When he wanted to give a gift to his father, who sacrificed a lot to raise him as a single parent, Lee Geon Hui came up with an unusual idea: an animated video message using artificial intelligence of his late grandfather, who is greatly missed by his father.
Lee wrote a message and, in December, hired Seoul-based technology company Vaice, South Koreato create a short video featuring a digital replica of his grandfather reading it. The virtual character referred to his father as “my dearest son” and apologized for forcing him to help with farm work when he was a child and for having opposed his son’s decision to become a hairdresser.
“My father said he wasn’t going to watch the video. But in the end he watched it and he cried. So I felt rewarded,” Lee, a 28-year-old office worker, said in a recent interview. “I wrote the script… because it was what I really wanted to say to my father.”
A growing number of digitally savvy South Koreans are exploring the possibilities that AI offers for creating video recreations of deceased people: several startups offer videos with AI-generated recreations of loved ones, while TV shows have shown AI-generated versions of deceased pop stars and actors.
This emerging sector raises both hopes and concerns. Some claim that this practice can provide comfort to grieving people, but others maintain that it raises complex ethical, psychological and legal questions.
“It is a double-edged sword, since it has to do with human emotions,” said Yong Man Ro, an artificial intelligence expert at the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology. “As AI technologies become integrated into people’s lives, they can also generate cultural experiences and situations that we have never experienced before.”
Many customers are looking for AI-generated versions of their deceased parents
Vaice CEO Jeongu Won stated that his company serves about 300 customers a month, mainly people in their 40s and 50s who want videos of their deceased parents. Others request videos of their deceased grandparents as gifts for their own parents.
Won explained that his company needs a few photographs and brief voice samples of the deceased to create an avatar. According to him, a basic video of between three and five minutes costs 600,000 won (about $390).
Many customers play these AI-generated videos when their families gather to perform commemorative rituals in honor of their loved ones or during major Korean holidays, Won said, adding that the scripts are usually written by the customers themselves.
Won noted that most include the words “I love you,” while others express grief over unresolved conflicts with their deceased parents and their hope to overcome them.
Lee’s grandfather died unexpectedly in a car accident before he was born, and Lee said he always felt that his father regretted not being able to show him that he had managed to make it as a hairdresser and start a family.
“I don’t know much about my grandfather. But when I saw the tears streaming down my father’s face, I got a little emotional realizing that he still misses him,” Lee said.
Artificial intelligence applied to grief raises ethical concerns
According to Choi Yu Ha, an executive at JL Standard, when the company launched a similar service five years ago, some grieving customers greeted it with suspicion because they feared it would reignite their pain. However, acceptance of this technology is spreading, thanks in part to digital recreations of deceased artists that have appeared on television.
Won stated that no client has told him that the service has made their grieving process difficult.
However, specialists warn that digitally recreating deceased people raises important ethical dilemmas and could affect vulnerable people by blurring the line between reality and the virtual world.
Choung Wan, professor emeritus at Kyung Hee University School of Law in Seoul, said laws are urgently needed to protect the dignity and other rights of deceased people. As he explained, these rules should prohibit the creation of an artificial intelligence-generated version of a deceased person if he or she objected before dying and establish clear limits on the commercial use of his or her image and voice.
Challenges will increase as technology advances
Experts argue that ethical dilemmas could become much more complex with the emergence of so-called “griefbots” or “deathbots,” programs capable of simulating two-way conversations between grieving people and artificial intelligence-generated versions of their deceased loved ones. Some startups are already experimenting with these types of products.
“From a psychological point of view, healthy grief involves acknowledging the absence of the loved one and overcoming the pain of their loss,” Choung said. “However, conversing with an artificial intelligence system that simulates a living person could hinder that acceptance process and, on the contrary, leave families trapped in a fantasy.”
Won said he is cautious about launching a chatbot based on artificial intelligence, since real-time conversations could not be monitored by the company and could raise unforeseen ethical problems.
Still, both the technology and its acceptance are advancing rapidly.
Choi said that technological advances make it possible to reproduce even the wrinkles and pores of a deceased person’s skin in surprising detail, and that customers report that the artificial intelligence-generated representations closely resemble their loved ones.
Ro noted that interactive chatbots still need to overcome some technological hurdles, such as a lack of synchrony between their responses and facial expressions. Additionally, they tend to seem less human as conversations drag on.
“There are those who wonder why we can’t have a one-hour conversation with chatbots, even though we can talk to them for five minutes. Efforts are being made to develop that technology,” Ro said.
Ro said he recorded a one-minute video with AI-generated representations of his own parents after both died last year, and played it during a family gathering with his siblings. When everyone saw the digital versions of their parents saying “Don’t worry” and “Take care of yourselves,” they were deeply moved.