When we miss someone who has passed away, we often turn to old photographs or voicemails for comfort. Now, thanks to artificial intelligence, we have the option to interact with a virtual bot designed to resemble and sound like our loved ones.
Known as griefbots, deadbots, or re-creation services, these digital replicas of the deceased offer the illusion that the person is still alive, allowing for interactions as if they never left. Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, a researcher at the University of Cambridge’s Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, delves into how technology influences our experiences of death, loss, and grief.
Nowaczyk-Basińska and her colleague Tomasz Hollanek, a technology ethicist at the same institution, recently examined the ethical implications of technology that promises a form of “digital immortality” in a paper published on May 9 in Philosophy & Technology. Are we sacrificing human dignity in the pursuit of AI advancements? Science News sat down with Nowaczyk-Basińska to explore this issue further. The following interview has been condensed for brevity and clarity.
SN: The TV series Black Mirror featured an episode in 2013 where a woman receives a robot resembling her deceased boyfriend. How plausible is this scenario?
2024-05-15 08:30:00
Source: www.sciencenews.org
