Humans remember their dead in several ways. If one is buried, a tombstone is erected which lists the name, date of birth, date of death, and prayers according to the faith of the person who has passed.
The physical state of the person is altered as the ground consumes them, and while the body will cease to exist, the tombstone will signify who is buried there.
With the advent of photography, humans found another way to preserve the memory of their dead. Now, on a special piece of paper, an image of their loved one was saved. This later turned into a digital form, one so compact that we can carry thousands of them in our pocket and access millions more if connected to the internet.
With AI, a new form of remembering our dead is emerging. AI models have been trained to bring static images to life, making pictures into moving objects. Someone who might have died decades ago can suddenly be brought to life on our smartphone or laptop and speak to us as if on a video call. Using videos and audio recordings of the person who has passed, their exact voice pattern could be recreated, and you could be receiving a call from someone who is not alive anymore.
Image enhancement and making static pictures move is not in and of itself a new technology. Artists and programmers have previously been successful in doing this, but building each frame for a new video was a painstakingly long process. Several museums worldwide spent small fortunes hiring IT companies to make holograms of famous personalities in a bid to make the museum more interactive. One such hologram is of the Quaid-e-Azam, at the National History Museum in Lahore.
AI can do this in seconds and, suddenly, any picture can be transformed into a video – and one that, with the clarity of our prompt, can do exactly what we would like it to do.
At present, we cannot make a definite judgement over how dangerous or useful this may or may not be, but one thing is for sure: bringing these images ‘back to life’ is going to greatly alter how we perceive our dead, and ultimately how humans mourn.
How will we emotionally cope with this? Whenever an awful event happens in our lives, we are told to ‘let it go’, that if we dwell on it for too long, it would be detrimental to our health. I use health deliberately, since mental and physical health affect each other, and neither exists in a vacuum. While one’s physical state will have gone, their live video – with their mannerisms – will enter our screens and our brains.
Yet if we now see our loved ones who have passed interact with us in this way, what does that mean for us to ‘let it go’? The past, whether that be decades ago or just a few days, will become alive for us in our present. For now, the idea may seem novel, but it will soon become a part of our daily lives.
The human mind has not thought this way before. How is one supposed to react when their deceased loved one calls them? We might know that one will not be able to see them in person again, but the feeling of the call could just be one of that person just being in a different country. Especially for Pakistanis and others with weak passports and limited financial means to travel, entire lives are lived with parents, siblings and cousins being physically apart in different countries, and their existence only confirmed through calls and social media.
Then come the potential dangers, outside of how our emotional states will be altered. One might argue that it would only be through our own volition that an AI company could recreate the voice and moving image of someone from our family. However, what is to stop someone else, or potential scammers, who have access to pictures and videos of someone, from recreating moving images of them? Banks might have to revert back to in-person visits only for certain transactions.
Recently, Meta was in hot water for creating chatbots of celebrities such as Taylor Swift and Anne Hathaway without their consent, violating their privacy.
Though we like to say the future is in our hands, this one is not.
The writer is the managing editor at Folio Books. He tweets/posts saeedhusain72 and can be reached at: saeedhusain72gmail.com