Aug 17, 2022, 5:08 p.m.03
Updated 3 hours ago
Credit, Marina H Smith Foundation
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Guests could ask Marina questions
Activist Marina Smith, who worked in Holocaust education, died in June aged 87. A few days later, however, her family and friends could see her answering questions about her life — on her own — thanks to technology developed by her son.
Stephen Smith said his company’s video tool, StoryFile, allowed his mother to be “present in a way” during the ceremony.
He explains that the technology makes it possible to video call someone who is already deceased and he “answers as if he were there”.
Smith says the technology brought the aspects of her mother’s life into the conversation that mattered most to her and the people she loved most. And the words used were actually his mother’s lines, not text created by artificial intelligence.
To make the video, the subject must take a picture before they die and answer numerous questions about their life.
Later, after death, an artificial intelligence system chooses the appropriate clips to play in response to questions from people watching the video, and the person appears to be listening and responding in what the company is calling “conversation video.” .
Rollo Carpenter, who created the CleverBot chatbot — and has no affiliation with Smith’s company — claims the video chat system works differently, without attempting to create your own responses or using artificial intelligence to generate new responses create.
“It’s just a selection from a prerecorded set of playable sequences,” he says.
Celebrity Interaction
Marina Smith was one of the cofounders of the National Holocaust Center in Nottinghamshire, UK, where she ran a Holocaust education programme. In 2005 she was awarded a knighthood by the British royal family for her work.
StoryFile’s founders came up with the idea for Conversation Videos while working to create interactive holograms of Holocaust survivors for the USC Shoah Foundation.
The company sees a wide range of potential business uses for the technology, from customer service to sales.
The company has also encouraged some celebrities to use technology to document their careers, including actor William Shatner, best known for his role as Captain Kirk in the Star Trek series. You can interact with the video on the company’s website.
credit, story file
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Stephen Smith developed the technology used at his mother’s funeral
“Virtual Version of Me”
Looking ahead, Smith envisions a world where people continuously document their lives, and suggests that users “can talk to their 18yearold selves when they’re 50, or introduce their 16yearold selves to their children be able”.
The idea that artificial intelligence could be used in the future to create virtual versions of the dead has been around for a long time. For example, the subject was taken up in an episode of the Black Mirror series.
But Smith explains that’s not what his technology does and dismisses the idea. “Everything about us is absolutely unique. There’s no way you can create a version of me.”
Carpenter agrees, saying that using current artificial intelligence technology to create a “computergenerated” person would risk “putting words in the mouth of the deceased person.”
The result could be even worse if other people believed that the deceased actually spoke those words while he was alive.
Meta said the robot is a prototype created for research purposes. The company also stated that users were warned that the program could say things that ideally it shouldn’t say.
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