If you could see your deceased parent again through virtual reality, would you do it?

Whether you like it or not, new technologies influence your life – and perhaps, in the future, your death. It is not fanciful to imagine in a few years’ time funeral directors systematically asking bereaved families if they would like, accompanied by a coffin or flowers, an avatar of the deceased.

A market for “grief technology” has already taken off in the United States. One of the largest operators is HereafterAI, whose creator James Vlahos started the company as his then-dying (now deceased) father’s “Dadbot.” Customers can create an “immortal” avatar of their loved one through a virtual reality (VR) filming process that costs up to $50,000 (€46,000).

There are cheaper options in China, where several companies now sell interactive digital replicas of your loved ones. The price has fallen from around $3,000 to a few hundred dollars, according to a report published last month in the MIT Technology Review.

The prospect of standardization of these goods here was discussed at a conference in Dublin last week. One of the organizers, Dr Jennifer O’Meara, Associate Professor of Film Studies at Trinity College Dublin, examined the case of Meeting You, a Korean documentary about a mother who had the chance to interact with a version generated in virtual reality of his deceased. girl.

The film asks viewers to consider whether they would similarly encounter a deceased loved one through virtual reality if they had the chance. “Just because we can do it doesn’t necessarily mean we should,” O’Meara says.

Part of his unease with virtual reality experiences like Meeting You is the way they adopt “manipulative cues” and “filmic melodrama”: mother and child are thrown into even more poignant scenes , including a play area with a picnic table and birthday cake.

O’Meara’s participation in the conference is part of a four-year research project supported by the Irish Research Council entitled From Cinematic Realism to Extended Reality: Reformulating Screen Studies at the Precipice of Hyper -reality. It’s a long name for what is essentially an attempt to use film studies to better understand how virtual reality and artificial intelligence (AI) will shape our future lives.

O’Meara notes that computer scientists and tech entrepreneurs tend to dominate the AI debate. His project provides “a humanitarian perspective”.

“Often there is no recognition that what we see today are forms of earlier special effects and illusions in cinematic media.”

There is a parallel between some of the criticism leveled at AI today and claims in early cinema that films were tools of deception. “The audience learns the whole cinematic grammar of close-up, shot and reverse shot,” which helps them make critical judgments about what they see, O’Meara says. Similarly, with virtual reality, “we can see the seams of the technology…and we can see when things are wrong.” For the moment, this generally prevents one from completely believing in the false.

She emphasizes “as of now”. In the future, AI may no longer allow us to see the “seams” between truth and falsehood. A related concern is the rise of what another researcher at the TCD conference calls “truth agnosticism.”

“When you ask people who are watching some of these fake videos or these deep fakes, and ask them if they are bothered by the fact that what they were watching turned out to be fake, a lot of them don’t seem be – as long as they are entertained or enjoy the experience,” says O’Meara.

One question being considered as part of the research project is whether the history of the screen can offer lessons for regulating a technology like virtual reality.

No government seems willing or able to interfere with the business plans of AI companies. However, some Hollywood stars and other figures in the creative industries are trying to hold tech giants accountable through copyright and privacy laws.

The latest such action was launched last month by actress Scarlett Johansson – she is suing ChatGPT for its use of a voice “eerily similar” to hers in its updated version. Such legal actions serve as “test cases” for society as a whole, O’Meara says.

There have also been cases of children suing “influencer” parents for using images without their consent on social media. “This shows that parents don’t necessarily own their child’s digital life, or their afterlife, as they might imagine,” says O’Meara.

Returning to the question of whether to resuscitate a deceased loved one in virtual form, she asks: “who can give this consent? As for whether there is a market for it, O’Meara says: “At the moment these technologies are prohibitively expensive for most people… but as they become more integrated or dominant – like with laptops or smartphones – they will become cheaper and more people will have access to them.

There are no simple answers to the moral questions generated by new technologies. However, O’Meara emphasizes the value of digital media education, or learning “to be able to critically read the signs of deception, in any form.”

Food for thought for this year’s Leaving Cert students ahead of the CAO change of mind deadline. Film studies may have once been seen as a “backpack” course, but as a form of understanding the relationship between humans and screens, it might just keep you from being unknowingly absorbed. in unreality.