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Staying in touch with a loved one after their death is the promise of several start-ups using the powers of artificial intelligence, though not without raising ethical questions.

Ryu Sun-yun sits in front of a microphone and a giant screen, where her husband, who died a few months earlier, appears.

“Sweetheart, it’s me,” the man on the screen tells her in a video demo. In tears, she answers him, and a semblance of conversation begins.

When Lee Byeong-hwal learned he had terminal cancer, the 76-year-old South Korean asked startup DeepBrain AI to create a digital replica using several hours of video.

“We don’t create new content” such as sentences that the deceased would have never uttered or at least written and validated during their lifetime, said Joseph Murphy, head of development at DeepBrain AI, about the “Rememory” program.

“I’ll call it a niche part of our business. It’s not a growth area for us,” he cautioned.

The idea is the same for StoryFile, a company that uses 92-year-old “Star Trek” actor William Shatner to market its site.

“Our approach is to capture the wonder of an individual, then use the AI tools,” said Stephen Smith, boss of StoryFile, which claims several thousand users of its Life service.

Entrepreneur Pratik Desai caused a stir a few months ago when he suggested people save audio or video of “your parents, elders and loved ones,” estimating that by “the end of this year” it would be possible to create an autonomous avatar of a deceased person, and that he was working on a project to this end.

The message posted on Twitter set off a storm, to the point that, a few days later, he denied being “a ghoul.”

“This is a very personal topic and I sincerely apologize for hurting people,” he said.

“It’s a very fine ethical area that we’re taking with great care,” Smith said.

After the death of her best friend in a car accident in 2015, Russian engineer Eugenia Kyuda, who emigrated to California, created a “chatbot” named Roman like her dead friend, which was fed with thousands of text messages he had sent to loved ones.

Two years later Kyuda launched Replika, which offers personalized conversational robots, among the most sophisticated on the market.

But despite the Roman precedent, Replika “is not a platform made to recreate a lost loved one,” a spokesperson, said.

Somnium Space, based in London, wants to create virtual clones while users are still alive so that they then can exist in a parallel universe after their death.

“It’s not for everyone,” CEO Artur Sychov conceded in a video posted on YouTube about his product, Live Forever, which he is announcing for the end of the year.

“Do I want to meet my grandfather who’s in AI? I don’t know. But those who want that will be able to,” he added.

Thanks to generative AI, the technology is there to allow avatars of departed loved ones to say things they never said when they were alive.

“I think these are philosophical challenges, not technical challenges,” said Murphy of DeepBrainAI.

“I would say that is a line right now that we do not plan on crossing, but who knows what the future holds?” he added.

“I think it can be helpful to interact with an AI version of a person in order to get closure — particularly in situations where grief was complicated by abuse or trauma,” Candi Cann, a professor at Baylor University who is currently researching this topic in South Korea.

Mari Dias, a professor of medical psychology at Johnson & Wales University, has asked many of her bereaved patients about virtual contact with their loved ones.

“The most common answer is ‘I don’t trust AI. I’m afraid it’s going to say something I’m not going to accept.’ … I get the impression that they think they don’t have control” over what the avatar does.
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Resisting the hype, Apple defied most predictions this week and made no mention of artificial intelligence when it unveiled its latest slate of new products, including its Vision Pro mixed reality headset.

Generative AI has become the tech world’s biggest buzzword since Microsoft-backed OpenAI released ChatGPT late last year, revealing the capabilities of the emerging technology. 

ChatGPT opened the world’s eyes to the idea that computers can churn out complex, human-level content using simple prompts, giving amateurs the talents of tech geeks, artists or speechwriters. 

Apple has laid low as Microsoft and Google raced out announcements on how generative AI will revolutionize its products, from online search to word processing and retouching images.

During the recent earnings season, tech CEOs peppered mentions of AI into their every phrase, eager to reassure investors that they wouldn’t miss Silicon Valley’s next big chapter.

Apple has chosen to be much more discreet and, in its closely watched keynote address to the World Developers conference in California, never once mentioned AI specifically.

“Apple ghosts the generative AI revolution,” said a headline in Wired Magazine after the event. 

‘Not necessarily AI?’

Arguments vary on why Apple has chosen a more subtle approach. 

For one, Apple follows other critics who have long been wary of the catchall “AI” term believing that it is too vague and unhelpfully evokes dystopian nightmares of killer robots and human subjugation to machines. 

For this reason, some companies – including TikTok or Facebook’s Meta – roll out AI innovations, but without necessarily touting them as such. 

“We do integrate it into our products [but] people don’t necessarily think about it as AI,” Apple CEO Tim Cook told ABC News this week.

Indeed, AI was actually very much part of Apple’s annual jamboree on Monday, but it required a level of technical know-how to notice.

In one instance, Apple’s head of software said “on-device machine learning” would enhance autocorrect for iPhone messaging when he could have just as well said AI.

Apple’s autocorrect innovation drew giggles with the promise of iPhones no longer correcting common expletives.

“In those moments where you just want to type a ‘ducking’ word, well, the keyboard will learn it, too,” said Craig Federighi.

Autocorrect will also learn from your writing style, helping it guide suggestions, using AI technology similar to what powers ChatGPT.

In another example, a new iPhone app called Journal, an interactive diary, would use “on-device machine learning … to inspire your writing,” Apple said, again not referring to AI when other companies would have.

But AI will also play a major role in the Vision Pro headset when it is released next year, helping, for example, generate a user’s digital persona for video-conferencing.

‘Not much effort’

For some analysts, the non-mention of AI is an acknowledgement by Apple that it lost ground against rivals. 

“They haven’t put much effort into it,” independent tech analyst Rob Enderle told AFP. 

“I think they just kind of felt that AI was off into the future and it wasn’t anything surprising,” he added. 

The glitchy performance of Apple’s chatbot Siri, which was launched a decade ago, has also fed the feeling that the smartphone giant doesn’t get AI. 

“I think most people would agree that Apple lost its edge with Siri. That’s probably the most obvious way they fell behind,” said Insider Intelligence principal analyst Yory Wurmser. 

But Wurmser also insisted that Apple is primarily a device company and that AI, which is software, will always be “the means rather than the ends for a great user experience” on its premium devices.

In this vein, for analyst Dan Ives of Wedbush Securities, the release of Apple’s Vision Pro headset was in itself an AI play, even if it wasn’t explicitly spelled out that way.

“We continue to strongly believe this is the first step in a broader strategy for Apple to build out a generative AI driven app ecosystem” on the Vision Pro, he said. 
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