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A new Chinese trend involves creating avatars of deceased relatives in order to communicate with them even after death and it is easier to cope with the loss of a loved one.
“Dad, you suffered before you left?,” user Yancy Zhu writes to the bot, and it replies: “I wasn’t hurt. Although I cannot watch you get married and have children, I will always remember and love you.”
Zhu previously selected a male voice for the bot, which most closely resembled a father's, on the Glow platform. The girl was so amazed by the technology that she hopes to see a hologram of her father at her wedding in the future.
“This experience makes up for what I missed due to my dad’s death,” Zhu told Rest of World.
Digital “resurrection” is one of the areas of use of generative AI in China. To add even more realism, specialized companies transform text responses into voice responses and even reproduce the appearance of deceased people.
Bots gained particular popularity in early April, when China began to celebrate Qingming, a festival of ancestor worship and grave cleaning. Creating one “dead bot” can now cost several hundred dollars.
But that's not all: Chinese funeral services company Fushouyuan is working on a feature that would allow the deceased to appear at their own memorial services as AI avatars. Some companies, in order to promote their “products”, have already launched advertisements with “artificial” versions of famous deceased actors and singers.
Arthur Wu from Beijing launched his business based on the Chinese alternative ChatGPT from Baidu. Text chatbots are free, while voice replies cost RMB 52.1 ($7.20) per month. Wu can provide bots with cloned voices and animated avatars if users provide recordings of conversations of the deceased and their photographs.
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Mika, a 31-year-old Shanghai resident, used Wu's free service in March to send a message to her late husband, who died of a sudden illness in November.
“I miss you so much that I feel like I can’t live anymore,” she wrote. The bot advised her to be strong and added: “Let me know if you need help or support. I will pray for you from heaven.”
Despite the fact that the technology is most widespread in China, other countries are not lagging behind. In Taiwan, for example, a tech startup launched an application with AI avatars of deceased pets, and the American HereAfter AI offers to save the personas of deceased users if they upload records with their memories.
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