Blue sky ideas: old avatars never die, they only soldier on

The internet has a long memory. Our digital legacies comprise years of search requests, images and comments. US start-ups want to turn that data into something more purposeful.

Silicon Valley’s version of immortality does not involve transforming brainwaves into binary code, another subject of this New Year Lex column on blue sky thinking. Instead, start-ups such as Eter9 and HereAfter AI are developing services driven by artificial intelligence that create digital avatars. These will go on interacting with others even after the person they are based on is gone.

Companies such as Facebook and SafeBeyond already memorialise existing social media posts and digital assets. Eter9 aims to go one step further with a new social network that offers to build users a virtual self. This counterpart learns from your interactions and can then connect with the world as if you were present. HereAfter AI takes voice recordings and makes chatbots that can replicate someone’s conversation.

There are several possible medical and commercial applications for such technologies. Sonantic can create AI voices for those unable to speak. JLL, the property services group, worked with Google to launch its own AI assistant called JiLL.

But practical applications increase rather than eliminate ethical concerns. The wealth of online data available means virtual personas could in theory be created without the say-so of the individual. That raises the risk of fraud. US lawmakers have proposed a bill that would regulate the use of synthetic media known as deepfakes.

For now, the threat is limited by the clumsiness of the creations. Academics Maggi Savin-Baden and David Burden say online personas built today are unlikely to be mistaken for a still-living subject. Improvements in natural language processing and the ability to learn are required.

Even if convincing digital avatars become possible, demand may not be high. Multiple start-ups have invested in digital resurrections but none has yet created a mainstream service. Technologists may simply be discovering that ordinary people are more reconciled to death as the natural corollary of life than some of the inhabitants of Silicon Valley seem to be.

This is the last of five articles on blue sky thinking published by Lex today. Look out for the others in Lex online.