Eternime and Replika: Giving life to the dead with new technology

Texting from the grave:
Chatbots of dead people are now a reality.
Samantha Lee/Business Insider

• Netflix drama “Black Mirror” once imagined a world in
  which tech could be used to recreate the dead. Now, people are
  working to make that a reality.
• Tech firm Eternime is beta testing an app that will
  allow users to create a digital “avatar” of themselves after
  they die.
• Eternime is not the only firm experimenting with AI
  technology to give people a voice after death.
• Business Insider spoke to four people working in and
  researching the death tech space. They laid out the benefits
  and dangers of creating digital alter-egos that live on after
  you die.

If thousands of years of human storytelling is anything to go by,
waking the dead is rarely a good idea. From ancient Greece to
“Black Mirror,” fiction tells us that there are drawbacks in
summoning loved ones from the grave.

But one tech entrepreneur is working to turn these tales on their
head. Marius Ursache wants to make digital copies of the dead.

The 41-year-old grew up in Romania where he studied to be a
doctor. He set up his own web design company while at medical
school and dipped his toe in fintech, but quit because he hated
working with banks.

He started taking courses at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, which is where he got the inspiration for a grander
venture: Eternime.

Enter Eternime

The company was founded in 2014, and hopes to make people
“virtually immortal” by creating a digital avatar of people after
they die. Soon after founding Eternime, personal tragedy gave the
project new meaning when Ursache lost his best friend in a car
accident.

He repetitively watched footage of his friend’s TEDx talk after
his death. “It made me remember how important that person was to
my life and how lucky I was for having him in my life and
learning so many things from him,” he said. He hopes Eternime
could have a similar effect.

Marius Ursache, Eternime
CEO and cofounder.
Eternime

At the moment, Eternime takes the form of an app which collects
data about you. It does this in two ways: Automatically
harvesting heaps of smartphone data, and by asking you questions
through a chatbot.

The goal is to collect enough data about you so that when the
technology catches up, it will be able to create a chatbot
“avatar” of you after you die, which your loved ones can then
interact with.

“We collect geolocation, motion, activity, health app data, sleep
data, photos, messages that users put in the app. We also collect
Facebook data from external sources,” Ursache told Business
Insider. This is all done, of course, with your explicit
permission.

A prototype demo of Eternime was recently on display in London’s
Victoria and Albert Museum, showing its user interface and how it
amasses data from its users’ digital lives.

Ursache has been funding the project with his cofounder and CTO
Claudiu Baciu, who he met working at his first company. In the
future, Ursache hopes to release Eternime as a free service with
premium account options, but said he would never run ads.

“Even basic things like profiling
would be a breach of privacy and confidence, so we’re going to
try to support basically the free plans through subscription fees
from other users,” he said.

A
promotional image of Eternime’s chatbot which learns about you so
it can make an “avatar” of you after death.
Eternime

The beta test has more than 40,000 signups, according to
Eternime’s website, but is so far only in the hands of around 40
people. The test involves users chronicling their day-to-day
lives. Business Insider spoke to one of Eternime’s beta testers,
Claudiu Jojatu, who has been using the app for about a year.

“For me it’s very important, and I am using it every day as a
personal journal. I input a lot of data on how was my day and how
I felt that day. And then it’s very cool that it synchronises
with my Facebook account and with my pictures from the phone,”
Jojatu said.

Eternime feels like having a “digital alter-ego,” he added, and
although the afterlife functionality of Eternime is a while off,
Jojatu is relishing the prospect.

“Probably 99% of our memories get lost, and it’s kind of awesome
to know that you can actually leave something behind,” he said.

How would you want to be remembered?

That same thought struck Eugenia Kuyda when her close friend
Roman Mazurenko died in a car accident in 2015. He was just 34.
Kuyda missed Roman so much,
she created a chatbot of him.

“Roman was a close friend and a special one,” Kuyda told Business
Insider over email. “I wanted to tell a story about him and tell
him some things I hadn’t been able to. I put together around
10,000 of his text messages and together with a brilliant AI
engineer on our team, Artem, we made a bot that could replicate
the way Roman used to speak.”

Eugenia Kuyda (left) and
her friend Roman.
Eugenia
Kuyda

From Roman, Replika was born. Replika is an app in which you
confide in an AI-powered chatbot that learns about you as you
chat to it. The app has more than 200,000 monthly active users,
and has raised $11 million from investors including Y Combinator
and All Turtles, the incubator run by former Evernote CEO Phil
Libin.

Ursache recognizes the crossover with Eternime. “I think in terms
of approach and mindset and surprisingly even personal stories,
Replika is our closest competitor that we have,” he said.

Creating Roman was a personal project and a memorial for a
friend, but Kuyda points out that building chatbots like Roman’s
on a commercial scale poses a myriad technical and ethical
challenges. For example: At what age do you wish to be
immortalised?

“This is especially true for older people or people that have
Alzheimer’s and other diseases that change the way they act and
talk a lot. Do you want to talk to your grandpa in his 20s? Or
the grandpa you remember when you were a kid?” she said.

She also pointed out that a chatbot might accidentally divulge
information the deceased would not otherwise disclose to their
loved ones. “Think for example if you’re building a bot for your
best friend and she was gay and her brother doesn’t know — will
you program it to understand who the bot is talking to it? It’s
not an easy problem ethically and technically.”

Ursache recognised that this is a challenge Eternime will have to
overcome, especially if family members feel uncomfortable with
the idea a chatbot that could potentially say anything.

The dangers of being virtually immortal

There are many other moral quandaries to consider. Researcher
Carl Öhman, of the Oxford Internet Institute, explored the
potential problems with “re-creation services” in
a paper published in Nature, which named Eternime and
Replika.

“The main problem as I see it is the updating of software,” he
told Business Insider. If you sign up to have your chatbot stored
forever by a company, you won’t be able to sign off on any
software updates that might change the way that bot functions
after you die.

Microsoft’s Tay chatbot started churning out alarming
comments on Twitter in 2016.
Twitter

He also warned that algorithms have been known to act
unpredictably. “Just look at what happened to Microsoft’s Twitter
chatbot Tay — it turned into
a racist, Holocaust-denying, bigot within a matter of hours.
How can we guarantee this doesn’t happen with chatbots claiming
to portray a real person?”

“The crucial thing is that consumers understand how the data is
to be used after their death, this is difficult to guarantee when
you use complex algorithms fed with many different data sources,”
Öhman added.

Ursache admits that the bots responding to stimuli poses an
ethical conundrum. “There’s tonnes of things to think of
ethically and technically and behaviorally,” he said.

Problems for the living

Another big question Eternime throws up is whether it’s healthy
for living people to interact with a digital alter-ego of their
deceased loved ones.

Another tech entrepreneur looking to break into death care is
concerned by this. Mark Alhermizi is the CEO of Everdays, a
company which creates pop-up social networks when a person dies.
These networks are used to notify people of that person’s death,
and thus far have been set up via funeral homes, although
Everdays has recently launched a consumer app.

Everdays
generates a pop-up social network when someone
dies.
Everdays

Alhermizi is optimistic about the potential tech has to improve
the death care sector, but the thought of a legacy chatbot like
Eternime’s troubles him.

“The problem ethically allowing this to exist… is that you get
stuck living a false reality,” he told Business Insider.
Alhermizi referred to the “Black Mirror” episode “Be Right Back,”
in which a bereaved woman resurrects her partner using his data
but it quickly turns sour.

He is not worried about the immediate future, because the tech
isn’t yet good enough to make an AI chatbot that convincingly
imitates a person.

“But one day they will be good, and I think about what the
consequences are for people using them. Forget about ethics, it’s
about them living in a false reality. Not just not moving on with
grief, but not moving on with their lives,” he added.

Ursache said he collaborated with psychologists when designing
Eternime, but admits there could be unforeseen consequences, like
people isolating themselves because they become too involved with
a chatbot.

“Black Mirror” explored
the idea of using tech to recreate the dead.
Netflix

For the moment at least, he said Eternime is beneficial because
people can use it to reflect. “We had people from the beta
programmes who said it’s like having an imaginary friend and it’s
providing some comfort,” he said.

Ultimately, Ursache and Alhermizi think tech needs to move into
death care in earnest. “This is one area of human life that I
don’t think has been improved or touched by technology,” said
Ursache.

But researcher Carl Öhman thinks regulation needs to be set up
before “digital afterlife services” become commonplace. “As a
society, we should think twice before we leave the nature of our
afterlives entirely to an unregulated market,” he said.

We may be getting closer to making thousands of years of human
storytelling about speaking to the the dead a reality, but it
will not be without its dangers.