The nascent grief tech industry is booming in China on the back of advances in artificial intelligence, offering the bereaved the chance to "resurrect" deceased loved ones in the form of avatars.
China has been leading the charge in the generative AI revolution, with U.N. data showing Chinese patents in this industry exceeded 38,000 between 2013 and 2023-over six times as many as in the U.S. over the same period. This has coincided with the rise of AI-cloned influencers, who hawk products 24/7 on the country's e-commerce platforms, according to MIT Technology Review.
One company riding the ghostbot wave is Super Brain, a Nanjing-based startup founded by entrepreneur Zhang Zewei. Super Brain and other such companies feed large language models (LLMs) information about the deceased, in addition to images, video, and audio recordings, to produce their likeness.
In April, the company said it had "resurrected" more than 1,000 people. Zhang told Chinese media orders shot up ahead of the Qingming Festival in April, known in English as "Tombsweeping Day," during which Chinese families clean ancestors' graves and make ritual offerings in honor of deceased relatives.
Zhang said his company offers three main categories of services, with price points ranging from hundreds to thousands of dollars.
One, which he calls "AI healing," involves having employees or psychiatrists interact with customers via video chat while "wearing" the generated appearance and overlaying their speech with the deceased's voice. Another service is creating a "digital photo frame" of the subject. The most complex and time-consuming offering is a hyperrealistic 3D model made possible through holographic technology.
"On AI technology, China is in the highest class worldwide," Agence France-Presse quoted Zhang as saying. "And there are so many people in China, many with emotional needs, which gives us an advantage when it comes to market demand."
Two such people were Seakoo Wu and his wife, who paid AI companies thousands of dollars to create a digital facsimile of their son, who died at age 22 of a stroke in 2022. "Once we synchronize reality and the metaverse, I'll have my son with me again," AFP quoted him as saying. "I can train him... so that when he sees me, he knows I'm his father."
Observers have said the ethical and legal implications of this nascent technology are likely to follow.
"As with all things AI-related, the law is untested, very complex, and varies from country to country-users and platforms should be thinking of rights in the training data as well as the output and regulation," Andrew Wilson-Bushell, an associate with London media and commercial law firm Simkins LLP, told The Guardian in June.
