This AI app lets you chat with the dead using a few minutes of video – and not everyone is okay with that

• AI app 2wai can create lifelike AI avatars of deceased loved ones
• A promotional video has provoked intense argument and some revulsion.
• 2wai pitches “digital immortality” but makes many people uncomfortable

Former Disney Channel star Calum Worthy has more lately been exploring AI as co-founder of a startup called called 2wai (pronounced “too why”) that can produce AI-powered facsimiles of people using just a few minutes of video and some details about their personality. But a commercial promoted by Worthy for his company has some in a tizzy over the idea of the app enabling users to talk to deceased loved ones.

The ad features a young, pregnant woman chatting over video with her mother. In a montage showing the baby growing up, the grandmother doesn't seem to age as she continues to give advice. It’s only in the final moments that viewers learn the grandma in question is a synthetic avatar, born from a three-minute video recording.

Cue the horror in the responses to Worthy's post. Obvious Black Mirror comparisons and exaggerated calls to stop necromancy sit alongside plenty of more nuanced and serious concerns about privacy and how using 2wai this way might affect the grieving process.

But there’s more to 2wai than grief-themed viral marketing. The app, developed by Worthy and founder Russell Geyser, aims to be a kind of social network for avatars. Not only can users record themselves or others for posthumous interaction – they can also engage with AI recreations of historical icons, use chatbots for cooking and travel tips, or hang out with Worthy’s own digitized self.

AI necromancy

The company describes this all as a “living archive of humanity,” but in practice, it lands somewhere between a digital diary and an educational simulator. You can get advice from Florence Nightingale, plan a picnic with King Henry VIII, or upload your own likeness to chat with your descendants long after you’re gone. The app’s pitch is sentimental, but the public’s response suggests the average person isn’t quite ready to upload their dead relatives to the App Store maelstrom

Immortalizing yourself to preserve your voice for future generations sounds poetic, until you realize it’s also creating a simulation of you that you can’t actually control once you’re gone. If your AI twin starts acting in ways you never would, who’s accountable? And what if it’s done without you ever knowing? 2wai could open a Pandora’s box of what consent, memory, and digital identity even mean.

2wai isn’t the first to dabble in AI resurrection. Companies like Replika and HereAfter have explored digital companionship and memory preservation for years. They face similar questions about the business model. While the app is available for free right now, one has to assume there will be a subscription or something else for the service. Do families pay to keep grandma’s avatar active past a trial period?

The tension between sentiment and commerce is an ethical maelstom. The average person might not object to a chatbot that helps them pick a pasta sauce. But bring in their late mother, or their childhood pet, or a historical figure now repackaged for profit, and things get murky.

Still, 2wai offers a kind of digital life raft. For a parent who wants their voice to outlast them, the pitch might be hard to resist, even if they are smart enough to understand the avatar is not them, and not in any way actually sentient or self-aware.

For now, 2wai is very real and very live. You can download it, record yourself, and leave behind a version of your personality for your great-grandkids or random internet strangers to engage with. Whether that future is comforting, commercial, or something closer to uncanny valley horror will be revealed in time. And it will be up to us to decide. Or maybe up to our avatars. You can see the full ad below.

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