psychological costs may be too much to bear.
If you buy something using links in our stories, we may earn a commission. This helps support our
journalism. Learn more.

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Tamara Kneese is a Senior Researcher at Data & Society Research Institute and the
Project Director of D&S’s new Algorithmic Impact Methods (AIM) Lab.

TOPICS DEATH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE CHATBOTS CHATGPT

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