If Meta has its way, your social media feeds may one day become a kind of digital mausoleum.
Profiles will keep posting long after your buddy from college died of a massive coronary. The feeds will keep on truckin’, thanks to a 2023 patent from Meta that proposes the idea of using large language models to simulate the way someone would post. That way, they can keep posting long after they’ve died.
Business Insider details the horrors in a patent outlining a system in which an LLM could simulate a user’s social media activity when they are “absent.” That’s an umbrella term that encompasses many ideas, from a chatbot version of a vacation away message to post-death digital immortality.
The AI would train on a person’s posts, comments, likes, and messages, then continue interacting on their behalf. It could like your photos, respond to DMs, and potentially even simulate video or audio calls. The document lists Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth as the primary author, if you’re looking for someone to blame.
This Patent Would Make You Immortal on Social Media. Using AI, Of Course.
Meta has since said it has “no plans” to move forward with the idea. But it kind of does feel like the cat’s out of the bag. It exists. Either they’ll revisit it at some point, or someone will jump on it, at which point Meta will dust off the old tech and implement it as they’ve always wanted to. But the fact that it was seriously considered at all and formalized as a patent says plenty about where the industry’s head is.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has previously floated the notion that AI avatars of deceased loved ones might help people grieve. In a 2023 interview, he suggested interacting with virtual versions of the dead could offer comfort, before conceding it might also be unhealthy.
The whole thing is ghoulish, and becomes even more so when you realize that Meta also has an incentive here. A simulated user is still a user, someone who is still capable of creating content and farming engagement, even in death.
At a certain point, being alive will just be another data point, a minor detail that the algorithm will be too concerned with, getting tossed into the mix of who you are, along with the Facebook groups you are part of and the band fan pages you liked.
Science fiction spent decades warning us about the blurred line between the realms of the ghoulish and the mundane. All the authors, screenwriters, directors, and actors did a decent enough job of letting us conceptualize what those blurred lines would look like. But they never prepared us for the deep dread of watching the ideas get patented in real life.
The post This New Patent Could Let AI Run Your Social Media After You’re Dead appeared first on VICE.
