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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2407 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 13, 2025

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We had a death in the family recently. It will be a simple funeral - a viewing, a cremation, and a burial of her ashes. I chuckled a bit when the funeral home asked us for a DVD for the photo slideshow during the ceremony. It got me thinking - how is AI technology and AR/VR going to change the future of the funeral industry?

Imagine that an AI avatar was trained on voice recordings, videos, photos, and text of the deceased. You visit the cemetery with your family and you all don the VR goggles, stepping into the living room of grandma's house. She's tending to the garden and her avatar ad-libs about her tomatoes and the recent weather. Just as you remembered from a few years ago before she had to go into the nursing home.

If you've seen the incredible improvements in image and video generation in the last 2-3 years, as well as the improvements in text-to-speech (see a previous Friday Fun thread post that I shared) you'll probably agree with me that this is something we'll see in our lifetime. Yes, we'll have a period of uncanny valley, but when it's fully ironed out, there will be a convincing digital copy of ourselves floating in the ether.

Everyone spends some time chatting with grandma then she excuses herself to take the cookies out of the oven. You decide it's about time to grab lunch with the family and say goodbye for now.

The funeral home charges you for the disposable insert in the VR goggles that soaks up your tears.

My mother has actually been doing a text version of this with her ancestors that lived in the 1800s.

She fed hundreds of pages of translated letters into the prompt, and can have the AI sort of respond to fake written letters with real sounding stuff.

I expect text based AIs are probably already possible for anyone that spends enough time online, and especially if the training data is comprehensive enough.

Cool! It's just like the Torment Nexus (from the famous Black Mirror episode "Don't Invent the Torment Nexus", which Charlie Brooker meant as a cautionary tale...)

In this case, Be Right Back, with the robot replaced by AR/VR. In all fairness, likeness to a Black Mirror episode should not be a thought terminating cliché.

A lifetime? More like 2 years. The only thing we can't do today (with good results) is the interactive AI avatar or real time video.

The other reply is right, you don’t have anywhere near enough data on Grandma (unless she’s a famous celebrity with a 40+ year TV career) to train an AI that ‘feels’ like it’s her. She’ll make an infinity of hand movements, facial tics, use certain words and the illusion will be instantly destroyed.

It’s as much about learning the things she would never say as it is appearing like an authentic old person. For it to be fully authentic those Meta glasses will have to catch on so we can record dozens of hours of mundane interactions with others. I would estimate that a few thousand hours would be enough for a good facsimile.

Nobody's storing their data rigorously enough to have a compelling product. The first generation of kids who are going to be able to digitally replicated were born in 2018, with auto-populating albums of videos and photos in cloud services. The adults aren't recording enough of their real thoughts and opinions.

Maybe me going through a couple days of interviews with an AI from my deathbed will be enough? But it'll be a pretty shallow copy.

If it was just a brief little loop of one specific memory, like the photos in Harry Potter, then I guess that would be OK. But it's not going to stay there, is it? It will develop persistent memory and learn over time, so it's basically an afterlife. And every single member of the family will want their own version, so now there's 10 copies of grandmas that have all evolved over time. that sounds horrible.

I feel that, just like all technology, its use can be both beneficial and harmful depending on how we approach it. An avatar can help us remember and honor those who have passed, and perhaps even help us get over their death. There's a reason why people put photos of their loved ones on the wall - you look up at them from time to time to think about how they would say, or how they would react to something. On the other hand, the avatar can make us indulge in our worst neuroses - Using it as a crutch and refusing to grow, or clinging to the past and being untruthful with oneself.

Shit, that actually sounds awesome. The awkward conversations that are sometimes a risk with loved ones when they're alive can be undertaken with a "rewind" button?

I'm sure a family could agree to have a merged copy of grandma. Something we should start specifying in our wills.

Don't get me wrong, I can absolutely see how this would potentially be awful, but being able to talk with your ancestors has been a strong human desire for a long time. It'll be cool right up until they lobotomize my model for problematic language 20 years after I pass.

I reckon it'll be more like "sanitize your speech in phone calls in real time 20 years before you pass".

I fail to see what's so horrible about it. It's a pale shadow of true immortality, but it's better than nothing, and I don't see how ten copies is any worse than one. You could always get them to sync up, and if you can't, then a granny who has a different set of memories and doesn't remember what you said to her last week is not much different from a living one with dementia.

I disagree that it's better than nothing. Such a "copy" wouldn't be the person you love, it would be a simulacrum pretending to be them. Even if it's many times more convincing than what we could do now, it would still be nothing more than a doll. The original, the being with actual value, is lost forever. If I can't have my loved one back, I wouldn't want to piss on their memory by pretending that a cheap imitation is a reasonable substitute for having them around.

If that's how you see things, then you have the option of not creating such a simulacrum, and asking your family not to make one of you. If you're an EU citizen, you probably have stronger legal recourse, such as the people who successfully got ChatGPT to ignore their names.

I would be entirely fine with such a clone of me being around when I wasn't. I don't see it being any worse than people fondly looking back at pictures or videos of the deceased today, they're gone either way, and they're instantiating a replica in their brain to represent them.

Sure. But the fact that I may have legal recourse does not make the idea not horrifying. I was explaining to you why I find it horrifying, not saying that there's nothing to be done.

It's a pale shadow of true immortality

It’s the only immortality that is realistic. Not because “brain upload” is against the laws of physics but because it’s probably grossly inefficient.

I'll take it over being plain old dead, and we'll have to see what future technologies can do in regards to full-fat uploading. Like living on through your genes, it beats utter non-existence.

Wouldn't it be great if your kids could see a healthier, better version of grandma? No reason to wait until she's dead, just turn on AI grandma and avoid an awkward trip to the nursing home.

If she's lucky, maybe someone will remember to turn on grandma's "your family cares about you and comes to visit regularly" VR experience.

I think the future is going to be far more awful and dehumanizing than we can possibly imagine right now.

Wouldn't it be great if your kids could see a healthier, better version of grandma?

Certainly, that's why I'm a transhumanist and a doctor.

No reason to wait until she's dead, just turn on AI grandma and avoid an awkward trip to the nursing home.

I presume you don't see yourself doing this, and neither do I (assuming my grandmas were anything but ash now). So most decent people who visit because of obligation or simply because they care will continue doing so. The people who had little inclination to do so won't, and I don't see this making much of a change on the margin.

So far, improvements in telepresence and telecommunications means it's easier for lonely old folk to speak to their families, leaving aside their issues operating a phone or a video app. The alternative wouldn't be a drastic increase in visits, it would be them being left even more in the cold than is already the case.

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