One of the many horrors that Gen AI is bringing to life out of dystopian sci-fi. Absolutely loathe this and wish I weren't entering a future with AI "cloning" of dead people, loved ones, and (probably) me.
Cloning a dead loved one is a fun thought exercise - but I can't quite figure out how you would do this in real life? What would the training set be? I know in my life you could train an AI on my professional emails, writings, lectures, etc., but that wouldn't at all teach it how to communicate with my kids. You could train it on my social media posts (I don't actually have many of those...), but again, that version of me isn't the one my mom would recognize or want to reminiscence with at Thanksgiving dinner. Text messages might be the best option - but I rarely "meme war" my loved ones in person as often as I do on text chains. I just don't think that data set would produce an AI that could come close to being satisfying for grieving loved ones.
I'm just not at all sure you could accurately duplicate the many facets of a person without having recorded basically their whole life as a training set... Now there's a dystopia for you! A 24/7 surveillance state built on the premise that it's needed to clone you when you die.
First: this isn't a thought exercise. People have been doing it for years[1][2] and are trying to commercialize it. The results have become frighteningly convincing, at least for some people. You can convincingly clone both voices and writing, and the combination is even more convincing.
The training set would be exactly what you mentioned: chats between you and your family, friends, and coworkers. Professional writing might be useful for another purpose, to replicate your writing style (as we've seen done to famous authors).
Most people send hundreds of personal messages a week, which (over time) is more than enough to train a model.
This is really interesting - Thanks for sharing! It looks like these services are taking an "interview" approach, so they are building their own dataset. That makes a ton of sense, and really avoids a lot of the concern of cloning people without their consent (it would be hard to talk them into hours of interviews without their knowledge).
Some people have tried this, even before computers were available to individuals.
Finnish composer, synthesizer inventor and futurologist Erkki Kurenniemi started recording his life in 1970 and continued until his death in 2017.
First he used audio cassettes and paper, then a video camcorder, and over the decades every form of digital recording available. Supposedly he also obsessively stored everyday items with which he had interacted.
His projection was that this mass of digital and physical data could be used to create a digital clone of him by the year 2048.
An article in Finnish about his lifelong recording:
