"What she sent me was hysterical," said Jed Brubaker, a University of Colorado Boulder professor and co-researcher with Morris. "It was a stage play with lighting directions that opened with, 'We gather today to honor the memory of Amelia Eggheart.' That was how we started talking about what was going on in this space."
"We anticipate that within our lifetimes it may become common practice for people to create a custom AI agent to interact with loved ones and/or the broader world after death," Morris and Brubaker wrote in their latest paper, 'Generative Ghosts: Anticipating Benefits and Risks of AI Afterlives.'
Brubaker has studied the intersections of death and technology for the past 15 years. After his grandfather died, he wondered whether, instead of scrolling through his Facebook memorial page, what it would look like if he could sit down and have his grandpa tell him through virtual reality about the stories flooding the social media platform.
Morris, the director and principal scientist for human-AI interaction research at Google, took some creative liberties in prompting a generative AI program to eulogize her chicken. She wound up with the script to a play memorializing Amelia Eggheart - and an itch to further explore how AI could be used to commemorate the dead.
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