AI Afterlives

AI Afterlives offers the first-ever empirically informed investigation of how algorithms and automation are being used to 'revive' media fragments from the past, from animating old photographs of our ancestors, to creating deathbots or using the likeness of deceased actors in films. It traces the ethical, emotional, and political dimensions of creating synthetic pasts, and critically examines the infrastructures and platforms that enable and encourage them. This book carries out a rigorous and comprehensive analysis of AI 'resurrection' in the contexts of grief, family history and genealogy, the cultural and creative industries, and heritage institutions. It draws on a series of unique and innovatively designed datasets, exploring how synthetically remediated pasts afford new networked, technological, temporal, spatial and affective realities for archival materials, and impact individual, collective, and cultural memory work as a consequence. Situated at the intersection of Digital Memory, New Media and Critical Algorithm Studies, this book speaks to a range of pressing concerns about what futures our uses of AI will facilitate, what ethical challenges these systems suggest in the present, and how our relationship to the past is oriented and experienced.