https://futurism.com/ai-seance
AI Company Says It’ll Perform A Seance On Your Dead Loved Ones
June 20, 2023 by SkyWatch Editor
Throughout narrative history — from ancient mythology to modern stories like “Pet Sematary” — bringing lost loved ones back from the dead has been generally regarded as a pretty big no. As the tales will tell it, bringing the dead back to life will result in the resurrection of some horrible silhouette, or at the least a vacant one, empty of whatever it was that made that person them.
Often, the attempt at resurrection destroys the necromancer, whether by the hand of some macabre force or just the extra heartbreak of losing a loved one twice. This millennia-long lineage of warning tales in mind, it’s not terribly hard to understand why some might find grief tech — startups that aim to bottle deceased or dying loved ones into algorithms, in theory preserving them forever — unsettling. Cursed, even. Maybe that’s why most companies operating in the grief tech space market their work as a means of preservation, as opposed to resurrection.
Upload your writings, memories, and voice recordings into a service, and it creates an algorithmic version of you that surviving friends and family can interface with. After all, you can’t resurrect someone you’ve never actually lost. Right? But fascinatingly, that’s where an upcoming service called Seance AI — yes, it’s actually called that — sets itself apart. It’s built by a software development lab called AE Studio, where its creator, a designer named Jarren Rocks, isn’t shy about the straightforwardness of the product’s name. While other companies often talk around any implication of resurrection, Rocks leans full-tilt into the ghoulishness — and according to him, it’s very intentional…