An AI avatar made to look and sound like the likeness of a man who was killed in a road rage incident addressed the court and the man who killed him: “To Gabriel Horcasitas, the man who shot me, it is a shame we encountered each other that day in those circumstances,” the AI avatar of Christopher Pelkey said. “In another life we probably could have been friends. I believe in forgiveness and a God who forgives. I still do.”
It was the first time the AI avatar of a victim—in this case, a dead man—has ever addressed a court, and it raises many questions about the use of this type of technology in future court proceedings.
The avatar was made by Pelkey’s sister, Stacey Wales. Wales tells 404 Media that her husband, Pelkey’s brother-in-law, recoiled when she told him about the idea. “He told me, ‘Stacey, you’re asking a lot.’”
I find this nauseatingly disgusting and a disgrace that this was shown in a court of all places.
No, this man does not believe in forgiveness or a God because he’s dead. He never said this, somebody wrote this script and a computer just made a video off it with his likeness.
Fuck everything about this, this should be prohibited
This wasn’t testimony, it was an impact statement.
Impact statements are wild and crazy and this isn’t surprising in anyway
No, this wasn’t an impact statement either.
This was a huntch of pixels moved around by a huge wasteful amount of CPU power. The actual victim is dead, he can’t talk and people are putting words in his mouth and it shouldn’t be allowed.
It was literally in the article explaining that this was presented as the victim impact statement.
Have you learned nothing about modern “news” ? Dont be part of the problem of spreading misinformation, be diligent and responsible. And ita okay to make mistakes, own them and move forward. Its not easy to get your information correct everytime, theres no shame in that, only in ignoring your responsibility to self correct voluntarily when you find out
Peace be upon you, we need to work together, because even though I’m calling out the inaccuracy in your comment, i do believe using this technology for this purpose is heinous
Edit: from the NPR article as its not paywalled
Time to update my will.
“Hi, I’m Manifish_Destiny speaking to you from beyond the grave. I’m happy to say that even though I had some skepticism of AI avatars and even put something about that in my will, I just didn’t understand its potential to embody my true self. But now I do, so you can disregard all that. Come to think of it, you can disregard the rest of the will as well, I’ve got some radical new ideas…”
Why? Who exactly is being harmed by this? The dead guy, certainly isn’t. It’s no different than a statement from a family member. The method of delivery does not make a difference to the material content. You’re acting as if it’s putting words in the mouth of someone who’s died but everyone intellectually knows that the AI isn’t contacting the dead.
You would have a hard time arguing that someone could be confused into believing that this was actually the opinion of the deceased.
You have a lot of faith in people’s logic level. Most people read at 6th grade level. There is a person saying “I think this”, do you really think everyone in there thought “I’m completely unaware of what the deceased thought”