From the very first pile of rocks to the Great Pyramids of Giza, people have always wanted to keep their memory alive well after they’ve passed away.
But I won’t need any boring old headstone to remind people about my life when I shuffle off this mortal coil: I’ll be able to do it myself.
Thanks to the booming new ‘grieftech’ industry, I no longer need to worry about my memory fading away with time.
That’s because my AI clone will be able to keep on chatting away in place.
In the last few years, grieftech has gone from a fringe idea among AI enthusiasts to a real service that more and more families are turning to.
These controversial ‘dead-bots’ combine interviews, written information, pictures, and videos to create an AI that should look, talk, and react just like a lost loved one.
So, when Los Angeles-based tech company StoryFile offered to make an AI clone of me, I wanted to know whether anyone would really accept my digital replacement.
But I don’t think my friends and family will be replacing me with a chatbot anytime soon.
The Daily Mail’s Wiliam Hunter has had an AI ‘grieftech’ clone (pictured) made to replace him after his death, but his family are not impressed by the results
One of the most surprising things about making an AI clone of yourself is just how easy it is.
All StoryFile needs is a handful of photos, a minute’s worth of voice recordings, and a questionnaire to get started.
StoryFile’s CTO, Dr Veronica Jones, sent me about 60 questions covering everything from my earliest childhood memories to the message I’d like to leave behind for people in the future.
A lot of those questions felt deeply personal, and were definitely not the kind of thing I was used to handing over to a company.
For example, one prompt asked me: ‘What was your first real heartbreak, and what did it reveal about what you need in relationships?
However, the clone doesn’t know anything you haven’t told it, so the more information you put in, the better it gets at impersonating you.
Normally, that database would be gathered over multiple days of exhaustive interviews, so that the AI would have a full picture of someone’s life story.
Years before starting StoryFile, Dr Jones started out using a similar technology to make digital replicas of holocaust survivors for museums, working with Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation.
The clone is made by a company called StoryFile, which has previously used their technology to allow people, such as Marina Smith MBE (pictured), to speak at their own funerals
‘We interviewed the first survivor in 2012,’ Dr Jones recalled.
‘We interviewed him for seven days on his entire life story, so if someone asked a question, it would find the best video and play it back.’
‘Then, as we were doing that, we people were asking, “What about my grandmother? What about all these other people?”‘
In the years that followed, more and more people came forward asking whether their loved one could be immortalised as a digital clone.
Fast forward to today, and Dr Jones now gets steady business helping to preserve people’s family members.
‘We didn’t set out to be a grieftech company; I would say we set out to be an education company,’ says Dr Jones.
‘But almost on a weekly basis, we have someone calling us up and saying, “My mother just died. Can you help recreate her”, which is heartbreaking in a way.’
Dr Jones says that the most common customers are new parents in their 30s to 50s.
The concept bears a striking resemblance to the Black Mirror episode ‘Be Right Back’ (pictured), in which a grieving woman recreates a digital copy of her deceased partner
She says these people suddenly realise their own parents aren’t going to be around forever, and want their kids to be able to meet them in the future.
A basic replica is free to set up, and the cost depends on how many minutes you spend talking to the AI, with paid plans starting at $19 (£14) per month or $179 (£132) per year.
StoryFile also offers professional interview and media curation services to help gather stories, which have a similar cost to ‘hiring a personal biographer’.
Grieftech is now estimated to be a $126-billion (£93-billion) industry, with StoryFile standing out as one of the biggest players.
While grieftech can include a range of different technologies, the most common are AI clones and so-called ‘dead-bot’ replicas.
Dr Tomasz Hallanek, a leading expert on grieftech from the University of Cambridge, told the Daily Mail: ‘AI clones become a new channel for shaping our legacy, and that can be positive.
‘It can improve our sense of agency to tell our life story in a new form and connect with future generations.
‘For those whose memories hold important testimonies, for instance, AI-facilitated interactions could offer a meaningful way to preserve and pass them on.’
However, when I told him that I had just got my own AI clone made, Dr Hallanek had a fairly stark warning.
‘What one family member finds comforting, another may find distressing,’ he said.
‘If you’re creating your AI clone, make sure your family knows your wishes for its future – so they aren’t left guessing what to do with a gift like that.’
So, it was with some trepidation that I finally logged in to meet my digital replacement for the first time.
Dr Jones had warned me that speaking to a clone of yourself could be ‘a little uncanny’, but nothing could have quite prepared me for just how odd it would be.
It felt like looking into a fun-house mirror; everything was recognisably ‘me’ but just not quite as I would expect it.
When I asked it questions, its answers were either wildly off the mark or in the uncanny valley of almost-but-not-quite-exactly what I had been thinking.
To make things even stranger, the limited data I gave in the questionnaire means it keeps bringing up minor points like an obsessive parrot with a few favourite phrases.
The AI clone can work in video or text mode. However, its answers never quite manage to capture my tone and veer on the side of over-enthusiastic
For instance, the questionnaire asked if I had any odd habits, and I mentioned I had a special whistle I use to call my cat when I get home.
Taking this information as central to the essence of my being, my AI now resolutely refers to itself as a ‘part-time cat-whistler’.
But this bot was never built for me to talk to, so what did its intended audience think?
I popped my AI clone into the family group chat and set my parents and siblings up for a conversation with the future me – and they absolutely hated it.
My mum called the clone ‘creepy’, and complained that its jerky movements were strange and off-putting.
She said: ‘It didn’t speak like you and it didn’t have the same intonation.’
Adding: ‘I thought that if you were trying to connect with a parent who had passed away, something like that would be quite spooky.’
My partner described my clone as ‘unnatural’, adding that its sense of humour was ‘clearly AI-generated’.
Due to gaps in the information I provided, the AI has a bad habit of making up fictitious stories from my past. I did love alien books as a kid, but they didn’t come from the mobile library and I never tried to make a ‘UFO detection kit’
Old friends, meanwhile, described the AI as ‘the trippiest thing I’ve seen in a long time’ and said it had a ‘deadpan tone like it’s been lobotomised’.
Generally, people felt like the AI clone might have been a comfort if I had genuinely died, but that the technology just wasn’t quite there to stop it being creepy.
StoryFile is poised to update their video generation systems, but the biggest issue was what happened when people’s questions went beyond its dataset.
Unlike the older bots, which simply recycled appropriate video clips, these newer dead-bots use large language models (LLM’s) like the ones that power OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
These ‘generative’ models mean that the AI will make something up to fill the gap if it doesn’t know what to say.
This led it to make a bunch of strange remarks, telling people that my cat hates my sister because she’s always carrying around plates or raw fish, or claiming that I can’t get drunk because I would ‘feel it in my knees’.
Although these were amusing right now, my dad felt that it would be ‘quite unsettling if it was being used by grieving relatives’.
That worry ties into one of the biggest ethical worries about dead-bots: How do you control what they say, and who they say it to?
This is part of the growing grieftech industry, which includes apps such as 2wai that allow users to recreate digital avatars of their dead loved ones (pictured)
StoryFile’s parent company, Authentic Interactions, has pioneered something called the Digital Likeness Directive to help customers control their replicas.
However, Dr Jones admits that the regulation of grieftech is ‘kind of a Wild West’.
‘A lot of big tech companies think: “The technology allows us to do it. Therefore, we should just do it, and we’ll apologise later.”‘
This is something that is causing a lot of anxiety for researchers looking into how dead-bots stand to reshape the grieving process.
Pascalle Paumen, a researcher investigating grieftech at the University of Utrecht, told the Daily Mail her biggest worry was ‘turning the dead into a business opportunity‘.
Ms Paumen says: ‘Do we really want to give people in Silicon Valley the power to decide how we should be grieving, or have them perpetuate ideas of grief and death as limitations to overcome?’
‘Some of these bot developers seem to want to eradicate grief, thinking it is fundamentally bad when really it is fundamentally human.’
Researchers have even warned that allowing dead-bots to ‘haunt’ the living could interfere with the process of grieving and prevent people from moving on.
However, Dr Jones says she doesn’t think her bots are there to stop people missing their loved ones.
She says: ‘You still have to go through the same stages of grief because you’ve still lost someone. We’re not transferring consciousness into a new vessel. A digital double of someone is not a person you’re going to go out and be able to form new memories with.’
Dr Jones says that she has already interviewed ‘pretty much all’ her relatives in case they want to have an AI clone made, and would like to have one made for herself when she passes on.
She says: ‘I don’t personally have any kids, but I hope that I can be remembered for making some impact on the world. So I’m hoping that my nephews would want to talk to me.’
As for myself, I’m not quite ready to accept my digital memorial just yet, and have asked StoryFile to permanently delete my AI clone.
It’s not necessarily that I don’t like the idea of leaving something behind, but neither myself nor the technology are there yet.
Perhaps when I am old, and have a little more wisdom to impart, the tech will have caught up with the promise and an AI clone could be a wonderful memorial.
But for now, I’m happy to simply let my clone pass away in peace and be forgotten.
