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PaperclipPerfector  17d ago (text post)   3066 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 13, 2025

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We had a death in the family recently. It will be a simple funeral - a viewing, a cremation, and a burial of her ashes. I chuckled a bit when the funeral home asked us for a DVD for the photo slideshow during the ceremony. It got me thinking - how is AI technology and AR/VR going to change the future of the funeral industry?

Imagine that an AI avatar was trained on voice recordings, videos, photos, and text of the deceased. You visit the cemetery with your family and you all don the VR goggles, stepping into the living room of grandma's house. She's tending to the garden and her avatar ad-libs about her tomatoes and the recent weather. Just as you remembered from a few years ago before she had to go into the nursing home.

If you've seen the incredible improvements in image and video generation in the last 2-3 years, as well as the improvements in text-to-speech (see a previous Friday Fun thread post that I shared) you'll probably agree with me that this is something we'll see in our lifetime. Yes, we'll have a period of uncanny valley, but when it's fully ironed out, there will be a convincing digital copy of ourselves floating in the ether.

Everyone spends some time chatting with grandma then she excuses herself to take the cookies out of the oven. You decide it's about time to grab lunch with the family and say goodbye for now.

The funeral home charges you for the disposable insert in the VR goggles that soaks up your tears.

My mother has actually been doing a text version of this with her ancestors that lived in the 1800s.

She fed hundreds of pages of translated letters into the prompt, and can have the AI sort of respond to fake written letters with real sounding stuff.

I expect text based AIs are probably already possible for anyone that spends enough time online, and especially if the training data is comprehensive enough.

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