A somewhat creepy Chinese trend involves creating avatars of deceased relatives to communicate with them even after death and make it easier to survive the loss of a loved one.
«Dad, did you suffer before you left?», — user Yanxi Zhu writes to the bot, and the bot replies: «I was not in pain. Although I can’t watch you get married and have children, I will always remember you and love you».
Zhu had previously chosen a male voice for the bot that most closely resembled her father’s on the Glow platform. She was so impressed with the technology that she hopes to see her father’s hologram at her wedding in the future.
«This experience makes up for what I missed because of my dad’s death,» Zhu said to Rest of World magazine.
Digital «resurrection» — is one of the ways generative AI is being used in China. To add even more realism, specialized companies transform text responses into voice responses and even recreate the appearance of deceased people.
Bots became especially popular in early April, when China started celebrating Qingming, a festival of ancestor worship and grave cleaning. Today, the creation of one «dead bot» can cost several hundred dollars.
But that’s not all: the Chinese funeral services company Fushouyuan is working on a feature that would allow the deceased to appear at their own memorial services as AI avatars. Some companies have already launched ads with AI versions of famous deceased actors and singers to promote their «products».
Arthur Wu from Beijing launched his business based on Chinese alternative to ChatGPT from Baidu. Text chatbots are free, while voice responses will cost 52.1 yuan ($7.20) per month. Wu can provide the bots with cloned voices and animated avatars if users provide recordings of the deceased’s conversations and photos.
Mika, a 31-year-old resident of Shanghai, has been using Wu’s free service since March to send messages to her late husband, who died of a sudden illness in November.
«I miss you so much that I feel like I can’t live anymore,» she once wrote. The bot advised her to be strong and added: «Let me know if you need any help or support. I will pray for you from heaven».
Although the technology is most widely used in China, other countries are not far behind. In Taiwan, for example, a tech startup has launched an app with AI avatars of deceased pets, and the American HereAfter AI offers save the identities of deceased users if they upload recordings of their memories.