What is digital cloning?
There digital cloning is an emerging technology that involves machine learning algorithms through which it becomes possible to manipulate audio, photos and videos in such a realistic way that it is extremely difficult to distinguish what is real from what is not.
These are technologies available to the public that can bring benefits but are creating quite a few concerns from an ethical and legal point of view.
How digital cloning works
To give life to a clone it is necessary to feed the algorithm with numerous videos and voice recordings that teach it to create an exact duplicate of the original. This digital clone personalized consists of a replication of all a person’s known data and behaviors, capable of replicating their choices, preferences, behavioral tendencies and decision-making processes.
The last frontier of this technological evolution is turning to digital cloning with the aim of creating digital immortality that allows the deceased to continue living in cyberspace. Not only capturing the visual presence of someone who is no longer there but also their way of behaving, their attitude and their cognitive abilities. A digital copy of a person’s mind is created, giving life to digital immortality that allows you to continue interacting with your loved ones even after death, overcoming the barrier of physical death.
What are the implications of digital cloning?
Among the main perplexities and potential concerns that these technologies bring with them we find the violation of data and personal privacy. Even assuming that the deceased had given consent to the creation of his own while alive digital clonehe cannot have been able to authorize all future actions that a digital clone could take replacing him.
Not to mention the possible creation of deepfake, that is, intentional manipulations. Considering that the apps capable of offering these services are potentially available to anyone, it becomes difficult to defend oneself from any malicious use of them. This not only invades the privacy of the individual but also raises various ethical concerns.
And what about the psychological implications? How can continuing to interact with deceased loved ones affect your ability to grieve? With what consequences?
Questions that are still difficult to answer but which create anxiety and concern.
How to defend yourself from deepfake?
If in general we can have defined the possible risks of these technologies, the difficulty comes when we try to give a legal outline to these practices in order to make them fall within a specific system capable of sanctioning incorrect behavior.
Spread deepfake it can cause damage not only in economic terms but above all in psychological and ethical terms.
Protection against these threats can be thought of by creating a way to analyze or detect the authenticity of a video but at the same time it will be essential to intervene with specific laws that regulate the use of these new technologies by prosecuting any abuse.
Are we in favor of digital cloning and “virtual resurrection”?
An interesting study was conducted in the United States by Masaki Iwasaki, a professor at Seoul National University, and subsequently published inAsian Journal of Law and Economics. It involved a sample of 222 subjects of different ages, levels of education and socio-economic levels. An imaginary scenario was described to the people involved in which it was assumed that a young woman had died in a car accident. Relatives and friends, devastated by this loss, were considering whether to use artificial intelligence to revive her as a digital android.
At this point a variant was introduced: half of the participants were told that in life the woman had not expressed consent to such an eventuality, while the other half was told that she had done so.
The result was that 97% of those in the first group considered it inappropriate to resurrect her digitally without her having explicitly expressed this intention, while 58% of the second group said they were in favor, considering the fact that there was written consent of the interested party.
Subsequently the research moved to a personal level, asking the sample involved if in their case they would have been in favor of being virtually “resurrected”. 59% said they were against giving consent and, perhaps even more significantly, 40% believed that digital cloning is unacceptable in any case, explaining their position with ethical, religious and psychological reasons, and supporting the need to face a correct mourning process.
