#30: Reviving the Dead, Virtual Friends, Virtual Bands

Ian Bowie
Hello and welcome to AI unfiltered with me Ian Bowie and our resident expert, Michael Stormbom, where we will be talking about everything to do with AI in our modern digital society and what the future holds for all of us.

Michael Stormbom
I have recently seen some stories about creating virtual copies of deceased loved ones in the news. And those stories are about creating chatbots that mimic how the deceased person would speak and that the chatbot would have their personality. And they would have been trained then with text material like text messages that the deceased person had written.

Ian Bowie
Right okay. This is starting to sound a little bit macabre. But yeah,

Michael Stormbom
I recall listening to a presentation of a company that creates virtual persons and they also brought up the possibility of using that technology to quote unquote, revive the dead. Isn’t that creepy?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I mean, yeah, I’m just thinking, again, you know, something we’ve talked about as well the potential mental health issues of using AI and you know, the idea of being able to interact with somebody whose passed and if it was, you know, like an immediate loved one like a wife or a husband or a sibling or whatever… the limitation there of course, is that you can’t touch them. Can’t feel them you can’t you know, that… Would it ever be enough for the person who’s obviously grieving, because I can’t imagine anybody who has, you know, got over the death of a close relative, wanting to bring them back to interact with them.

Michael Stormbom
I feel like having something like that would interfere with the grieving process.

Ian Bowie
Wouldn’t it, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
I think yeah, you cannot resurrect the dead, that’s impossible. Well, you can create a replica is possibly quite believable. It’s still not that person, though.

Ian Bowie
I think that might actually do more harm than good. I think so. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn’t mind having a chat with Elvis. You know, I often think it must be quite interesting for you know, people who have had actor or actress parents. You know, there’s films with them in it. Yeah, and you can watch the film and that’s kind of like wow, yeah, yeah. But that’s okay. It’s a way of honoring the dead actually in a way…

Michael Stormbom
Well that is yes, but to then try using that to create an AI that which would produce…

Ian Bowie
And then to have a conversation Yeah, no. It doesn’t you never had. No, I think I think there are limits to what you should actually use technology for.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, absolutely.

Ian Bowie
No, I don’t like that at all.

Michael Stormbom
Speaking to famous historical figures. Well, yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Because I mean, you’re never going to you’re never going to know the real Elvis anyway.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, no, I can think of any number of people from history that would be very interesting to talk to. Yeah. But not to try and sort of have a conversation with a dead relative. As you said, it’s a bit macabre.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, there’s a grieving process and you will just interfere with it

Ian Bowie
Absolutely, of course, it also comes back to that kind of idea of, you know, what are you? You know, I mean, I sometimes think about that, you know, you’re conscious of being yourself, and one day that consciousness will disappear along with you. Yeah. But, you know, what is that consciousness? And when, when, when the human body shuts down, where does that consciousness go? You know, I think it’s, I’ve always thought of it as just being some kind of energy that then just dissipates into the ether. Some people might call that the human spirit. But I don’t think you can recreate that can you really, no.

Ian Bowie
no, I would say not, no.

Ian Bowie
No, I think it’s not possible. And I don’t even think people should even try, personally. Creating something that purports to be Churchill, so that you can have a chat with Churchill, that’s a different matter, you know, and

Michael Stormbom
I think it’s more sort of like from a… If you’re interested in history and want to learn about history, then talking to Churchill is interesting. Yeah. And I mean, you can even take it a little bit further. Let’s say I want to speak to my great grandfather who died 100 years before me. There also from the historical context, but possibly, but yeah, why not?

Ian Bowie
But I think it should be somebody that you didn’t know personally.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, that’s my.. Yeah, indeed. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I think I think that’s where it needs to be, somebody who has no actual connection with you directly. But of course, you see, we talk about historical figures like Churchill, of course, there may be living descendants of Churchill who would then object to that as well. Well, I mean, certainly and quite rightly so. You know, if that’s how they think. So then you’d have to go a bit further back in history.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. I think some people are just so historically important that maybe that consideration goes goes away, I suppose. Yeah. And of course, we’re also we’re not… you wouldn’t interact with Churchill, the private person necessarily, you would probably be speaking to Churchill the Prime minister. Absolutely. Yes. Yeah. Which I think is quite different than the Churchill that they knew personally. Yeah. Yeah. So I think those are two different things or two different persons in a way. Yes. Yeah. So I think they if we were to try to create a version of the unseen Churchill, then I think that the objection would definitely be valid.

Ian Bowie
But you couldn’t do it. There’s a huge amount of public data available about the public Churchill, but very limited as to the private person. So it would all be conjecture. Yeah, for sure. And hearsay. No, yeah. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
So I mean, then then it becomes Churchill a fictional character.

Ian Bowie
I can imagine that there might be some serious objections to creating a virtual Diana.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I don’t think people will go for that. No.

Ian Bowie
No, I think I think you have to go far enough back. Yeah. Slightly outside of living memory for the vast majority of people. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
So you know, ancient history. Oh, let’s let’s talk to Julius Caesar. Who now magically speaks perfect modern day English? Yeah. Yeah. Cleopatra, Tuthankamon. Leonardo da Vinci. Ooh, yeah.

Michael Stormbom
That would be interesting. Yes. I’ve spoken about this game series, Assassin’s Creed on the show before. So the second game takes place during the Italian Renaissance. No, I don’t remember which game but Leonardo Da Vinci is a supporting character in one of those, you can go and have a…

Ian Bowie
Wow. That’s pretty cool.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, I mean, of course, it’s all you know, complete bullshit in terms of historical.. but it’s still fun to hang with him. And we were talking about Churchill there. But of course, there were just very recently two quite important historical people who would died, of course, Gorbachev and Queen Elizabeth. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So that would be interesting having a conversation with with Gorbachev about the Soviet Union, or the fall off. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Or just Queen Elizabeth and her 70 year reign.

Ian Bowie
One thing that kind of occurred to me recently, I had this conversation with a group of my students. And my question was, when was the last time you made a new friend? Okay. And it ranged from this summer to I actually have no friends. A bit sad. But the fact is that as we know, there are a lot of lonely people in society. And despite the fact that we’ve got so many billions of people on the planet, there are genuinely people who don’t really have that much social contact, especially old people. So it actually made me think that maybe here is a use for the metaverse that people can actually create their own avatar friends. Yeah, and I don’t see that as a negative thing, personally.

Michael Stormbom
No indeed not and we have spoken previously about robot pets, that the eldery…

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Yeah, but wouldn’t it also be nice if you know, for old people, maybe to be able to create their own friends? Or actually, again, we were you talking about raising the dead? And maybe maybe it would be quite nice for old people to be able to bring back their dead friends? Yeah, for sure. Yeah. So there is potentially it’s, of course, this is not a financial use. See, I think this is the problem, that everything new that comes along. always seems to start from, how much money can we make from this? Not from how much good can we do in society with this? And I think, you know, a lot of stuff starts from the wrong angle.

Michael Stormbom
Absolutely. Absolutely.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. So again, you know, the metaverse has all been about, oh, you can buy land and you can create buildings and you know, we can sell all this stuff to companies and they can sell their crap to idiots and…

Michael Stormbom
The same people who already have a lot of money make their money.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, that’s right. Yeah. But I think perhaps now, there should be the social aspect of could this actually be good for people’s mental health? Because there’s been a lot of focus on also, our video games bad for mental health, is social media for… well, I think we know it’s bad for mental health. But you know, looking at this technology, as is it bad for mental health, but not enough time has been spent on how can we make it a positive influence for mental health?

Michael Stormbom
Absolutely. There’s a lot of things that could be done so sure.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. And I think, you know, like you said, we talked about the pets, but this idea of bringing your dead friends back, creating new friends.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, no, I mean, I just saw this. There’s this service where you can create you can create your own chatbot

Ian Bowie
You send me that, I thought that was really quite funny. Okay, so that’s fun.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, it’s fun.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I haven’t seen anything negative in that.

Michael Stormbom
No, I know. I mean, especially if it’s fully disclosed that this is an automated thing.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. Yeah. So you know, I mean, just take that one step further and create the equivalent avatar in the metaverse.

Ian Bowie
Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Fun.

Michael Stormbom
Fun and potentially, mentally beneficial.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, I would say Yeah, absolutely. Yes. Yeah. And the other thing I canalso see is that potential for education. Again, coming back to one of my favorite topics. Imagine that you would go back to Wellington versus Napoleon. But then if you will just input some very slight changes and then hit enter what might have happened after… what if? Yeah, what if scenarios Yeah. I’d never be quite interest, wouldn’t it? Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
There is that. there’s that show on Amazon I guess, it’s called The Man in High Castle. Right. So I think the premise is there what would have happened if Hitler won the second world war?

Ian Bowie
Yeah, for sure. That’s an old one, isn’t it? Yeah, that’s totally true, you just mentioned the death of Queen Elizabeth II. Now, what if her uncle had never abdicated?

Michael Stormbom
That would be interesting one.

Ian Bowie
Wouldn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. Who mighty he have married and who might the children have been and What would the dynasty then have been? What about a virtual royal family, ooh.

Michael Stormbom
Let’s do an episode on that thing.

Ian Bowie
Now? That would be good, wouldn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. I mean, they’re already.. well should we get into now, but there are those so called virtual bands. So a famous one is of course, Gorillaz. That’s long before AI but… so okay, in that case, there are of course, these actual musicians behind it, but there are this cartoon characters that are the actual band. I mean, considering what you can do it with, like generating music. You don’t need musicians.

Ian Bowie
No, of course, I mean, that they just did the Abba concert, didn’t they? With…

Michael Stormbom
With the “ABBA-tars”? Yes, yes. Yeah, so pretty soon…

Ian Bowie
I mean, is that the road we’re going down? Virtual concerts with virtual bands that don’t really exist? Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Well it ties also nicely into the metaverse thing as well. So but yeah, so then there doesn’t need to be any band or talent behind it because all of it is computer generated, the music, the songs, the…

Ian Bowie
Well, I I actually rather like that idea. I kind of it’s actually really cool. Yeah, we’re a bit like the fact I like the idea of having AI generated best selling books.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind seeing Freddie Mercury in concert which is not a possibility. Given that he is dead.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, no, well, let’s let’s think about new stuff. Why does it always have to go back to the old, you know, this

Michael Stormbom
Because I’m an old fogey.

Ian Bowie
But what I’m thinking is, I mean a lot of the new stuff like today is basically crap as far as I’m concerned. You know, I mean, I’m well into the sort of, you know, the sort of classic stuff, you know, like Fleetwood Mac and that kind of stuff.

Michael Stormbom
Brahms? Yeah.

Ian Bowie
Absolutely. But to create new original material that is virtual, would be really quite funky.

Michael Stormbom
Because I mean, the technology exists to do just about every..

Ian Bowie
right well, I want to be their manager.

Michael Stormbom
And as we saw with the ABBA-tars, and I mean they did that of Tupac Shakur as well, a hologram. You can create this sort of, like digital performances. So I mean you could do in principle, whole thing and there’s, yeah, why not? Yeah. And then you plug in an AI to do it dynamically. So it generated and why not? Brilliant? Yeah. Ai jazz musician. Improvising.

Ian Bowie
So, so actually, we’ve slagged off the metaverse, but here we are talking about one aspect of it which we both find actually rather cool. Yeah, yeah. So that’s not all bad, is it?

Michael Stormbom
No, that’s the autumn season. First we bash the hell out of it and then we backtrack…

Ian Bowie
Absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. Now we have time to think about it. And we’re coming up with ways that actually would be really interesting. Do you see what we’re interested in, is the creative ways. I mean, you know what thing was talking about is you would live in a you know, like to go virtual shopping or you would go to work in a virtual environment. Who cares about that kind of rubbish, but virtual concerts and all that kind of stuff at that? Yeah, no, that is quite interesting.

Michael Stormbom
I think, completely virtual. But I had I thought now we were talking about the metaverse, so we could have our avatars there in the metaverse hosting a podcast, wouldn’t it be a fun idea to host that would be really fun. Virtual sort of podcasting thing, so you have your avatar there, you know, in a virtual studio and we have a virtual audience.

Ian Bowie
It must be possible.

Michael Stormbom
Of course it is. I don’t know if it’s any good, but it’s surely possible.

Ian Bowie
Would be a laugh. Yeah. Something you could direct people to and then it might go viral.

Michael Stormbom
I did see this article because, we were talking about people buying virtual real estate. So there was an article they’ve interviewed Mark Cuban the famous while he said that basically buying virtual real estate is a, well it’s a lot of bullshit.

Ian Bowie
Oh, he said that did he, kudos to Cuban.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. Real estate, the point is there’s scarcity. Yeah, there’s only a limited amount of real estate and well he’s actually making the same point that I am, and they’re introducing sort of artificial scarcity. Oh, no, you can only there are only five in this virtual realm when there’s a practically infinite amount of bits to use.. Which is ridiculous.

Ian Bowie
Of course it is. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
I mean, to my mind, if we’re gonna have a metaverse then it should be..

Ian Bowie
Infinite, shouldn’t it be Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
But artificial scarcity. That’s the…

Ian Bowie
Clever people are making money from stupid people. How you go. Perfect. The way the world has always been, isn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, sadly. So in that sense, the metaverse is definitely not a revolutionary aspect of the human condition, in a way it’s probably exacerbated, the baser nature of humanity.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, but it’s just it’s a place where you could have a bit of fun, though. I mean, like, for example, the virtual podcast. Yeah. With the virtual audience. I mean, that’s a laugh.

Michael Stormbom
That would be fun. Yes. Yeah.

Ian Bowie
I mean, not you know, it’s not serious or to be taken seriously. It’s just a bit of fun. Yeah, look what we can do? Yeah. So that would be interesting. If it’s possible to do that.

Michael Stormbom
Well, I mean, I don’t see why you couldn’t, why we couldn’t just create avatars of ourselves. Yeah. . And just be somewhere in there, no matter where I say we are recording now and then people can like.. why couldn’t you do that? I mean, you could probably do it in Second Life if you wanted, that old, that old chestnut, couldn’t you? Yeah, we could probably do it in a World of Warcraft. Or something.

Ian Bowie
That would be really funny.

Michael Stormbom
We have to bring in more World of Warcraft references. I don’t know anything about the game. So.

Ian Bowie
Yeah. I just know that it’s called World of Warcraft. I assume it’s about war.

Michael Stormbom
There’s probably there’s probably some craft of war.

Ian Bowie
It’s a strategy game I would imagine. Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah. I think you fight something but. The man. No, but I don’t know.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, no, I’ve got no idea, but could be interesting.

Michael Stormbom
It could be interesting. The point is you don’t need that much technology to… we could try on Second Life.

Ian Bowie
We could start popping up all over the place couldn’t we. Second Life. Metaverse. World of Warcraft

Michael Stormbom
Especially World of Warcraft.

Ian Bowie
Oh god, it’s those two guys again.

Michael Stormbom
They don’t know nothing about the game.

Ian Bowie
Kill him! Off with his head. So that would be funny, wouldn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, so instant feedback if if you don’t get your head chopped off then it was a good podcast.

Ian Bowie
Yeah, that would be funny, wouldn’t it. Yeah. We could be part of we could be dodging. You know that people could try to kill us.

Michael Stormbom
They could kill us virtually.

Ian Bowie
Virtually. That’s what I mean yeah, virtually and then we have to dodge them and you know, you missed wherever here fools.

Michael Stormbom
It feels like it’d be quite difficult to juggle having a conversation while saving your life.

Ian Bowie
Own life. Yeah. Yeah, I guess probably a bit difficult. Yeah. Well, although Bruce Willis does it in some of his films, like Die Hard. He talks to himself, oh come on, John, you know, you can do it. You’re gonna get them. He’s kind of psyching himself up.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, but But see, the thing about those is that they are in fact fictional.

Ian Bowie
So is World of Warcraft as well, isn’t it?

Michael Stormbom
Well, yes, but he’s an actor and he doesn’t do it live.

Ian Bowie
What you’re saying that we would appear live in this world of warcraft thing?

Michael Stormbom
Well, wasn’t that the point.

Ian Bowie
All right? We wouldn’t we wouldn’t record something and then embed it.

Michael Stormbom
No, no, we would literally .

Ian Bowie
Actually literally be there…

Michael Stormbom
Like, like a live broadcast.

Ian Bowie
Okay. Wow.

Michael Stormbom
Like with a live studio audience. So to speak. All right. Yeah. Well, we could try that. If they can have virtual concerts why can’t you have a virtual podcast.

Ian Bowie
Indeed. Yeah. Hello. We know absolutely nothing about your world but we thought we would pop in and run our podcast here anyway. Yeah. That’d be really laugh, wouldn’t it.

Michael Stormbom
That would be funny. Yeah. Yeah, no, but about reviving the dead. So here’s the plot twist for our listeners. Yeah. We have in fact been dead for five years and he’s actually speech synthesized AI.

Ian Bowie
There you go.

Michael Stormbom
That’s the plot twist and you did not see it coming.

Ian Bowie
That would be funny, wouldn’t it? Yeah.

Michael Stormbom
Yeah, it would be funny except I don’t want to be dead.

Ian Bowie
Don’t want to be dead quite yet. No. Yeah. Well, after the last sort of 10 minutes or so of conversation, we might not have any choice in the matter. Yeah, absolutely.

Ian Bowie
You’ve been listening to me, Ian Bowie, and my colleague Michael Stormbom. On AI Unfiltered, and for more episodes, please go to aiunfiltered.com. Thank you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai