If you’ve yet to develop healthy coping mechanisms for the heartbreaking — and deeply human — experiences of loss and grief, maybe don’t bother.
According to one metaverse CEO, the introduction of OpenAI’s ChatGPT may well speed up the process of getting a realistic, AI-powered digital avatar of your dead loved ones to market, way ahead of schedule.
“The AI is progressing extremely fast,” Somnium Space CEO Artur Sychov, whose company is currently working to develop a “Live Forever” mode for robot avatars in its “virtual reality world,” told Motherboard. “Honestly, it is progressing faster than even we anticipated.”
Somnium Space’s maybe-forthcoming “Live Forever” feature is simple, at least in theory. Hand Sychov’s firm a bunch of personal data, and they’ll create a digitized “you,” which will “live” “forever” in the company’s hallowed metaverse halls. You could die knowing that your kids and grandkids and otherwise loved ones would be able to communicate with this interactive version of you, and those loved ones, in turn, would never be forced to entirely accept your death. It’s not the Jeff Bezos school of physical immortality, but it’s certainly immortality lite.
“Literally, if I die — and I have this data collected — people can come or my kids, they can come in, and they can have a conversation with my avatar, with my movements, with my voice,” Sychov told Motherboard in a previous interview last April. “You will meet the person. And you would maybe for the first 10 minutes while talking to that person, you would not know that it’s actually AI. That’s the goal.”
At the time, Sychov told Motherboard that “Live Forever” was at least five years away. Now, per Motherboard, Sychov has chopped his imagined timeline down to two years or even less, and it’s all thanks to the work of OpenAI. The company’s buzzy chatbot has apparently pushed the immortality project into hyperdrive, even providing a step-by-step plan detailing how to integrate itself into the broader landscape of Sychov’s digital world after being installed into one of the game’s robot avatars.
source: https://futurism.com/chatgpt-emulating-dead-people