China is using AI to resurrect the dead

Using a combination of emerging AI technologies, innovators in China have developed "griefbots" – chat programmes that embody the personalities and memories of the deceased – in an effort to reconnect with their loved ones.

Yu Jialin, 29, a Chinese software engineer in Hangzhou, came across with an essay about lip syncing technology that uses computer programme to match lip movement with speech recordings.

While going through the essay, his grandfather, who died nearly a decade earlier, came to mind. "Can I see grandpa again using this technology?" Yu Jialin asked himself.

His journey to recreate his grandfather is one of several accounts now surfacing in China of people using artificial intelligence to resurrect the dead, reports Business Insider.

Using the programme, Yu got a chance to speak his final words to his grandfather. In an interview with investigative journalist Tang Yucheng, Yu said he was 17 when his grandfather died.

After weeks of intense dedication, late nights, and numerous challenging obstacles, Yu was on the verge of realising the results of his deeply personal, unofficial artificial intelligence project.

"Hey, Grandpa. Guess who I am?" Yu asked the programme at one point. Grandpa delivered a generic response. "Who you are is not important at all. Life is a beautiful miracle," the bot wrote back, according to Tang.

Yu's face lit up with a smile upon hearing those words, but his joy quickly faded. The figure in the video was not his actual grandfather; instead, it was a digital projection that Yu had assisted in creating using his grandfather's text messages, photos, videos, and letters.

"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.

Systems like ChatGPT, the popular text-based programme that closely imitates human speech, have already learned how most people naturally speak or write, said Lu, whose research focuses on AI.

For Yu to teach his AI model what his grandfather was like, he retrieved a trove of old letters from his grandmother. She had exchanged them with Yu's grandfather when they were young, and they revealed a side to the man that even Yu hadn't glimpsed as a child, he told Tang.

"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.

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