retrotalk2023: where post-mortem meets postmodern

A Washington Post piece by Bina Venkataraman about the potential use of  AI to create "ghosts" - of famous performers who'll keep making records or acting in films after their physical death - but also of loved ones, who can continue to fulfil the function of companion or confidante long after their decease. 

"But what about people who aren’t so famous? Should we perform from beyond the grave, too, to nourish the nostalgia of family and friends who might want to remember us? We might want to think twice before haunting our friends and descendants like ghosts of Christmas past.

"Grief tech is already on offer. So it might be inevitable, if trends hold, that someone will try to make an AI apparition of you. Seance AI offers an AI chatbot for the living to “communicate” with dead loved ones." 

"The current offerings are mostly stilted and glitchy — and a poor substitute for the experience of actually talking to a lost family member or friend. It turns out summoning the King’s likeness to sing and thrust his hips is simpler than capturing your late father’s full personality, let alone the unique way he interacted with each of his kids.... 

"However, as language models get better at imitating the natural speech of individuals, and as techniques improve for cloning human voices and facial expressions, it’s going to get easier to imagine a next generation of these technologies with the same degree of verisimilitude as the musical performances — that is, interactive AI avatars who survive us, embodied by augmented-reality holograms or robots who look and talk something like we once did."

It could be an end to mourning and its healing closure: 

"Avatars lurking around the living room could thwart the grieving process of the living, depriving them of the peace that comes from letting go. People already mistake and confide in chatbots as if they were human; those who are suffering loss might come to depend on AI avatars as stand-ins, prolonging their grief."

On the immortalized performers level -  it's a new twist on that old line (Marx's?) about the dead tyrannizing over the living. Imagine as a new artist / writer / actor / musician, having to compete for attention / support/ audience / a public, not only with your contemporaries, not only with the archived and ever-more-easily accessible works of  the reknowned dead piled up and demanding time from listeners and viewers and readers -  but having to compete with new works and new performances by artists from earlier eras long beyond their natural lifespan! Radical inequality. But it will be irresistible for estates and rights holders to attempt to milk more money from the eminences of yesteryear.

Been doing a few interviews recently about retroculture, part of this recent seeming uptick in retrotalk, and one thing I've remarked upon is this conjunction of retro and futuristic technology - hologram tours, AI (e.g. AISIS, the "new Beatles song" aka "The Final Beatles Song" . the AI-enabled de-mixing and remixing of earlier Beatles albums). This seems to be opening up a new frontier for retromania: the unsettling and eerie convergence of science fiction and nostalgia.