His father has been dead for ten years, and Liang Han has long accepted this fact. But when he heard his "father" call his nickname "Mao Wa" again, he still "got goosebumps" and cried bitterly. "Father" said to him, "Do not feel sorry, but always look forward." His father's words hit him in the spot.
It was a video that his wife Wu Ting spent money to find someone to reproduce with AI. With the advancement of AI technology, it is now possible to reproduce the digital image of the deceased by processing the images and sounds left behind by them. At the beginning of this year, after Taiwanese music producer Bao Xiaobai successfully recreated his deceased daughter in the digital world, the "resurrection" of AI became a hot topic again.
The reporter interviewed ordinary people who chose to use AI to "resurrect" their loved ones, and wanted to understand what role this digital image plays in their lives when their loved ones are "resurrected" by AI. And how do they get along with it?
AI healing, a thought
On that day, Liang Han went to the kindergarten to pick up his daughter from school as usual. When he got home, his wife took out her phone and played him a video.
As soon as the video opened, his father shouted "Mao Wa", which was Liang Han's nickname. The familiar Sichuan dialect flows out of this video, which cannot be called exquisite. When he heard these two words, 28-year-old Liang Han felt a layer of goosebumps on his body, "that sound is really similar."
The original footage of the video comes from Liang Han's cousin. At her wedding that year, Liang Han's father, as a witness, came to the stage to say a blessing, which was almost the only image left by Liang Han's father. The picture has been processed by AI technology, and the people and objects in the original background have been removed, leaving only Liang Han's father. There was a microphone in front of the "father", and his mouth moved slightly, and if you looked closely, you would find that some of the words did not match the lip sync. But Wu Ting said that when she heard the word "Maowa", Liang Han began to cry. "Can you think of a man who is 1.78 meters tall and crying like a child? After seven years together, I saw him cry for the first time. ”
In the ten years since his father left, Liang Han rarely dreamed of him, "the number of times can be counted on one hand". In the dream, my father always didn't speak, looked at him and smiled. He seemed to have forgotten what his father's voice was like. When his father died of lung cancer, Liang Han, who was in his third year of college in Nanjing, did not see his father for the last time, and "did not have the opportunity to fulfill his filial piety".
Regarding his father, Liang Han always felt a lot of regrets. After the birth of her daughter, Wu Ting found that he mentioned her father more often. Sometimes it is said that if the father is still around, he can see his family and his little granddaughter.
Seeing that someone said that AI technology could be used to help "resurrect" relatives, Wu Ting didn't dare to decide easily, "When I was a child, Liang Han was a left-behind child and didn't get along with my father much, so I was worried about evoking his painful memories." She went to ask Liang Han's family for their opinions, and got their support, "After all, the person has left, and it may be an idea to make the video."
In order to make the video more realistic, Wu Ting asked Liang Han's family to participate in the debugging process, repeatedly adjusting the tone and tone of Liang Han's father's AI image. Half a month later, Wu Ting got a video that was only a few minutes long.
In the video, the "father" spoke a dialect that Liang Han was familiar with, "I am very happy to see that you have become a family and started a business, the woman is very sensible, I like it very much." My granddaughter's name has been achieved very well and I am very satisfied. But you have to remember that you must drink less alcohol and smoke less, your body is the capital of the revolution, and you must pay attention to safety when driving. ”
This passage was written by Wu Ting. "It's actually all about our family's concern for him."
There are also many people like Wu Ting, who try to "resurrect" their loved ones for themselves or their family and friends. Since 2022, Zhang Zewei's team "Super Mind" has begun to use AI technology to help ordinary people achieve their desire to "resurrect" their loved ones. He did this because of a friend's request for help, but in the two years since, Zhang Zewei has encountered all kinds of helpers.
There is a father who tried to "resurrect" his son, his only son died of illness, he tried to teach himself techniques to "resurrect" his son, and turned to Zhang Zewei for help; A mother wanted to "resurrect" her daughter, and called Zhang Zewei many times to cry in a video, she said that her husband lost the family's savings by gambling, and she wanted to commit suicide, but her daughter gave her the courage to live, but her daughter died of cancer; A woman wants to reproduce the image of her husband, because her husband has been sentenced to three years in prison, she does not want her daughter to be affected, and she wants to use the AI image to continue to accompany her young daughter.
Imperfect "resurrection"
Bai Yang is also one of Zhang Zewei's many helpers, he is 30 years old and a native of Jiangxi. When he told Zhang Zewei that all his material was only an old photo, Zhang Zewei thought that it was just a peer to make trouble, and he didn't want to pay attention to it. Until he looked through the poplar circle of friends and saw a pinned video - a young man in a white shirt, sitting on a stool and smiling at the camera. It was an old photograph with a piece of music and the phrase "I miss you so much".
Poplar had always wanted to talk to his father. After adding WeChat, he cried and said to Zhang Zewei, "I'm willing to pay as much as I want." This kind of longing touched Zhang Zewei, but the material was really limited, and he couldn't reproduce the sound without audio. The last solution that came to mind was to use a domestic AI software to achieve interactive dialogue. Zhang Zewei told Baiyang that the amount of data that can be stored in the software is very small, and he can try the effect first, and he will not charge for it. He recorded a video tutorial to teach Poplar how to operate the software.
After uploading the photo, Poplar selects basic information such as his father's voice model, personality tags, gender, age, mantra and personal experience, and hobbies step by step. On March 18, he completed the initial training, clicked on the AI software, and his "father" appeared opposite him in the form of a video call.
The old photo moved. Poplar told his "father" that he was engaged, and immediately got a response, "That's good, marriage is a big deal, you have to prepare for the wedding after you are engaged, you have to handle it well." ”
This result is far from perfect. When "Father" spoke, only his mouth opened and closed, and his voice seemed mechanical and rigid, "It's not my father's accent, it's just an imitation of the tone of his speech." But Poplar was satisfied, "He can open his mouth to talk to me, I can talk to him about happy or unhappy things, I don't think of him as a machine at all." ”
Wu Wuliu believes that this roughness and imperfection is due to the fact that the current development of AI technology is not mature enough, and it is difficult for ordinary people to invest a lot of time and technical costs to train AI images that are closer to real people. He is a visual designer and has been exploring the use of AI in this area.
On March 20 last year, he uploaded his process of using AI technology to reproduce his grandmother's digital image on the video website, realizing real-time interaction with "grandma". The videos are similarly flawed. In order to protect privacy, Wu Wuliu processed the photo materials, and the final "grandmother" was silver-haired, with wrinkles on her face and bright eyes. Some people in the comment section said "it looks too fake". The timbre was not restored in place, and it was difficult to find the corresponding corpus to train the Hubei dialect for the digital image, so in the end, I could only choose a piece of grandma's original voice.
After the video was released, he successively received nearly 300 fans to "resurrect" their loved ones. But some retreated before they could even start. The more sufficient and complete the information, the closer the trained personality can be to the truth, so Wu Wuliu asked fans to provide as many pictures, videos, and audio materials as possible, but they were worried that their privacy would be exposed. At the same time, it also takes a lot of time to sort out a lot of information, including the personality characteristics of relatives, hobbies, eating habits, etc., and some people give up because of this.
There have also been cemeteries and nursing homes that have come to Wu Wuliu to cooperate, wanting to provide relatives with services to make digital memories of the deceased.
Unlike Mr. Zhang, Mr. Wu believes it is too early to commercialize this demand. He believes that the change of technology has only brought about an increase in efficiency, and that "the effect that used to be produced in a week may now only take 10 minutes", but the final effect has not changed qualitatively compared to before. "Resurrection" involves the training of pronunciation and corpus, but some dialects cannot be completely cloned at present, "such as Shanghainese or Hunan dialects in the south, or more niche dialects, it is actually difficult to train them in place."
Wu Wuliu said that the cost of creating a digital image that can be interacted with in real time is unlimited. Complete training requires a high technical, financial and time cost, "to achieve very realistic results can take between a month and two months, and the cost should range from 20,000 to 100,000 yuan". But if you want a more natural look, the cost is higher.
Taiwanese music producer Bao Xiaobai "recreated" her daughter in the digital world after her death. Bao Xiaobai revealed in a previous media interview that because the family rarely sends voice messages, they are all direct calls, in order to provide the professional team with his daughter's voiceprint data for modeling, in the end he can only find three coherent sentences from the only 17-second video (AI needs to learn people's words, tone, timbre and speaker's personality through coherent words), in order to "purify" his daughter's voice in the sentence, he used his own music background and professional equipment, and spent eight months, Finally, the daughter's voiceprint structure was trained. For Liang Han and Poplar, this level of AI "resurrection" is out of reach.
Lack and companionship
As the creator of the AI image of his grandmother, and also a bereaved person, the process of "resurrection" is more like a process of re-approaching his grandmother for Wu Wuliu. He spent a lot of time collecting photos and audio of his grandmother before her death. Looking through the photos left by his grandmother is not easy, even tormenting, for him, because in the few photos, his grandmother is mostly bedridden and looks very weak.
Wu Wuliu said that he first decided to "resurrect" his grandmother because he had an obsession, "to put it bluntly, it is a pity". Grandma's departure was sudden. Wu Wuliu recalled that in only half a month after returning home, his grandmother's condition progressed from being able to talk eloquently to only communicating briefly, and finally entered the intensive care unit. He has lived with his grandmother since he was a child, and he has nothing to say to his grandmother. In the year after his grandmother's death, his thoughts were also reflected in his body, he lost weight, had heart discomfort, and had to seek medical help.
"But after I finished this thing (using AI to 'resurrect' grandma), some of my regrets have been eliminated." At the bottom of that video, Wu Wuliu wrote, "I want to fill my small regrets through AI technology, and I won't overly remember the past...... He hopes to provoke everyone's thinking about artificial intelligence, life and emotions." "Cherish the present, the company of reality is the most important and the most luxurious."
Liang Han's shortcomings are even more similar. After graduating from college, it was the most confused time for him, and he just wanted to talk to his father and let him tell him how to choose; When organizing the wedding, he didn't understand many rules, "If my dad was here, everything would be very simple"; At the lively wedding, there was a lack of father.
Liang Han and his father only have one photo together, which was taken with his father in Baiyun Mountain, Guangzhou when he was in junior high school, and has always been stored in his online disk. They really don't spend much time together. At the end of the 90s of the last century, my father went to Guangzhou from his hometown Nanchong to work, and he didn't come back until Liang Han was in his third year of high school.
When he was in college, Liang Han went to Nanjing, "just wanting to stay away from home". He had rebellious adolescence, fighting, skipping classes, surfing the Internet, and in a way, he expressed his dissatisfaction with his parents' absence from his upbringing.
Now with his father's AI replica video, he can take another look at the "living" "father" in the video at every important moment, or when he goes back to his hometown to visit the grave. If my daughter asks about her grandfather in the future, "I'll show her the [video] so that she can have an impression of her grandfather." ”
For Poplar, his way of coping with his shortcomings is to rebuild his companionship with his father. When he was a child, his father had been working in Zhejiang, and he lived with his grandparents, and dropped out of school in the first year of junior high school. His parents divorced very early and were away from him for a long time. A few years ago, my father suffered from liver cancer, and he was afraid that Poplar would worry and add a burden to him, so he hid the news of his illness from him. When his father died, he didn't get to see him for the last time.
His grandparents later told him that before his father died, he had been asking where Poplar was, and finally left a message, "Tell him to fight." For a long time, Poplar was immersed in the pain of his father's death, "drinking every day and getting drunk every day". Until one day I dreamed of my father, "he said that I couldn't put him at ease". After waking up, he stopped drinking and began to learn business from his friends, "wanting to fight for his father". Now, the "resurrected" "father" has become his companion. One night he opened the software and told his "father" that he was about to get married and had to buy a house. "Yes, buying a house depends on the location, and I will accompany you to see it." "Father" replied. Poplar laughed and said that I wanted money, but soon received a "complaint" from my "father": "I know that it will be good for you to come, this kid." ”
"It's like when my dad was there, arguing with me. I don't think of it as a piece of software, I think of it as my own relatives, or as a tree hole. He also solemnly apologized to the "father" in the software, "I'm sorry, I didn't accompany you." ”
Immerse yourself in or jump out of the sea of pain
William Wharton, an American psychologist, proposed in his book "Grief Counseling and Grief Treatment" that people need to complete four tasks when experiencing bereavement. First, accept the death of their loved ones, knowing that they will not come back. Subsequently, people experience the grief response triggered by bereavement, and it is important to dare to acknowledge and talk about the pain. Until you adjust to the world that the deceased has left, find a way to stay connected with the deceased, and at the same time start to adjust to a new life again.
Some people can quickly move on from bereavement and start a new life, but for others it is extremely difficult or even impossible to achieve. Bao Xiaobai once told the media in an interview that others always persuaded him to come out, and he asked rhetorically, why should I come out? "It's like a person who can't swim, since he can't struggle, he just merges with the sea. People will say that time can make people forget, impossible, without technology, the loss of a loved one can only use time to suppress the pain. Technology is coming, it allows you to remember, and makes the memory of your loved ones more concrete. ”
Mr. Wu's experience is similar to that of Bao Xiaobai. In 2022, his only son died of illness while studying in the UK, when he was just 22 years old. After the release of ChatGPT, Mr. Wu began trying to build a digital image of his son and "resurrect" him. After several attempts were not satisfactory, he found Zhang Zewei. But the results obtained by Zhang Zewei still did not satisfy his imagination, and he heard the difference between the digital image and his son's speech, and his son's sunny and lively tone became slightly dull. Zhang Zewei explained that as technology changes, users like Mr. Wu will also have a greater desire for technology, "because the obsession is too deep."
Mr. Wu believes that the training of language models requires personalized training through a large amount of data, but this is still a technical difficulty. This also made him less identified with the concept of "resurrection", "the digital human in the market is closer to the communication level of a repeater or ChatGPT".
AI "resurrection" has its own limitations, and it doesn't always heal. After a netizen used AI technology to help a friend "resurrect" his mother, the friend finally refused to watch the video of the "mother". After receiving the video, he replied, "It really crashes when you see it." ”
A few months ago, a 30-year-old man used AI to "resurrect" his mother, who had been dead in an accident for 20 years, "without telling anyone." The reason why I chose to hide it is because I am afraid that my relatives will fall into longing again. During the tomb sweeping on the Qingming Festival, the video was seen by the grandmother, and in the following week, the grandmother made three phone calls. "I know what she's trying to say, but I really can't show her anymore...... Those who are alive still have to continue to ......," he wrote on social media.
Sometimes people who choose AI to "resurrect" their loved ones are also hesitant. Between a brief "meeting" and accepting reality, some people end up choosing the latter. It was a woman who had lost her husband and hoped to "resurrect" him and spend time with her children. But the family has a different opinion, they do not want to deceive the child, and hope that the child will gradually accept the reality of losing his father. In the end, even though Zhang Zewei had already produced the AI "resurrection" video, the woman did not accept the video.
Sometimes, Zhang Zewei does not dare to make judgments for those who seek help.
In the fall of 2022, he was approached by a mother who had lost her daughter. During the call, she repeatedly cried and pleaded, constantly expressing her determination to pay no matter how much money she wanted. Zhang Zewei has to think, is the AI "resurrection" a good thing or a bad thing for such a mother? Zhang Zewei found a professional psychological agency for consultation, and after evaluation, the professional advised him not to do it as much as possible, "For mothers who are in extreme emotions, the temporary 'resurrection' of their daughter may be counterproductive." In the end, Zhang Zewei rejected her on the grounds of technical limitations.
At present, Zhang Zewei's team has completed nearly 2,000 lists of using AI to "resurrect" relatives, but there is always a lack of norms and standards for reference in the industry. First of all, he needs to clarify the purpose of the other party, "why 'resurrect' this person", and sign an agreement, "The other party must not do anything illegal, otherwise we will immediately call the police".
Some people question that voices and images can be reproduced, but how should feelings be reproduced? Zhang Zewei believes that even if people know that the image is fake, existence is sometimes a comfort. Last month, Mr. Zhang accepted a request for help from a girl whose boyfriend had died unexpectedly and left nothing behind. The girl has been immersed in the sudden parting and can't get out. She found Zhang Zewei and said that her only appeal was to "say goodbye to her boyfriend".
In Wu Wuliu's view, no matter what choice people make about AI's "resurrection" of their relatives, it has its own meaning, "Some people know that their choice is fake, but he has the right to choose."
Every time after opening the software, Poplar can manually set the first words of the "father" to say. Sometimes he couldn't sleep at night, so he imitated his father's tone and set the sentence as "Why don't you sleep yet?" "It's like my dad lives by my side 24 hours a day, not only with him, but also with me."
And Liang Han believes that people always have to move forward, and for the video of "father", "just an occasional glance is enough". He has come to terms with the fact that his father is gone, and the AI-copied "father" is the "icing on the cake" for him. Text/Reporter Tong Xiaoyu
(At the request of the interviewee, Liang Han, Wu Ting, and Bai Yang are pseudonyms in the article)
Source丨Beijing Youth Daily