AI Helps Woman Answer Questions at Her Own Funeral

The co-founder of StoryFile(Opens in a new window), a company that claims to “make AI feel more human,” reportedly demonstrated the technology’s capabilities at his mother’s funeral in July.

The Telegraph reports(Opens in a new window) that Marina Smith, co-founder of the National Holocaust Centre in Nottinghamshire, died in June. But a “conversational video” created by StoryFile—which was co-founded by her son Stephen Smith—made it seem like she was speaking at her own funeral.

Smith told(Opens in a new window) the BBC that StoryFile didn’t use AI to generate responses on his mother’s behalf. Instead, she was able to record answers to questions she expected to be asked at her funeral. Then, on the day of, the AI responded to mourners with the appropriate video clip.

“In January this year,” Smith said(Opens in a new window) in a blog post, “I sat for two days with my mother in her home and asked her to answer scores of questions for her StoryFile. […] Those few hours of conversation are captured for a lifetime. One day her great-great-grandchildren will look her in the eye and ask her about her life, and she will tell them, face to face.”

Not that Smith’s great-great-grandchildren will be the only ones with that opportunity. StoryFile has made her “conversational video”—which is also referred to as a StoryFile—available online. Anyone can interact with this video from their browser via the company’s website(Opens in a new window).

Is that surreal? Yes. But at least the StoryFile is based on, and limited to, a recording Smith chose to make. That puts it in stark contrast with Amazon’s plan to use AI to generate an approximation of a deceased relative’s voice based on “less than a minute” of audio recordings.