Episode 2392 - July 27 - Tiếng Anh - Deepfake của người thân đã mất - Vina Technology at AI time - Lê Quang Văn | Podcast - Nhac.vn

Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business

By Zeyi Yang. May 7, 2024.

People are seeking help from AI-generated avatars to process their grief after a family member passes away.

["Deepfakes" refer to synthetic media in which a person in an existing image or video is replaced with someone else's likeness. This technology utilizes deep learning, a subset of artificial intelligence (AI), to create highly realistic digital forgeries. These AI-generated images, videos, or audio can convincingly mimic the appearance and actions of real people. In the phrase "Deepfakes of your dead loved ones are a booming Chinese business," it means that companies in China are using deepfake technology to create digital recreations of deceased individuals. These digital representations can appear in videos, images, or even interactive formats, allowing people to see and interact with lifelike renditions of their departed loved ones. This business has become popular in China, possibly due to cultural practices around honoring the deceased or technological advancements and demand in the market.]

Once a week, Sun Kai has a video call with his mother. He opens up about work, the pressures he faces as a middle-aged man, and thoughts that he doesn’t even discuss with his wife. His mother will occasionally make a comment, like telling him to take care of himself—he’s her only child. But mostly, she just listens.

That’s because Sun’s mother died five years ago. And the person he’s talking to isn’t actually a person, but a digital replica he made of her—a moving image that can conduct basic conversations. They’ve been talking for a few years now.

After she died of a sudden illness in 2019, Sun wanted to find a way to keep their connection alive. So he turned to a team at Silicon Intelligence, an AI company based in Nanjing, China, that he cofounded in 2017. He provided them with a photo of her and some audio clips from their WeChat conversations. While the company was mostly focused on audio generation, the staff spent four months researching synthetic tools and generated an avatar with the data Sun provided. Then he was able to see and talk to a digital version of his mom via an app on his phone.

“My mom didn’t seem very natural, but I still heard the words that she often said: ‘Have you eaten yet?’” Sun recalls of the first interaction. Because generative AI was a nascent technology at the time, the replica of his mom can say only a few pre-written lines. But Sun says that’s what she was like anyway. “She would always repeat those questions over and over again, and it made me very emotional when I heard it,” he says.

There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them. In fact, the avatars are the newest manifestation of a cultural tradition: Chinese people have always taken solace from confiding in the dead.

The technology isn’t perfect—avatars can still be stiff and robotic—but it’s maturing, and more tools are becoming available through more companies. In turn, the price of “resurrecting” someone—also called creating “digital immortality” in the Chinese industry—has dropped significantly. Now this technology is becoming accessible to the general public.

Some people question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is actually a healthy way to process grief, and it’s not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. For now, the idea still makes a lot of people uncomfortable. But as Silicon Intelligence’s other cofounder, CEO Sima Huapeng, says, “Even if only 1% of Chinese people can accept [AI cloning of the dead], that’s still a huge market.”

AI resurrection

Avatars of the dead are essentially deepfakes: the technologies used to