In Memoriam: is dying truly dying in social networks?
Can one truly disappear peacefully from social networks? The case of Stefanie Sun and artificial intelligence invites us to reconsider the question.
It's terrible to say, but I'm entering the decade where the age pyramid takes its toll; friends gone too soon, accidents. What was already not so easy to live with seems increasingly disconcerting with social networks.
On Facebook, reminders of the birthdays of our departed friends seem never-ending. Who really makes the effort to transform an active Facebook account into a "commemorative" account? And isn't it, in fact, limiting compared to the millions of ways one might want to be remembered in memoriam?
Abandoned profiles closely resemble ageless graves, where weeds grow, and sometimes a message is affixed. The same goes for other social networks like LinkedIn, where some encouragements to congratulate a person for time spent in a particular company take on Kafkaesque airs: you are dead, but not entirely. Networks want us to grow with them, but death seems to be evacuated from the user experience.
To be forgotten, if one desires, is no easy task on these platforms. The processes are long and demanding. We have not only given away our data; we have accepted that a part of our beings cannot completely vanish.
New technological developments are even forcing some of us towards immortality. A community can refuse your death—or your public disappearance—by playing with vitality and physical constraints.
In China, the Mandopop diva (a contraction of songs mainly sung in standard Mandarin and pop) Stefanie Sun saw her fans decide to launch new songs on her behalf using artificial intelligence techniques. For example, a coder named Zheng trained a "deepfake" voice generator based on 100 songs by the artist, allowing the composition of numerous pieces using her voice without seeking her opinion. Solutions are proliferating, especially on GitHub, breaking down technical barriers for large audiences. Particularly thanks to the So-Vits-SVC program, popularized on Bilibili and shared on GitHub. To the point that the content created by Stefanie Sun's artificial intelligence is now more popular than her original works on some social networks.
"My fans... have accepted that I have become an outdated singer, relegated to oblivion, while my AI character is currently the center of attention."
Stefanie Sun
Accounts with thousands of videos and songs generated by artificial intelligence are exploding on social networks. This raises the question of the relationship to success (does an artist have a duty to provide raw material interpretable billions of times?), the ownership of a work, and what will remain after the author's death. In my essay, I mentioned that with social networks, we first created fictions of ourselves—or at least accelerated the phenomenon—and the acceleration of technical and technological infrastructures can lead to a new stage of this fictionalization, close to a form of interfacing humans composed of new digital and physical properties.
But this fiction needs to be examined through the prism of death: a good story has an intrigue, actors or actresses, and audiences. Vitality has challenged our individual narratives: they are crossed by the infinite ramifications of networks, technological features, and phenomena of adherence. In short, the reading contract is reinvented. Actors or actresses, as we see, now have hybrid expressions: for example, there is no longer a need for the human originator of content to sing if we become only a material that enters a machine. As for audiences, they feel invested, act as shareholders in the reputation of actors or actresses, in their vital experiences, and even dispossess them if necessary, as in a hostile takeover. This raises questions about our legacy, about the memory that will remain: we are born dust, we will end up pieces of code, at the disposal of thousands of strangers?
There is no clearly defined path or clear moral relationship. In the case of the artist Plaaastic, whom I mention in my book, the pattern seems more noble at first glance. His fans continue to create dedicated accounts to his memory—at least the way they have decided to construct it—and translate or extend his work. But without the oversight of his family or former partners.
And that is probably the monster that is being created: uploading certain aspects of our physicality (voice, image?) and our mind (turns of phrase, ways of expressing ourselves?), and then not really being necessary anymore. A galaxy of codes, algorithms, and computers giving us a new existence for the benefit of a community.
It's a perfect world.