There is a man called James Banks who is a picture editor who gives up his own time in order to bring the dead back to life by an AI driven process known as ‘digital resurrection’. Facebook, where most things are derived from AI, is inevitably the place where people are going to in order to resurrect dead family members. Mr Banks, I suspect, is that rarity who does things for the right reasons. He says: “I always help these families for free because they’re vulnerable, and the last thing they need is someone scamming them or exploiting their grief.” But is it A Good Thing?
Some of the images and videos in the Sky News story, which you can read here, are on the face of it quite moving. For a parent who lost a young child, I can I can imagine the fascination of finding out, through digital resurrection, what they might have looked like today. And what about the video, based on a photograph taken in 1915, of the young solider who died in World War One ten days after the photograph was taken? It is hard not to be moved by it, as the family certainly were. But I have to say I find it more than a little disturbing, creepy almost.
On the day of my mum’s 103rd birthday – unfortunately she’s a bit too dead to enjoy it – I’m thinking of how I might react to an AI video based on a photograph of her as a young woman. And I am in no doubt that I have no wish to see one. The grieving process after my mum’s death occurred organically and quickly, primarily because I was able to recognise that her death was actually a blessing, in effect a deliverance from the years of terrible pain she suffered in later life as a result of myriad smoking-related conditions. Of course, you don’t want, or wish for, a loved one to die, but by the same token you don’t want them to suffer endlessly, either. When mum died, so did her pain. I only cried once, when I phoned her brother, the only surviving member of her Dutch family, and those tears dried in a heartbeat when he expressed complete indifference to her passing. But here’s the thing: following death and grieving there comes, to most of us, acceptance.
When I see a photo of the past, and I have many photos of family and friends who are no longer with us, there is a part of me that wishes they were still with us, particularly those who were from my era and in some circumstances much younger than I am. That loss will never go away. But in many instances, where people died in horrible circumstances, from ghastly terminal illnesses and conditions, I have similar feelings to the ones I have about my mum, a blessing, a deliverance. And ultimately, while it’s taken longer to get over some deaths than others, acceptance.
And with acceptance comes a desire to leave things as they are. To maintain my memories, for sure, sometimes perhaps by flicking through old memories, by going to places we might visit together, by playing a piece of music we both loved, but always in the way we were and not where one’s imagination, especially driven by AI, might take us.
Later on in this excellent piece on Sky News, Dr Elaine Kasket, a cyberpsychologist who studies the link between technology and grief, explains her reservations and concerns about whether digital resurrection “is actually eroding further our ability to discern what is actually real and historically accurate”. I am obviously no expert in the subject but I have seen enough in life to suggest that her concerns are entirely justified. People still consult with so called practitioners in the imaginary world of the supernatural, fraudsters in my view, who pretend to the grieving and vulnerable that they can communicate with dead people. The fact that people are dead means that they can no longer communicate with anyone. Digital resurrection is, to my mind, just another step down that road, and equally illusory, dangerously so.
Grief of course affects everyone differently and people deal with it in different ways and if people want to use the imaginary world of the paranormal or AI to achieve it, then who am I to stop them? I don’t think it’s very healthy, though, because we all die eventually and sometimes it’s better to accept it and get on with the rest of your life, with the memories you still have. Remembering us the way we were.
