Elle Purnell writes for the Federalist about a disturbing new use of artificial intelligence.
The year is 2025. You froze your eggs a decade ago, after your live-in boyfriend dumped you on your 30th birthday. You’re about to start your fifteenth round of IVF, and if this one doesn’t work, you have a color-coded list of surrogacy agencies to call. But your parents are pushing 70, and you feel some guilt thinking about the years your kids could have spent with them. Thankfully, former Disney child star Calum Worthy and his company 2wai have an app for that: In between trips to the IVF clinic, you can digitize your parents and create immortal AI clones of them that will haunt your children forever.
An ad posted last week, which has since been viewed more than 40 million times on X alone, features a pregnant woman talking to an AI avatar of her own mother on her phone, and goes on to show the grandma avatar present at various stages of the pregnancy and eventually the child’s life, until he is grown and expecting a child of his own. This touching act of necromancy was possible, the ad reveals at the end, because grandma recorded a three-minute video of herself before she died and her daughter uploaded it to 2wai. (An older ad from June boasts that you can use 2wai to talk to historical figures, your favorite influencers, or even yourself. In a porn-addled society, what could go wrong?)
The ad’s suggestion that lost loved ones can be rendered obsolete in minutes by soulless video game characters is repulsive and deeply disrespectful to the memories of the dead. Judging by the online response, most people innately understand there’s something very wrong with it. Even “Saturday Night Live” had a skit over the weekend poking fun at an AI algorithm for bringing old family pictures to life in bizarre and disturbing ways. No one wants a creepy Minecraft Grandma.
