IBL News | New York
With the goal of teaching an online course on BBC, the legendary British novelist Agatha Christie, who died in 1976, has been animated or re-enacted with the help of a team of researchers and an AI-made digital prosthetic fitted over an actor’s performance (Vivien Keene).
This Agatha Christie avatar has been created with permission from Christie’s family, who manage her estate.
The course on BBC Maestro is an online lecture series similar to MasterClass, priced at $105.
Amid a heated debate about the limits and the ethics of AI, the chief executive of BBC Maestro, Michael Levine, told The New York Times, “We are not trying to pretend, in any way, that this is Agatha somehow brought to life; this is just a representation of Agatha to teach her own craft.
“We’re not speaking for her,” Agatha Christie’s family said. “We are collecting what she said and putting it out in a digestible and shareable format.”
Some academics pointed out that even if the author’s family consented, Christie has not and cannot agree to the course. Therefore, it’s a deepfake.
The NYT reported that AI technology has been used to talk to the dead, becoming a cottage industry for wealthy nostalgics.
