Digital Afterlife: Hollywood and AI Tech

Can AI Replace Therapy? Hey Pi is the Conversational Chatbot that Works.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/how-pi-ai-replaced-my-therapist-72c21eca6f85

The integration of AI conversational chatbots like ChatGPT in mental health apps aims to screen for or support individuals dealing with grief, isolation, mild depression, or anxiety. By tracking and analyzing human emotions, these apps use machine learning technology to monitor a user’s mood or replicate a human therapist’s interactions. Although this technology presents opportunities to overcome financial and logistical barriers to care, skeptics argue that algorithms are still unable to accurately read and respond to the complexity of human emotion or provide empathetic care.

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Seance AI and the Digital Afterlife - Chatting with the Latest Grief Tech.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/seance-ai-and-conversations-with-deceased-62e96c7e6afd

Seance AI is a digital afterlife or death tech platform that uses conversational chatbot technology to give the illusion of talking to the dead. Seance AI was developed by software company, AE Studio and is operated by OpenAI’s API. The idea of a seance takes us back to the Victorian era and refers to a gathering of people trying to establish contact with the dead. The Hollywood film, Ghost put a 1990s spin on the idea with Whoopi Goldberg playing a con artist psychic reader who discovers she is the real deal.

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Grief is Artificial: Death in the Hands of Big Tech - Death tech companies and scientists explore AI and grief.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/grief-is-artificial-death-in-the-hands-of-big-tech-and-science-deba060bf95f

Death tech companies and scientists are exploring innovative new designs in grief technology and pushing boundaries that are mind-blowing, like preserving interactive memories in the form of a bot or avatar that replicates the deceased likeness, mannerisms, and voice. But for some, this new overlap between the living and the dead is more fantastic than 19th-century memento mori portraits or death photographs. The technology then and now plays tricks on the vulnerable, prolongs grief, and messes with our sense of reality which is evermore virtual.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Hollywood’s Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media — specifically death tech, digital afterlife, AI death and grief practices, AI photography, biometrics, security, and policy, and an author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.

AI poses an existential threat to the entertainment industry as we know it, and it is entirely justified for the WGA to demand control over its usage. Networks and studios have a troubling history of adopting new technologies. In 2008, studios commanded a $16.9 billion market in DVDs and home videos, but their lack of understanding and adaptation to streaming technology caused an 86 percent loss within the first decade. Change happens rapidly in the entertainment sector, with sound movies replacing silent films and television superseding network radio. The rise of streaming has significantly impacted artists’ income and studio financing, wiping out billions in revenue.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Hollywood’s Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media — specifically death tech, digital afterlife, AI death and grief practices, AI photography, entertainment, and an author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.

Can Artificial Intelligence Recreate the Deceased - death tech companies think so.

Can artificial intelligence recreate our deceased loved ones and will it help or hinder how we grieve? Tech experts and grief therapists have debated the pros and cons of AI but because the technology to replicate the deceased is still in its infancy, the social impact has yet to reach a consensus.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/can-artificial-intelligence-recreate-the-deceased-1f3b65ffae5a

The Rise of the Griefbot

In 2020, a young Chinese software engineer named Yu Jialin stumbled upon an essay about lip-syncing technology that detailed synchronized lip movements with recorded speech. The concept of a grief bot provided an opportunity to communicate his final words to the man who played a significant role in his upbringing.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/the-rise-of-griefbots-44c6b5b8d7db

Creating an AI Version of MeHow I used speech synthesis AI and an AI digital human creator.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/creating-an-ai-version-of-me-578f0c8aa0ff

Creating an AI Version of Me Part 2 - Death tech conversational video platforms, commercial AI video, and generative AI art.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/creating-generative-ai-videos-f57c4b9cb53

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.

https://www.buymeacoffee.com/gliuphoto

Who owns your footprint after you die? Is it big tech companies or the loved ones you’ve left behind? Access and ownership cause unintended consequences that shift societal norms and behaviors in online spaces. Mourning is mediated and managed in different social spaces. Are you prepared for the inevitable and will you take a deletionist or preservationist stance? What is the long-term impact on the bereaved when third parties control technology platforms and your data, make the rules, govern who has access, and how the data is presented? Deletion of the deceased online footprint on social networks and email accounts is seen as a second loss by families and creates a new form of anticipatory grief. Putting too much weight on technology could develop a phantom of personhood that immediate grief could cause.

Ginger Liu is the founder of ⁠Ginger Media & Entertainment,⁠ a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an ⁠author,⁠ journalist, ⁠artist,⁠ and filmmaker. Listen to the ⁠Podcast⁠.

⁠https://www.buymeacoffee.com/gliuphoto⁠

Tech Leaders Sign Letter to Halt Generative AI. Plus the Generative AI Tech News Round-Up.

No wonder big tech influencers like Elon Musk and Steve Wozniak have signed an open letter with 1100 industry experts, expressing their concerns over the speed of AI disrupting society. Fueled by ChatGPT’s ability to wipe out the careers of writers and even expressing dystopian concerns for the end of humanity and the:

“loss of control of our civilization.”

Will AI Destroy Hollywood? Small independents and artists should be wary.

Hundreds of millions of dollars are poured into AI startup investment as it is hailed as the greatest revolution since the last one. Does Hollywood have a right to be anxious about AI revolutionizing the industry?

The Trend in Digital Death. Will death and remembrance be virtual or natural?

StoryFile and Hereafter AI are at the forefront of an AI-assisted grieving trend that preserves the digital legacies of the deceased and is changing the way we memorialize the dead.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.

Artificial IntelligenceTechnology

It’s been a great year for AI photo apps which are dominating the Apple app charts. According to TechCrunch, there were 12.6 million downloads in the first 11 days of December alone.

The Lensa AI photo and editing app is the latest AI photo app to go viral because of its amazing creative capabilities and serious concerns about copyright infringement, data privacy, and the sexual exploitation of women and children. It’s a huge money spinner for app purchases and part of a new generation of apps that are turning prompt engineering into productivity and entertainment tools.

And news on copyright, death tech, and entertainment.

https://medium.com/technology-hits/generative-ai-art-and-photo-apps-dominate-the-market-in-2023-53abfa5e9839

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.

Interactive internet-based technologies are transforming the way in which we understand death, grieving, and coping with loss. Online communication together with changes in social and religious attitudes in western society has created a space where the individual is part of the collective. The transition from analog to digital combines the private with the public and the real with the virtual.

Feeding the digital afterlife zeitgeist are tech giants who are eager to build a synthetic heaven where big egos go to die. The idea of a synthetic heaven is offensive to many with long-standing religious beliefs even though those same beliefs are as synthetic as digital data.

In the 21st century, the internet became a place for people to find community. The bereaved could share their own experiences and validate those they’d lost by sharing photographs and videos and they could find support from those with similar experiences. In-person social interaction is difficult for grievers unless they have a social group but online is different. It’s a place where the bereaved can find a network of similar people to connect with through online grief communities.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.

Does digital privacy continue after death and how safe is our data from cybercrime? What happens to social media accounts when we die? Most people don’t know what to do with their data or that social media accounts like Facebook, can be memorialized and legacy executors can be appointed.

A service that creates a digital replica of someone without their participation raises complex ethical issues regarding consent and privacy. Companies are not obliged to check that the users of their services are consensual or in fact, have died. There is no law stopping anyone from creating an avatar of another person. These are the new norms around legacies we leave behind in the digital world.

The idea of an autobiographical interactive legacy, driven by markets, publicity, creative technologies, and years of digital grieving is finally upon us. The technology to speak to our dead relatives has been reintroduced to consumers by death tech companies like StoryFile and other market-driven startups.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media, and an author, journalist, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast, Find me on LinkedIn.

Photography can no longer represent our identity. Our identity can no longer be represented by the two-dimensional flat surface of a photographic image alone. Photography has had its day. The photograph as a referent of our identity will be replaced by an AI Hologram.

In the 21st-century digital world, our identity is represented by multiple forms of technology. In addition to photography — digital video, social media posts, text messaging, and online writing — artificial intelligence is designed to replicate and converse with us. Taken together they form a fuller picture of who we are. From this online data, a narrative is constructed to produce a multimedia autobiography rather than a single portrait but one that is still limited to one-way interaction. Two-way interactive technology will be possible and affordable and easy to use and a fully interactive machine-learning AI hologram will replace the portrait photograph.

We are no more equipped to deal with grief after bereavement than any of our ancestors and our greatest flaw drives technology to find ways to represent who we are and how we interact with our dead. Academics writing before 2001 were fearful of the social, moral, and religious implications proposed by digital immortality and that issues surrounding grief and bereavement are an afterthought for technology designers. Similar to the doubters of the emergence of photography in the 19th century, they are consigned to history in a pre-smartphone social media world and are caught up in the how and not the why. Why is the digital afterlife of a person any different than the afterlife of an embellished photograph or keepsake from the 1850s? Technology has changed but our desire to hold on to our lost loved ones remains as strong as ever.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. researcher  in photography and artificial intelligence, and a podcast producer, journalist, author, artist, and filmmaker.

The creator economy is a $1 Billion industry. AI-generative art is a radical approach to art-making where humans and machines collaborate to produce art with future possibilities for how we are able to work and play. Meta, Google, and other startups have flocked to the AI art economy potential. Big tech is pushing investment in art-producing Generative AI and applying the tech to other forms of content creation like music and podcasts. Tech companies are using Generative AI to build chatbots that can converse with originality and it's no wonder that generative art is dubbed the ‘second wave’ of AI. Much of this technology is some years away, leaving plenty of questions that need answering with regard to ethics and ownership.

In defense of artists' copyright, the Have I Been Trained website checks if your art has been used and can search 5.8 billion online images. The website was created by artists Mat Dryhurst and Holly Herndon and uses bots to help artists opt out of AI data training sets.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. practice research student in photography and artificial intelligence, and an author, writer, artist, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast.