Thanks to AI, Charlie Kirk will never die for some people

There is really no rest for the bad guys. During the weekend, according to the religious information service, at least three churches played for their congregations a posthumous message from Charlie Kirk, in which he assured those of the benches: “I am fine, not because my body is fine, but because my soul is safe in Christ. Death is not the end, it is a promotion. “

Of course, it was not really Kirk speaking of his place in life after death. It was a clip generated by AI which, before playing in these worship houses, went around social networks. Audio seems to have been created on Tiktok, generated by the user Nioscript, who published the message of 51 seconds per day after Kirk’s death. He has since collected millions of listenings, shared by users who register by reacting and crying by hearing the message generated by AI. All this finally led to audio sound in churches like Prestonwood Baptist in Texas, where he is presented by Pastor Jack Graham as an intermediary – but something “moved” and that he shares so that his congregation could “hear what Charlie says what happened to him last week”.

This is not again what Charlie Kirk says. But that did not prevent people from talking to him as if he were real. Prestonwood Baptist members gave the video a standing ovation. The public of Dream City Church in Arizona and Awaken Church, San Marcos, California, who both directed the clips, also applauded, as the religious information service pointed out. Users on social networks responded to audio with legends and comments like “that’s exactly what Charlie would say if he could talk to us at the moment” or “I know it’s AI, but you can’t tell me that this is not exactly what he would say.”

This type of adaptation with the feeling of loss is not completely unique. People have always sought to remember and preserve the people they love after their visit, and technology has made new ways of achieving it, whether it is an endless photo flow that triggers memories or online presence of the person transformed into a digital memorial. In the world of mourning literature, these are often called continuous obligations. In this way, an audio clip generated by AI or a video of someone like Kirk is not so different to share stories about it to keep your memory alive.

It is different in that it is a complete manufacture. It is not a memory, which can also be defective, but an invention of all the fabric. Yes, he can have access to the words, the likeness and the voice of Kirk, which are all omnipresent on the internet. But he is, as a model of language, unable to do something other than trying to automatically make the void for mourning.

The creation of a version replicated by AI of a deceased person to help in the mourning process is an in -law industry. A recent article in nature highlights several efforts to better understand if the chatbots formed in the resemblance of a loved one can help mourning to work through the complex and intense feelings that have a loss. Although there is evidence that suggests that users of “grievance” have managed to find a certain sense of internal closure with their lost loved ones, there are real risks of injuring people in a fragile emotional state, including making it difficult to let go of the BOT version of the person.

There is also the very real concern that we are simply unable to differentiate between our real memories of a person and those generated by AI which are established in our minds through these types of interactions. A study conducted by MIT Media Lab revealed that the exposure of a person with a single image published by AI can affect a person’s memory, and the people exposed to images generated by AI “have reported high levels of confidence in their false memories”.

The reality for people who commemorate Kirk in this way is that the vast majority of them do not really know him. They have a parasocial relationship with him that they would like to continue, and the message of AI allows it to happen because, in their minds, captures his voice – or, perhaps more precisely, captures what they want to hear.

There are already a lot of current debates on which was exactly Charlie Kirk and how it should be recalled without a version generated by AI-A-them injected into the conversation. But for people who cry his loss, if they believe that there is a part of the soul of Kirk living in that voice of AI, perhaps simply letting him rest.