[xwdv]

It’s exciting to imagine that we can soon enter the age where people will be able to voice their opinions in their own voice and choice of words, long after they are dead and gone from this physical world. Perhaps the first version of some digital afterlife.

[isoprophlex]

I too long to retain some corporeal presence as a box, filled with an llm trained on my life's collected texts and utterances. A featureless grey cube with only two buttons marked "more snark" and "more grossness", to be dusted off and interacted at every christmas by my great-grandchildren.

[thallium205]

This comment will be added to your LLM.

[metabagel]

And a robotic finger to pull.

[cryptoz]

But like, you can't know what someone would have said in the future if they aren't there to say it. No amount of LLM improvements would be able to know the real internal thoughts and memories of someone. You could guess, sure, but you don't know with any certainty.

People change. Small things change people - seeing a car speed by might alter your opinion on some variety of things, but no LLM was there to capture that moment.

It will always be a guess. You can never know for sure what someone who is deceased would think about something in the future since they are simply not there.

[midasuni]

And of course anyone can use your voice ti voice any opinion. Want Ghandi saying his words are backed with nuclear weapons? Want to portray Hitler as a nice loving chap? And that’s before you get onto current politicians - https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2023/nov/10/faked-audio...

[Dioxide2119]

Hm. Gives a bit of truth to the Amish claim that having themselves be photographed steals a bit of their soul. Your voice is (was) unique to you.

Recordings moved the needle to your voice (when saying new phrases) is unique to you.

These voice cloning of the last few years means that your voice (as long as it is never recorded and remixed) is unique to you.

A far more difficult proposition.

[giraffe_lady]

I sincerely find this to fall into the proscriptions against necromancy present in most ancient belief systems. The dead should not be made to speak the words of the living. And we should not create for ourselves any illusions about the completeness or finality of death.

It's not so much that it's a moral transgression as that it will undermine and corrupt our own understanding of what it means to be a living person.

[xwdv]

Turns out, it doesn't mean much to be a living person. Ideas are what matter to society, not the individual that spawns them. When you kill a revolutionaire, you are only killing a man.

[giraffe_lady]

Depends on your framing I guess. I live life as a person not as a society, and so being a person is quite meaningful to me. I don't know what it would be like to be an entity that experiences it otherwise and I'm glad for that.

[xwdv]

This will be a fairly trivial problem to solve. Each spoken word can be cryptographically signed on some kind of distributed public ledger and unless the words originate from a verified origin you cannot assume something you hear was indeed spoken by the original source LLM.

Only verified sentences coming from your LLM clone can be considered the actual you.

[theGnuMe]

This is a startup - digital tombstones or a digital dia de los muertos.