In its brave quest to never learn a single thing from science fiction, Meta has patented a literally ghoulish AI that keeps you posting long after you're dead and gone

In season two, episode one of Black Mirror—a science fiction show designed to do what good sci-fi always does, satirise and critique the future—Martha, boyfriend of the late Ash Starmer, decides to try out a new service that creates an android from her dead boyfriend's social media profiles.

The episode is about how existentially horrifying this is, a harrowing glimpse into a future where AI passes the Turing Test so thoroughly it can replace the living, breathing people in our lives with the data that companies have spent decades harvesting.

Meta, in the wider big tech community's quest to never learn a single goddamn thing from any popular science fiction in existence, has patented a service that keeps you posting long after you're dead. Or, like, taking a holiday or something.

As spotted by Business Insider, Meta has a patent, which the site says was granted in late December last year, to perform the literally ghoulish act of keeping your social media profile going after "a long break or if the user is deceased."

"A user may be absent from the social networking platform for a long period of time," reads the patent, "Thereby affecting the user experience of several users on the social networking system. The impact on the users is much more severe and permanent if that user is deceased and can never return to the social networking platform."

In case your loved one has died, thus irrevocably affecting your user experience on a social media platform in a severe and permanent way, which is, I'm sure, your top priority in that situation—Meta's patent more-or-less describes a large language model trained on the personality of the absent or deceased.

"The training data is collected in accordance with the permissions. For example, the target user may indicate that comments posted on content items may be used for training the language model, but messages to individual connections may not be used as training data." Oh, well that's all right then.

The patent also outlines some potential options for its act of digital necromancy, including, retraining the model based on user interactions, slowly changing the personality of your loved one's AI corpus like they're still there.

Or you could train the model based on a specific age range of the "target user", which I suppose could be a jolly if you want to see how your 16-year-old self would react to news in the present day (this assuming you have been alive as long as I have).

The end result would be a social media bot that can like your posts, comment on them, or respond to your DMs, in case you're out on holiday, or… you know, dead. As Business Insider duly notes, this could be useful for influencers who are under constant pressure from the almighty algorithm to keep engagement up, which is only slightly less dystopian.

It's okay, though—Meta assures the publication that "we have no plans to move forward with this example", and that it's merely, as Business Insider paraphrases, to "disclose concepts". I'm being cynical, here, but this feels like the equivalent of going 'I'm not touching you, am I bothering you? I'm not touching you'. I'm just thinking about the patent, bro. I'm just out here disclosing my concepts.

Do I think Meta is seriously going to go through with this? It's unlikely. AI's proving to be so broadly unpopular that Microsoft's CEO—you know, head of one of the largest tech companies in the entire world—has had a big old whine and moan about the fact we all find it offputting and annoying. Digitally reanimating your loved ones so they can comment on your selfies seems beyond the pale.

The patent itself was also filed in 2023, which means Meta was entertaining these necromantic thoughts three entire years ago, but also during the height of the AI hype era, so that might have something to do with it. It's also not like Meta was the only one doing this. Heck, Microsoft did it back in 2021.

Could this stuff potentially be used to help people grieve, as so many of these companies claim? Man, I dunno. Under the close watch of a therapist after decades of research, I concede maybe—grief is weird, people are weird. As part of a package Meta offers you on its social media platform? A feature provided by a corporate entity? Certainly not.