Home » News » China is using AI to resurrect the dead, and give people one final chance to bid adieu

China is using AI to resurrect the dead, and give people one final chance to bid adieu

(Image Credit Google)
Image credit : Digital World (YouTube) In Hangzhou in the year 2020, a young Chinese software engineer by chance came upon an essay on lip-syncing technology. Its basic idea is to correlate lip movements to voice recordings using a computer program. But his grandfather, who passed away about ten years prior, entered his head. "Can I see Grandpa again using this technology?" Yu Jialin asked himself. His quest to bring his grandfather back to life was chronicled in April by investigative journalist Tang Yucheng for the government-run publication Sixth Tone. His is just one of many Chinese testimonies that are now coming to light of people utilizing artificial intelligence to bring the dead back to life. People in the nation have begun creating chat programs, known as griefbots, with the personalities and recollections of the deceased by fusing a variety of upcoming AI technologies in the hopes of having a chance to communicate with their loved ones once again. They gave Yu the opportunity to say his goodbyes to the man who raised him. When his grandfather passed away, the software engineer, who is now 29 years old, said he was 17 years old. [caption id="attachment_175477" align="aligncenter" width="640"]Griefbots
Stories of griefbots are becoming more popular in China as the globe becomes fixated on generative AI like ChatGPT.(Image credit : Yahoo Canada Style)[/caption] He still feels bad about the two times he treated his grandfather harshly. According to Tang, Yu once raged at the older man for disrupting a game and once ordered his grandfather to stop picking him up from school. His family stopped mentioning his grandfather after he died, he told Tang. "Everyone in the family was trying their best to forget Grandpa rather than remember him," Yu said.

ChatGPT craze drives the rise of the Griefbot

The idea of a griefbot has been tested for years, mostly as AI-powered software that can emulate humans by studying their records, recordings, and mementos. However, the rapid development of generative AI over the past year has elevated the capability and use of griefbots to entirely new heights. Older models needed enormous amounts of data. Now, laypeople or lone engineers like Yu may feed language models with snippets of a person's past and virtually duplicate their appearance, speech, and thought processes. "In today's technology, you don't need too many samples for an AI to learn the style of a person," Haibing Lu, an information and analytics professor at Santa Clara University, told Insider. According to Lu, whose research focuses on AI, systems like ChatGPT, the well-known text-based program that accurately mimics human speech, have already figured out how most people naturally speak or write. Yu obtained a collection of old letters from his grandmother in order to teach his AI model about his grandfather. When they were children, she had traded them with Yu's grandfather, and according to Tang, they showed a side of him that even Yu hadn't seen before. Also read : Rural Pokemon Go duo bid goodbye to 4 & 5 star raids following nerf

"You only need to tweak the systems a little bit in order to loosely get a 99% similarity to your person. The stark differences will be minimal," Lu said.

By Awanish Kumar

I keep abreast of the latest technological developments to bring you unfiltered information about gadgets.

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