Artificial Intelligence (AI) is blessed with many talents already used by medical professionals, artists and even journalists. Recently, researchers from the Shree Devi Institute of Technology in India believed that AI is quite capable of helping people survive the death of a loved one.
Two experts, Shriya Devadiga and Bhakthi Shetty, studied AI's capabilities to communicate with deceased people. Of course, scientists do not imply the involvement of any dark magic or necromancy. We are talking about innovative digital solutions that allow you to communicate with virtual "avatars" of deceased people.
Indian researchers have focused on working with the Replica AI application to create “duplicates” of digital personalities, allowing others to communicate with them. By the way, the founder of the Replica AI project is the Russian programmer Evgenia Kuida.
For this reason, Devadiga explains, the main focus of his group was to explore ways to alleviate the pain of loss using existing technologies.
Essentially, Indian scientists have explored the concept of digital consciousness, or virtual immortality. This concept involves storing or transforming a person, roughly speaking, into a computer program.
In the future, technologies will most likely make it possible to create not just programs, but also avatars or even robots that behave, react to events around and speak like a particular person.
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Actually, the same Replika AI uses digital conversations (chats, correspondence) and the history of a person's life to create a chat bot that, using artificial intelligence, reproduces the communication model of a particular person.
In recent work, Indian experts have used Replika AI and a collection of digital "memories" from the accounts of friends and family of the deceased person.
After exploring the possibilities of AI, scientists have come up with a system that can create 3D digital avatars that look and sound like deceased people. The avatar will access the person's digital data in the cloud and then use it to communicate with living people.
While this kind of technology can never replace deceased loved ones, it may be able to help cope with their loss. The effectiveness of such assistance remains to be investigated by psychologists.
However, at present, the proposed solutions are still at an early stage of development.
The research results are presented in the scientific journal Asian Journal of Convergence in Technology.
Evgeniya Efimova
