The Talking Dead

Two well-known celebrities ignited a firestorm of controversy this week, when they used AI to bring dead people "back to life" by creating video Avatars that looked and sounded so much like the originals that they totally creeped some people out, and made them really question both the ethics of those who did it, and the technology they used to make it happen. First, it was Rock superstar, Rod Stewart, whose audience didn't think he was all that sexy, after he shared an AI-generated video of Ozzy Osbourne, who died a few weeks ago from cancer, waving a selfie stick and smiling back at a concert crowd with other dead rock stars, seemingly from the great beyond. Of course it was pure entertainment, and some fans thought it was great, but others were horrified and thought it was extremely disrespectful. Same goes for former CNN White House Correspondent, and now Independent Journalist, Jim Acosta, who did an "interview" with an AI-generated teenage victim of the 2018 Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. But, unlike Rod Stewart, who knew Ozzy Osbourne; Acosta never knew the victim, 17 year old Joaquin Oliver, but he did know his parents, and they asked him to do the story. But doing the story is one thing, and making it up from thin air using AI, is another. Besides being a quintessential example of "fake news"; the ethics behind doing it in the first place, are at least arguably, pretty darn questionable–at least according to the people who have been expressing outrage about it on social media and in the press this week. On the other hand, you have to consider that the boy's parents sanctioned this, and indeed, Axios Miami reports they are planning to continue to use the AI likeness of their son in their quest for stronger gun laws, mental health support, and community engagement. So, who is right, and who is wrong? If somebody is wrong, who should we blame; the people who did it, the people who created the technology that enabled them to do it, or society in general because we put up with it, or...well, I'm really not sure who else, but probably somebody.   It all reminds me of a Monkees song that was big when I was a kid called "Shades of Gray", which included the line, "Today there is no wrong or right, only shades of gray", which used to drive my parents crazy, because in their world; there were absolute rules. What was right, was right, what was wrong, was wrong, and that was just that, end of story. But that isn't just that anymore, especially when you have all these dead people just kind of spontaneously popping back up and telling us what's what, through the seemingly magical, but entirely algorithmic power of artificial intelligence. So, that's what we're getting into, on today's edition of "This Week In Tech with Jeanne Destro", with our special guest, Dr. John Huss, who is the Chair Professor of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Akron. He's been doing research into Ethics and AI, and will be presenting a paper on the topic at a big academic conference in Poland, next month.