Will Digital Immortality Enable Us to Live Forever?
Digital immortality refers to uploading, storing, or transferring a person's personality into a digital entity or cyberspace.
As the technology of digital immortality becomes more popular and available, people will find new ways of using AI-generated digital personas.
Researchers are currently studying human-AI social relationships, and the psychological impacts are not yet entirely known.
A grieving mother meets her daughter in a virtual world. A Holocaust activist speaks at her own funeral using AI-powered video technology. Nirvana released a "new" AI-generated song, "Drowned in the Sun," decades after the death of Kurt Cobain. Holograms of late music icons perform for live audiences.
These are all real events, not science fiction. Artificial intelligence (AI), including deep learning methods such as neural networks, is making digital immortality more of a reality each day.
Digital immortality refers to the concept of uploading, storing, or transferring a person's personality into something digital, such as a computer, virtual human, digital avatar, or robot.
These entities are referred to as AI clones, replicas, agents, personalities, or digital personas.
Digital immortality was predicted by technologists decades ago.
In 2000, Microsoft researchers Gordon Bell and Jim Gray published the paper “Digital Immortality” and posited that it would become a reality during this century. In the same year, Raymond Kurzweil, an American inventor and computer scientist, predicted that by 2030, we would have the means to scan and upload the human brain and re-create its design electronically.
Timothy Leary, a psychologist known for his advocacy of psychedelics, wrote in Design for Dying, "If you want to immortalize your consciousness, record and digitize." A futuristic version of digital immortality is the hypothetical concept that technology will eventually allow us to upload one's consciousness, thoughts, and whole "identity" into a digital brain that can persist indefinitely.
In the television series Upload, humans can “upload" themselves into a virtual afterlife. But the "mind uploading" process is still very much in the air. Some startups have suggested they have a way to "back up" your brain, but the process would be fatal. There are also thornier philosophical questions of personal identity and whether consciousness is even transferable in the first place.
Other forms of digital immortality exist today. Maggie Savin-Baden and David Burden define digital immortality as an active or passive digital presence of a person after their death and refer to two categories of digital immortality: one-way and two-way.
One-way immortality is the passive "read-only" digital presence of people after death, such as static Facebook memorial pages.
Two-way immortality includes interactive digital personas, such as chatbots based on real people or interactive digital avatars trained on real people's data.
In the Black Mirror episode "Be Right Back," a widow meets and interacts with a virtual version of her late husband–a concept that inspired the programming of "griefbots," or bots that can interact and respond like loved ones after their death.
After losing her close friend in 2015, Eugenia Kuyda created the startup project Luka, a chatbot that interacted and responded like her friend. Kuyda later went on to create Replika, a chatbot program that learns and mimics the user's language style. Users can also use Replika to create personalized “AI friends" or digital companions. Griefbots and "human-AI" social relationships are actively being studied, and the long-term psychological impact of human-AI social relationships is not entirely known.
Savin-Baden and Burden have identified three categories of digital immortality "creators":
Memory creators– digital memorialization of someone before and/or after their death, not typically made by the person.
Avatar creators– interactive digital avatars with some ability to conduct a limited conversation, with minimal likelihood of being mistaken for someone who is a live human (virtual humanoid).
Persona creators– digitally interactive personas that evolve and can interact with the world, high likelihood of being mistaken for a live human (virtual human, chatbot, griefbot).
Image is AI-generated by author
AI-powered digital personas are not just for the dead.
As the technology for digital immortality expands, companies and celebrities are increasingly finding ways of using their AI selves when they are still alive. Spotify created an immersive AI experience that offered fans a personalized "one-on-one" experience with the digital version of The Weeknd. Digital Deepak, an AI version of wellness figure Deepak Chopra, can lead a meditation. By collaborating with StoryFile, William Shatner made an interactive AI version of himself that can answer questions.
OpenAI is releasing a new feature to create customized personalized chatbots. These custom chatbots will be able to be monetized in the upcoming OpenAI app Store, GPT Store, where custom GPTs will be available for public download.
Users want to use their AI-powered personas now.
In my interactive and immersive play, Elixir: Digital Immortality, based on a fictional AI tech startup that offers AI-powered digital twins, a surprising user feature request from the audience came up repeatedly– people were curious to meet their AI digital persona while still alive. The idea of leaving an AI version of oneself as a legacy to others received a more lukewarm response, except in the case of educating and preserving stories for future generations.
The question of what to do with AI personas once they are created from individual data (i.e., what companies do with these personas once the creator dies) will likely become an ad hoc consideration, similar to how companies navigated social media profiles of deceased users. Legacy-building through AI personas will be a secondary consideration.
AI clones, replicas, digital twins, and agents will become the new reality.
Users will be motivated to find new ways to use AI personas and integrate them seamlessly into daily life. With the incentive of increased productivity, enhancing AI agency will become necessary for goals like content creation and task automation. This shift toward increased AI agency will raise new ethical and legal questions.
The expansion of digital immortality and popularization of AI agents raise a host of psychological, philosophical, ethical, and legal issues.
How will human-AI interactions affect us emotionally? What are the potential uses for having a digital persona while one is alive?
Will the creation and use of AI digital personas become socially accepted and integrated into daily life like social media profiles?
Will people be alerted to the fact they are interacting with or viewing an AI agent?
Who will be responsible for the actions of an AI agent?
What are the ethical limits of using one's own AI agent? What about using other people's AI agent without their consent?
Who owns and manages the digital persona, its data, and any profits from its activity? Will it become a part of one's digital estate?
What regulations should be in place regarding the use of that person’s AI and its agency after the creator dies?
How would data security and privacy be ensured? How does one prevent the unauthorized use of a digital persona, including deepfake videos?
Does leaving a digital version of oneself interfere with the grieving process for others? Does having an AI help preserve one's legacy? How will AI digital personas transform the grieving process, and how will they fit into existing cultural rituals?
These questions are increasingly relevant as the technology for interactive AI agents advances and is integrated into our everyday lives.
Copyright © 2023 Marlynn Wei, MD, PLLC
Subscribe to The Psychology of AI by Dr. Marlynn Wei on LinkedIn or Substack.