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A very uncomfortable story in The Wall Street Journal this week is only the latest in recent AI scares that have been circulating recently. The headline of the piece reads: "A Dead Father Is Reincarnated With AI." Now, I ask you, how could anyone resist reading an article like that? Well, I read it and I must tell you it creeped me out, as the kids say.
The father in the story died four years ago but his son has created an AI version of him. (Cue the mad doctor music and maniacal laughter). This may sound like a Boris Karloff movie, "Son of Frankenstein Returns" or something, but it's worse than that. This thing is no fictionalized horror film, it's for real.
The father, a former marketer and entertainment producer in Chicago, had left behind five filing cabinets of work-related documents and notes, some 17,500 pages in all. The son took this material and loaded it all into Anthropic's Claude chatbot. Then he trained the bot to sound like his father using voicemail messages he had saved from him over time. Okay, it gets even creepier. Next he created a three-dimensional image of his father, and with the help from a few friends, they designed the chatbot's personality. They worked on this thing for six months. They didn't have to wait for an electrical storm to bring Frankenstein's monster to life, however. They simply worked on computers.
The son used a 3-D printed model of his father's head, a TV screen and an angled mirror to create what looked like a hologram of his father. The article had a photo of this 3-D avatar smiling out at us behind his glasses and wearing a suit and tie. The son officially unveiled his creation at a tech event in Chicago and people lined up to ask the avatar questions. The thing answered "enthusiastically" the article said, but if it didn't know an answer it would decline.
So how close did the AI generated father come to the actual person? People who knew the real father say that the bot sounded more extroverted than the real guy, but was lacking his humor. The son said, "My father had a very distinctive laugh, which the bot didn't have. It's not my dad, but it doesn't mean it doesn't feel good when he gives me advice."
Some experts say that the technology is good enough now to create "clumsy AI models of real people." They call them AI ghosts. I've seen videos of dead classic movie stars who have been "brought back to life" using AI technology and yes, it's close in some ways, but there is a stilted, fake looking quality that comes through. It looks phony. Perhaps in the future they will improve the images, making them look closer to real life.
I'm sure many of us have seen the robots, at least on television, that emulate human motion. They walk, run, react, and move extremely similarly to a human being. The difference is, that they still look mechanical, all metal and nuts and bolts. The moves are there, but it doesn't look human. Not yet.
How long will it be until the Frankenstein doctors will be able to meld the physical robots with the video AI images and voices into one walking, talking, real live creature that will look, sound, and react like the human being it was designed to replicate? My sister tells me they can do it already. I haven't seen it myself, but I'm sure it's coming.
When that day comes, when we really can't tell the difference between the real and the machine-made, we will have begun the process of making ourselves obsolete. I hope I'm not around to see that day. I have my hands full dealing with people, let alone robot versions of people.
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