For years, advances in the reproduction of audio and video have made digital copies of deceased people possible, said Mark Dredze, a professor of computer science at Johns Hopkins University who helped create a finance-oriented AI language model called BloombergGPT. He pointed to big-budget movies and TV shows that feature impeccable computer-generated images.
You, Only Virtual addresses this challenge by focusing on communication between an individual living person and the deceased, thereby attempting to recreate their specific one-on-one dynamic, Harrison said. Harrison rejected possible privacy concerns raised by the use of personal correspondence to build a chatbot without the consent of the deceased, noting that the user of the chatbot is the same person to whom the communications were initially sent.
StoryFile, a company that says it has 40 employees and $10 million in annual revenue, offers an interactive version of deceased relatives by recording an hourslong question-and-answer session with the individual before his or her death, and in turn, attempting to create a reproduction that responds to prompts.In this case, the virtual reproduction utters pre-recorded content in a real-life manner, said Stephen Smith, the CEO of StoryFile.
To be sure, some experts doubted the progress for this industry afforded by language models like ChatGPT and warned of potential risks.Generative AI sometimes responds to prompts with arbitrary or inaccurate information, Marcus added, posing a risk to users who may struggle to fully understand the limits of the technology when it performs as a reproduction of a deceased loved one.