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.

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we live, connect, and grieve but will digital immortality allow us to live forever? Digital immortality refers to uploading, storing, or transferring a person’s personality into a digital entity or cyberspace, or a computer. As the technology of digital immortality becomes more popular and available, people will find new ways of using AI-generated digital personas.

Our identity has already shifted from the photograph to online social networks and is increasingly moving towards AI technology. And this is where the real revolution begins, in AI and its ability to represent who we are because it is designed to replicate and converse with us. And the emergence of AI in the genealogy of portraiture is driven in part by our insatiable appetite to remain connected with our dead loved ones.

Death and bereavement are driving new ways to communicate with the deceased to give us digital immortality. As artificial intelligence grows in popularity, consumers can animate still photographs, create virtual living worlds or maintain ongoing interaction with the dead via a chatbot application.

How companies like StoryFile are disrupting the death tech industry.

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AI image generators like Dalle are rightfully raising concerns from artists about creative ownership. AI generators are trained on millions of photos and learn to identify things from existing photos. Some of Dalle’s images are machine-made with the user only contributing text prompts, so it’s not copyrightable at all, according to Wired. Remember the monkey selfie copyright case? These images are more likely to be public domain and not owned by anyone, and therefore, free to use. More user input, like editing, could lead to human-made authorship and would be eligible for copyright. But do commercial technology companies own the copyright of the images users manipulate on their platforms? Look at the small print because laws are changing fast.

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Artificial intelligence has caught the zeitgeist of the 21st century. AI is no longer a fantasy concept exchanged by scientists and researchers predicting an uncertain time in the future. In the second decade of the century, AI is as omnipresent as it is mundane. Take the healthcare industry. AI has seamlessly integrated into workflow and systems to focus on patients and on providing more person-centered care that previous bureaucracy, technology, and organizational structure have grappled with. Is it too good to be true? I also discuss my personal experience with dementia and how AI is helping with early detection.

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In the past weeks, two influential women of a similar age died. One was the most famous woman in the world and the other was my aunt. Queen Elizabeth’s death at 96 on the 8th of September was followed by ten days of national mourning in the UK.

In the 21st century, grieving practices have evolved again to incorporate past cultural practices which are equally driven by technology, society, and the human condition.

Who are the providers of grief technology that bridge the gap between the living and the dead? Victorian portrait photographers and AI engineers. The human condition is in how we grieve and do business.

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