Puppeteering the Departed: When Memory Meets Machine

Elon Musk recently pronounced, “For most people, the best use of the @Grok app is turning old photos into videos, seeing old friends and family members come to life.”

Immediately, people responded with examples of what they had accomplished with this technology, and what they had made their decedents do in these fake videos. One man responded, “Our grandmother just passed 2 days ago. Found this old photo and brought her back to life with grandpa.” Below is the video he shared:

What may seem wholesome at a passing glance is more troublesome the longer one stares into its depths and contemplates the implications.

This attempt to breathe life into the dead results in a kind of blissful caricature of the deceased. It doesn’t “reanimate”, for AI cannot cause a re-enactment of what it does not know. It invents. Should we cheer for a fabrication that robs the victims it imitates, depriving them of their individuality? For example, watch the woman wave. She wasn’t waving in the original picture, so it’s not a stretch to suggest that perhaps she never waved that day. Maybe she was shy and covered her face immediately after the photo was taken. Perhaps she had a nervous twitch, or was missing a hand, or any number of distinctive qualities that made her unique. How your grandmother waves is probably recognizably distinct from how your neighbor waves.

Grok would never know from the photograph. It cannot know, so it invents. But this waving puppet will now live in the very real memory of her descendant. Her true humanity is erased as part of the creation of a fictional video. The possibilities of what she actually did in that moment are dwindled to one suggestion, marketed as “bringing pictures to life”, but in truth, draining all that was alive and replacing it with a fabrication.

Some will object to the criticism, swearing that those who are grieving can be helped by this technology. But healing from grief ends with acceptance, not with recreating what never was by refusing to honor them, using a Norman Bates-inspired caricature to create memories of events that never happened. Moreover, the depths of this contagion have likely not yet been fully realized, and few seem able to state clearly where the ethical line should be, if indeed there is one at all. This concept has already been explored much further than the above-referenced video, causing dead victims to announce that they have forgiven their murderers, to remake ancestors into personal chatbots, and to say things that we wish they had said.

It is the mainstreaming of what we saw done years ago by the parents of Joaquin Oliver, who was killed in the Parkland High School massacre. His mother and father used his likeness to create an ad campaign favoring gun control, in which he was puppeteered into telling people to vote in the November elections of that year. Now this formerly expensive technology is freely available to all.

If we are to respect the dead, then we must consider how it is abusive to those who no longer have a voice to use them as mere billboards for someone’s pet project, political campaign, or source of dark entertainment.

This sort of pictorial necromancy mirrors some of the damage of older methods of communicating with the dead, long forbidden in Christian societies. The specific branch of occultism that attempts to receive messages from the dead preys on the grieving and clouds the legitimate memories that people have of their loved ones. In net effect, this does the same. While not a perfect parallel, some of the harm (to the living and to the memory of the dead) is the same.

How we treat the deceased is ultimately a reflection of what we believe about the finality of death. For example, every culture’s burial rites indicate what they think happens after the body dies. The Sky Burials of Tibet point to a belief that the body no longer has any value, and the Hanging Coffins of China attempted to elevate the spirits and move them closer to their ancestors. In a truly atheistic society that recognizes no hope of the Resurrection, our grief is without salve, and the redemption of our suffering is precluded. Thus, our attempts to extend lives at the expense of the truth, puppeteering our ancestors, and venting to computer imagery that shares their veneer, is a natural consequence of parting from a truly Christian culture.