Today, it is common for people to leave behind information about how their social media accounts and passwords should be managed after death. With today’s rapid development of AI, funeral directors believe that it will also become more common for people to add information about whether they want to be recreated digitally after their death.
“Would give everything”
In a Sifo survey commissioned by the funeral agency Fonus, most respond that they cannot imagine using AI to recreate relatives, but the question is expected to become more common.
– Sometimes, for example, we meet mothers who have to bury their children, and they say that they would give anything to be able to talk to the child again, says Angelika Holm, undertaker from Älmhult.
“Write in the will”
Already today, it is possible to digitally recreate a person’s appearance, and to some extent personality, if you have enough material – that is, video, text, images and sound. There is no law regulating AI in relation to death and burial. “AI is a bit of the wild west” – that’s what the researchers say about the digital avatars of the future.
– We may have to write in our wills already now – I want or I don’t want to be recreated after my death, says Fredrik Heintz, AI researcher at Linköping University.
SVT asked some people in Växjö how they feel about being recreated digitally after death – this is how they answer:
Javascript must be enabled to play video
Maggie, Giacomo and Cecilia answer the question: Do you want to live on digitally after death? Photo: Keith Foster/SVT
About the Sifo investigation into death and burial
The Sifo survey was carried out by Kantar Sweden on behalf of Fonus to investigate the Swedes’ attitude to death and burial. 4,512 respondents aged 18-79 answered the survey between January 25 and February 6, 2024.
In the survey, 75 percent of the respondents answered that they cannot imagine recreating deceased relatives.
93 percent of the respondents answered that they do not want to be digitally recreated themselves after death.
The survey shows that the younger generation has a slightly more positive attitude towards AI technology compared to the older generation (10 percent among 18–29-year-olds, 2 percent among 65–79-year-olds).