The digital afterlife sector has accelerated growth to deliver brand-new and innovative methods of maintaining relationships with the deceased, and interacting with these memories of the deceased, via artificial intelligence (AI), virtual reality (VR), blockchain, etc. These services allow the bereaved to find comfort and let them know that someone’s digital legacy will live on.
HereAfter, MyWishes, etc., allow users to capture stories and messages while living; and then with some planning, those narratives can be handed down to relatives after a user passes away. Project December is a different form of digital afterlife that uses AI to develop chatbots that replicate or simulate conversations with deceased individuals. Specifically, Project December uses AI to replicate conversations with a deceased person by using the deceased digital evidence on different platforms to recreate their personality to develop human-like responses, providing a means for the bereaved to maintain a relationship with the deceased.
Mourners in China are also using AI to create digital avatars of their loved ones as a replacement for the traditional custom of light offering a digital reality experience. During the annual Qingming Festival in China, family members or relatives can speak to the digital avatar get closure, by offering the option of using traditional means or using technology.
VR has a similar capacity to create emotional bonds as the VR format offers deceased mother and daughter digital connection that has the potential for emotional connections.
However, “griefbots,” digital representation, avatar etc., presents an ethical dilemma. The researchers have warned of the potential psychological issues users of griefbot products may encounter, and several ethical and moral issues regarding breaches of data privacy laws.
While digital afterlife services expand in number and sophistication, there is a corresponding increase in the use of advanced technology to create immersive memorial experiences. For instance, VR environments are starting to allow users to not only visit simulations of their deceased loved ones, but also familiar places they shared together, like their family home from when the user was a child or some delightful vacation spot. Confronting the experience of sensation at a location or a likeness of a person offers an entirely different sense of grieving and remembering, thus affecting one’s sometimes still-enduring feeling of loss.
Vivid AI versions of individuals that some companies, such as Eternime and Replika, are already developing actually mimic not only the voice and appearance of, but also the character and mannerisms of the loved ones. These new entities are leveraging AI to attempt to do this by drawing upon the AI’s ability to learn everything about the deceased individual through their digital footprint, i.e., from their texts, emails, and social media posts.
Meanwhile, one emerging application of blockchain technology for the digital afterlife is to protect a trusted legacy related to authenticity and permanence of stored memories. After all, will someone be able to enter your account and delete anything on the platform? This may help you feel more assured as to how your digital selves are preserved beyond your mortal life.
Even with this innovation, experts generally caution the market of digital afterlifetime developments in the competence of its applications. There are ethical concerns about the issue of consent taken from the user’s surviving family or friends, making sure there is no case of emotional dependency on the digital lifelike replicas which can be powerful, or contingency of dubious benevolence to exploit the technique or the grieving family.
Moreover, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, there was significant and immediate interest in virtual memorialization in response to the inability to physically gather as families were resorting to livestreamed funerals and digital condolences, laying foundation for greater digital afterlife technologies to follow. This shift invites innovation, but there are growing debates about the ways to preserve dignity and privacy in digital spaces.
Another key area is digital inheritance — how are digital assets, social media accounts, and AI personae treated in death? For example, many platforms such as Facebook and Google, now offer “legacy contacts” or “inactive account managers” that allow for an individual to delete or manage an account at death following approval from a trusted individual. Managing AI personae and deepfakes will be another matter. It will present questions that current LCD policies will not address.
