HereAfter AI is an application based on artificial intelligence that generates responses spoken in the voice of a deceased person. The dialogue is previously supported by hours of recorded interviews with the other person before her death. “I want children to hear their voice talking about all those things, and not from my voice when I try to paraphrase, but to hear it from their point of view, their time and their perspective,” he said. Stephenie Lucas Oneya user of the platform, to the portal of The New York Times.
HereAfter AI was presented in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe, and blink while answering questions. Both applications generate responses based on what users answered orally to platform prompts such as “tell me about your childhood” and “what is the biggest challenge you have faced?”
According to the app, there are around 5,000 people who have created their profiles. StoryFile offers a “high fidelity” version in which a historian interviews someone in a studio. But of course, there is also a version that only requires a laptop and a webcam to get started. The same co-founder of the startup company, Stephen Smithmade his mother, Marina Smith, will try it. His avatar answered questions at his own funeral in July of this year.
“People are apprehensive about death and loss,” the businessman said in an interview. James Vlahos, co-founder of HereAfter AI and added: “It could be a tough sell because people are forced to confront a reality they would rather not participate in.” The chatbot that Vlahos created for his father, before his death from lung cancer in 2017, was the inspiration for the development of the platform. Far from imagining it, Vahlos began receiving messages from people asking him if he could make them a bot of his deceased relatives.
“Like all ethical lines in AI, it is going to come down to permission,” he said. “If it’s done knowingly and voluntarily, I think most ethical problems can be resolved quite easily,” he said. Alex Connockprofessor of the Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford and author of the book The Media Business and Artificial Intelligenceto the New York portal.
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