TAIPEI, Taiwan — Whenever stress at work builds, Chinese tech executive Sun Kai turns to his mother for support. Or rather, he talks with her digital avatar on a tablet device, rendered from the shoulders up by artificial intelligence to look and sound just like his flesh-and-blood mother, who died in 2018.

“I do not treat [the avatar] as a kind of digital person. I truly regard it as a mother,” says Sun, 47, from his office in China’s eastern port city of Nanjing. He estimates he converses with her avatar at least once a week. “I feel that this might be the most perfect person to confide in, without exception.”

Creating Digital Avatars

The company that made the avatar of Sun’s mother is called Silicon Intelligence, where Sun is also an executive working on voice simulation. The Nanjing-based company is among a boom in technology startups in China and around the world that create AI chatbots using a person’s likeness and voice.

The idea to digitally clone people who have died is not new but until recent years had been relegated to the realm of science fiction. Now, increasingly powerful chatbots like Baidu’s Ernie or OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which have been trained on huge amounts of language data, and serious investment in computing power have enabled private companies to offer affordable digital “clones” of real people.

Ethical Considerations

The rise of AI simulations of the deceased, or “deadbots” as academics have termed them, raises questions without clear answers about the ethics of simulating human beings, dead or alive.

In the United States, companies like Microsoft and OpenAI have created internal committees to evaluate the behavior and ethics of their generative AI services, but there is no centralized regulatory body in either the U.S. or China for overseeing the impacts of these technologies or their use of a person’s data.

Data Challenges

Browse Chinese e-commerce sites and you will find dozens of companies that sell “digital cloning” and “digital resurrection” services that animate photographs to make them look like they are speaking for as little as the equivalent of less than $2.

Silicon Intelligence’s most basic digital avatar service costs 199 yuan (about $30) and requires less than one minute of high-quality video and audio of the person while they were living.

More advanced, interactive avatars that use generative AI technology to move on screen and converse with a client can cost thousands of dollars.

But there’s a big bottleneck: data, or rather, the lack of it.

“The crucial bit is cloning a person’s thoughts, documenting what a person thought and experienced daily,” says Zhang Zewei, the founder of Super Brain, an AI firm based in Nanjing that also offers cloning services.

Zhang asks clients to describe their foundational memories and important experiences, or that of their loved ones. The company then feeds those stories into existing chatbots, to power an AI avatar’s conversations with a client.

Low-Tech Solutions

When Yang’s uncle passed away, he feared the shock would kill his ailing, elderly grandmother. Instead of telling her about her son’s death, Yang sought to create a digital avatar that was realistic enough to make video calls with her to maintain the fiction that her son was still alive and well.

Yang says he grew up with his uncle, but their relationship became more distant after his uncle left their village looking for work in construction.

Yang scrounged around family group chats on various social media apps on his own phone and came up with enough voice messages and video of his late uncle to create a workable digital clone of his likeness. But there was no getting around the lack of personal records, social media accounts and thus the lack of data his uncle had left behind.

“Do not overthink it,” he cautions. “An AI avatar is not the same as the human it replaced. But when we lose our flesh and blood body, at least AI will preserve our thoughts.”

Aowen Cao contributed research from Nanjing, China.