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E-life After Death!

Posted on 23rd August 2015

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This BBC report describes something that I find quite disturbing, and could eventually mess up the Internet. Apparently this is not the first attampt at this kind of AI avatar system.

There is a new web-site, Eter9, which will learn about your social media activity by scanning your posts, can post on your behalf, and then continue posting online for you after your death. Not only is this rather creepy, but it means that you won't know if the posts that you are reading are even written by real people.

If services like this take-off, as more people die, an ever increasing proportion of social media Internet traffic will be generated by avatars of dead people. I already consider that a large part of social media content is time-wasting junk, and it seems that this will be getting worse; I seriously doubt that an AI avatar will have anything to say which will interest me.