Digital Afterlife: Hollywood & AI Tech

It’s been a great year for AI photo apps which are dominating the Apple app charts. According to TechCrunch, there were 12.6 million downloads in the first 11 days of December alone. The Lensa AI photo and editing app is the latest AI photo app to go viral because of its amazing creative capabilities and serious concerns about copyright infringement, data privacy, and the sexual exploitation of wo...

Interactive internet-based technologies are transforming the way in which we understand death, grieving, and coping with loss. Online communication together with changes in social and religious attitudes in western society has created a space where the individual is part of the collective. The transition from analog to digital combines the private with the public and the real with the virtual. Fee...

Does digital privacy continue after death and how safe is our data from cybercrime? What happens to social media accounts when we die? Most people don’t know what to do with their data or that social media accounts like Facebook, can be memorialized and legacy executors can be appointed. A service that creates a digital replica of someone without their participation raises complex ethical issues r...

Photography can no longer represent our identity. Our identity can no longer be represented by the two-dimensional flat surface of a photographic image alone. Photography has had its day. The photograph as a referent of our identity will be replaced by an AI Hologram. In the 21st-century digital world, our identity is represented by multiple forms of technology. In addition to photography — digita...

The creator economy is a $1 Billion industry. AI-generative art is a radical approach to art-making where humans and machines collaborate to produce art with future possibilities for how we are able to work and play. Meta, Google, and other startups have flocked to the AI art economy potential. Big tech is pushing investment in art-producing Generative AI and applying the tech to other forms of co...

Artificial intelligence is changing the way we live, connect, and grieve but will digital immortality allow us to live forever? Digital immortality refers to uploading, storing, or transferring a person’s personality into a digital entity or cyberspace, or a computer. As the technology of digital immortality becomes more popular and available, people will find new ways of using AI-generated digita...

AI image generators like Dalle are rightfully raising concerns from artists about creative ownership. AI generators are trained on millions of photos and learn to identify things from existing photos. Some of Dalle’s images are machine-made with the user only contributing text prompts, so it’s not copyrightable at all, according to Wired. Remember the monkey selfie copyright case? These images are...

Artificial intelligence has caught the zeitgeist of the 21st century. AI is no longer a fantasy concept exchanged by scientists and researchers predicting an uncertain time in the future. In the second decade of the century, AI is as omnipresent as it is mundane. Take the healthcare industry. AI has seamlessly integrated into workflow and systems to focus on patients and on providing more person-c...

In the past weeks, two influential women of a similar age died. One was the most famous woman in the world and the other was my aunt. Queen Elizabeth’s death at 96 on the 8th of September was followed by ten days of national mourning in the UK. In the 21st century, grieving practices have evolved again to incorporate past cultural practices which are equally driven by technology, society, and the...