Woman finds deepfake image of dead dad going viral online
Technology
Dangers of deepfakes: Experts warn people to prep for ‘digital death’
(Web Desk) - The dawn of generative AI, an advanced form of machine intelligence, has flooded social media with computer-produced images of people.
These AI-generated people, generally referred to as deepfakes, are usually a Frankenstein-cocktail of hundreds of different faces that the AI has 'seen' on the internet.
But a worrying trend may be emerging.
A woman claims a deepfake doppelganger of a dead relative has to surface online, in social media memes, fundraisers, and even puzzles.
Scrolling on social media platform X (formerly Twitter), Sara Burningham, a podcast and documentary producer at Slate Magazine, stumbled across a "janky AI" image of five elderly men dressed like war veterans.
Below the photo it says, “The real heroes in America are not in Hollywood.”
The image bares all the hallmarks of a deepfake: extra fingers, a gibberish language, and a nonsensical five-seater arrangement for a plane.
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But what struck Burningham most, was that the man seated closest to the 'camera' was her dad, who died 14 years ago.
"It stopped me in my tracks. I wanted to find out where this image had sprung from," she wrote in Slate.
"I did a reverse image search and found the image is circulating all over the place."
While there are some minor differences between her dad and the man in the image, like the line of his beard and the shape of his glasses, she and her brother agreed it was "unmistakably him".
He was also not an American veteran, like the picture suggests, but a Canadian oil engineer–turned–environmentalist.
Burningham believes an image generator scraped a photo of her dad from social media, like the wedding snaps she posted in 2007.
"Our memories have become forever digital debris to be sucked in, digested, and reanimated by machine learners," added Burningham.
"Our lives, our dead, and their data are becoming a kind of digital compost.
"The ways in which our information is now totally beyond our control make all of us queasy or, if we think about it a little longer, angry."
Experts have urged people to start preparing for their "digital death", so that remnants of your life, what Burningham called her dad's "years-old digital shadow", aren't trapped in the digital sphere forever.
A recent Which? poll revealed that three-quarters of people have no plan for what to do with their digital assets after they have passed away.
While it is largely intended to avoid the risk of emails, photos and social media accounts being locked up and inaccessible to loved ones, it also helps remove some of the ammo AI can use to create deepfakes.
There are currently no legal rules for how digital assets are dealt with when you die.
The watchdog has encouraged people to share account details with family or friends before they die and consider including a letter of wishes.
