In a stunning demonstration of the capabilities of modern AI, a man has used cutting-edge technology to communicate with his deceased grandmother. Wu, a visual art designer living in Shanghai, was heartbroken when his grandmother fell ill and ultimately passed away. Despite spending over two weeks at her bedside, he was unable to speak with her and say goodbye due to her coma. Determined to find a way to reconnect with his grandmother, Wu turned to AI for help.
Using a combination of AI image generator Midjourney and recordings of his grandmother’s voice, Wu was able to synthesize a digital version of his grandmother that could communicate with him. By uploading several photos of his grandmother to Midjourney, Wu was able to create a realistic-looking 3D model of her. He then used recordings of her voice to train an AI model to synthesize a wider vocabulary and generate new sentences.
The result was a remarkable achievement: a digital recreation of Wu’s grandmother that could converse with him in a lifelike manner. Wu shared a video of himself having a conversation with the digital recreation of his grandmother, and the result was eerie and moving at the same time. The AI-generated grandmother had a good amount of perplexity and burstiness in her responses, which made the conversation more natural and human-like.
This technology has the potential to revolutionize how we deal with grief and loss, and it raises major ethical considerations about the border between life and death, as well as the limits of what we should do with artificial intelligence. While some thought this went too far, Wu felt that being able to converse even after her grandmother’s death provided her with intimacy and comfort that she would not have had otherwise. As AI advances, we can anticipate more fascinating and useful applications of this technology in the future.
