I believe in the future our descendants will likely find it normal to talk with AI versions of their ancestors, perhaps not us parents right now, but I suspect my children will willingly train and generate AI versions of themselves for future generations to interact with.
What I don't like is that the better it gets the more a radical contigent will start to believe that you're performing brain uploading, and people will want to protect these simulations as people with rights, or ban it to prevent conscious mini-mes from being booted into a simulation and psychologically tortured like the guy in Altered Carbon. Then of course theere's the suicide cults like in the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch" - leave your aches and pains behind !
I pray it doesn't get that weird! But if I had kids I wouldn't be raising them to talk to ghosts!
At the other side of this equation is the extremists that think this is great. To go full Godwin's law there are certainly people out there that would like for a digital Hitler to stick around forever.
I think it will end up just being boring. The sad reality is that no one really wants to talk to us, except for a few who are amazing poets or something.
I think what’s more likely is to train models on all material created and ask useful questions for purposes of probate (“when did you buy the house”) because its faster and cheaper than manual research. Or maybe for family history summaries (“how many cousins lived in Colorado in the 1990s and moved to Iowa?”)
You get that this only played out positively in the movie because the writers/director wanted it to play out that way, right?
Also as others have pointed out it suffers from the hollywood positive-ification of things and never attmempts to take on any serious aspects of the tech. Its just a plot device.
A managed service for all this surely has a market, imho
I don’t know if it was healthy, but I did it and I liked it when I did. It made me sad to do it, but I continued.
Would it? I'm not a specialist, but it would seem a bit off to me to approach it like that. I'd think best is to accept that your deceased one has gone, and it seems like having a fake one might just prolong the grievance process and possibly also develop into an obsession of trying to replace your deceased one with the simulation, upgrading it and obsessively finding ways to make it more accurate.
If you weren't able to process your loved one being gone in the first place, how would you ever be able to quit from using the simulation?
Although there is a market for psychics who claim to be able to talk to deceased relatives. Despite them obviously being liars, I wonder what the effect overall is for the customers. Does it help them? And is it because they believe the psychic, e.g. if psychic says, that your loved one would want you to move on and live your best life, perhaps this could alleviate their guilt. But I'm not sure how that would play out with a simulation. Would it have to be simulation's goal to slowly wean them off while hinting them to move on with their life and live their best life.
But if I was to find out I am about to die, I would definitely want to try and build a simulation out of myself, that would then keep DMing the people I knew. I guess either it would have to be activated as marked down in the will, or it would have to be a sort of dead man's switch. I have to reset it monthly or it will have a timer to activate. Once I die, people will keep receiving DMs of the simulated version.