What happens to social media accounts belonging to those who shuffle off this mortal coil has been a subject of debate ever since the tech went mainstream. Should dormant accounts be left alone, or should their surviving loved ones be given backdoor access to maintain them as digital memorials?
To Meta, there could be a morbid alternative: training an AI model on a deceased user’s posts, keeping post-mortem accounts active by uploading new content in their voice long after they passed away.
As Business Insider reports, Meta was granted a patent in 2023 for the idea, outlining how a large language model (LLM) can “simulate” a user’s social media activity.
“The language model may be used for simulating the user when the user is absent from the social networking system, for example, when the user takes a long break or if the user is deceased,” reads the goosebump-raising patent, which lists the company’s CTO Andrew Bosworth as the primary author.
However, the conversation appears to have dramatically shifted over the last three years, especially now that AI slop has infiltrated and practically assumed control over platforms like Facebook and Instagram: Meta now says it’s given up on the sepulchral concept.
“We have no plans to move forward with this example,” a spokesperson told BI.
We’ve already come across countless examples of using AI to emulate dead people, from a grandmother who was resurrected as an AI model for her funeral to “grief tech” startups aiming to let grieving loved ones train AI models on images, recordings, and footage of the deceased.
“The impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform,” read the Meta patent.
A digital clone of the deceased person would have been able to interact with people through likes and comments — and even DMs — according to the patent.
While the company has since distanced itself from the grisly idea, the mere existence of the patent highlights how companies were — and in many ways, still are — throwing everything at the wall to discover new use cases for LLMs, and how far they’re willing to go.
Last year, for instance, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg even suggested that lonely users could make friends with the company’s bots instead of with living humans. In a 2023 interview with podcaster Lex Fridman, he seemed to echo the ideas in the patent by saying virtual avatars could take over the accounts of deceased people.
“If someone has lost a loved one and is grieving, there may be ways in which being able to interact or relive certain memories could be helpful,” he told Fridman at the time.
“But then there’s also probably an extent to which it could become unhealthy,” he admitted. “And I mean, I’m not an expert in that, so I think we’d have to study that and understand it in more detail.”
“We have, you know, a fair amount of experience with how to handle death and identity and people’s digital content through social media already, unfortunately,” Zuckerberg said.
It’s not a stretch to assume Meta may have had an ulterior motive to create digital avatars masquerading as the deceased. Facebook has quickly turned into a graveyard of long-forgotten accounts, never-ending ads, unanswered birthday wishes, and updates from that band you hadn’t thought about since high school. At the same time, its feeds are filling with toxic AI slop.
As engagement drops, the company’s core business — selling ads — could take a hit.
“It’s more engagement, more content, more data — more data for the current and the future AI,” University of Birmingham law professor Edina Harbinja told BI. “I can see the business incentive for that. I’m just curious to see how they would, when, and if they will implement this innovation.”
Other experts were taken aback by the idea of training an LLM on a deceased person’s posts.
“One of the tasks of grief is to face the actual loss,” University of Virginia sociology professor Joseph Davis told BI. “Let the dead be dead.”