Digital Necromancy: AI is helping people communicate with the dead. But, is it safe?

Death is an inevitable truth, something that we cannot predict, control or stop. But with the increasing role of artificial intelligence (AI) in technology, death has found a new meaning — a digital afterlife with “digital necromancy”.

Generative AI, which encompasses large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, has the ability to work beyond their program — conjuring the dead from the digital traces they leave behind. As eerie as it sounds, it is even more dangerous, but some researchers believe it is of no harm.

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What is ‘digital necromancy’?

Digital necromancy is continuing bonds with the dead through text, images or artefacts using technology, like AI-based models. It first sparked debate in the 2010s when dead artists Bruce Lee, Michael Jackson and Tupac Shakur were reanimated using “deep fake” technology. It also led to posthumous film appearances by Carrie Fisher and Peter Cushing.

When ChatGPT made headlines in the public, one user in late 2022, used OpenAI’s chatbot to talk to his dead fiancée based on her previous texts and emails.

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Seeing the potential, a series of start-ups were launched to draw generative AI in order to reanimate loved ones for the bereaved.

The debate around ‘digital necromancy’

Experts believe this technology seems to cross a cultural and perhaps even ethical line with many experiencing a deep unease with the idea that one might interact with digital simulations of the dead regularly. Digital necromancy is viewed as suspicious and left many people worried.

But sociologists working on cultural practices of remembrance and commemoration, who have also been experimenting with raising the dead using generative AI, said they think there is no cause for concern.

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They argued that people place emotional value on things as a means of keeping the dead with them. Using AI to keep the dead close to you is just like having their portrait or videos with you as a way of memorising your loved ones, they argued.

Furthermore, the speed with which AI's necromantic possibilities have been exploited tells us a lot about how well the technology works with our existing practices of grieving, remembrance and commemoration – rather than "disrupting" or "changing" them.

But isn’t AI different?

The AI startups in this domain build on earlier do-it-yourself ventures in bringing back loved ones using generative AI. Using writing (for example, on social media and in emails), audio recordings of speech, photographs and videos of loved ones submitted by clients, they train AI models that make it possible to interact posthumously with "them" through images, voice and text.

As noted by Debra Bassett, who has studied digital afterlives extensively, some dissenters to this use of AI have stated that they are worried that the reanimated may be made to say things they wouldn't when alive and are instead acting out someone else's script. For Bassett, the concern is the dead are being "zombified" in a violation of their integrity.

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This is, of course, a possibility but we should always look at these things on a case-by-case basis.

Images, text and artefacts like past possessions or prized heirlooms have long been usable media for that kind of communion and new technologies, most recently cameras and recording devices, have always made such media more easily and widely accessible.

Others, in reflecting on the strangeness of encounters with dead people brought back into digital interaction with us, argue that those communicating are not in fact the dead at all but frauds.

(With inputs from agencies)

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