Great Job, Internet!: Nobody's happy about AI puppets of Jesus or your dead relatives
Forcing us to ask: Is it more undignified to talk with a supposed AI avatar of your dead parent, or your personal lord and savior?
Photo: Xavi Torrent/Getty Images)
It’s been a banner week for delusion on the internet—never not a growth market, as it happens—and specifically in the world of AI grifters. To wit: Which is more fundamentally undignified, an AI startup claiming that its product will let you talk to your dead mother? Or to your lord and savior Jesus Christ?
Let’s take this scientifically. On the one hand, the former “product,” billed under the name 2wai, feels like it could do much more practical harm: Claiming—in a much-mocked online ad—that you can film a three-minute video of a loved one with the app, then use it to create an AI avatar of them that will continue to be able to talk to you for decades, the service has provoked a lot of accusations of being, well, outright evil, for the way it seems primed to take economic advantage of people lost in the throes of grief. (There’s nothing like having to tell the kids that you’ve had to delete Gramma because of a rise in processing fees.) It also helps that it’s the kind of thing that would feel heavy-handed popping up in a story about humanity letting AI excesses run amuck, to the extent that we literally have a Black Mirror episode about how this kind of thing is a terrible idea. (And that’s all before we get to the absurdities hanging around the edge of 2wai, like the fact that it was co-founded by actor Calum Worthy—a long-time Disney Channel alum who will always be “The kid who lies about getting a handjob in American Vandal” to us. Who else would you trust to sell you a shallow, repetitive facsimile of the most important missing people in your life, but the fourth-billed lead on Austin & Ally, right?)
