Man Uses Midjourney and ChatGPT to Resurrect His Dead Grandmother
A man used Midjourney and ChatGPT to resurrect an artificial intelligence (AI) version of his late grandmother.
The 24-year-old Chinese man, whose surname is Wu, shared a video of him having a conversation with his dead grandmother.
Wu had been close to his grandmother and was bereft after she died. So he decided to upload several photos of her to AI image generator Midjourney and used recordings of her voice to synthesize a wider vocabulary.
He then used ChatGPT and trained it to behave like his grandmother. He uploaded all of the material to the website D-ID which enables users to create an immersive and human-like conversational AI experience.
“I shared many details of my grandma’s life to ChatGPT, hoping it could understand my grandma’s family background and speech so it could communicate with me in my grandma’s tone,” Wu tells the South China Morning Post.
“At present, ‘grandma’ can only have simple conversations. When my speech gets more complicated, the AI cannot understand.”
In a clip shared on the video-sharing website Billibilli, Wu demonstrates a conversation with his AI grandmother.
“Grandma, my Dad and I will go back to our hometown to celebrate the Lunar New Year with you this year,” Wu says in the recording. “My Dad called you last time. What did you say to him?”
“I told him not to drink wine. Be thrifty and not play cards,” his AI grandmother replies.
Psychological Comfort
Wu, who lives in Shanghai where he works as a visual art designer, returned from the city after hearing his grandmother had fallen ill. He stayed at her bedside for over two weeks but was unable to speak with her and say goodbye because she remained in a coma until she died.
Wu tells the South China Morning Post that the project is about psychological comfort. “I feel good being able to look at grandma and talk more with her,” he adds.
There are increasingly more companies offering this type of service. Earlier this year, PetaPixel reported on a Korean company offering a service that lets people talk to their dead loved ones after collecting photos and video footage of them.
