Welp. It happened. Black Mirror is real. Alan Hamel, the husband of the late Suzanne Somers, created an AI clone of her and claims "you can't tell the difference."
Suzanne Somers, who died two years ago, had been with Alan Hamel for 55 years at the time of her death. Apparently, according to him, creating AI clones of one another was something the couple had been discussing since the 1980s.
"Obviously, Suzanne was greatly loved, not only by her family, but by millions of people. One of the projects that we have coming up is a really interesting project, the Suzanne AI Twin," Hamel explained to People.
Calling the project to turn his late wife into an AI clone "perfect," Hamel said, "It was Suzanne. And I asked her a few questions and she answered them, and it blew me and everybody else away. When you look at the finished one next to the real Suzanne, you can't tell the difference. It's amazing. And I mean, I've been with Suzanne for 55 years, so I know what her face looks like, and when I just look at the two of them side by side, I really can't tell which one is the real and which one is the AI."
The concept that Hamel talks so glowingly about was the subject of a Black Mirror episode starring Hayley Atwell and Domhnall Gleeson called "Be Right Back." In that episode, Gleeson's character is killed in a car accident. Atwell's character, so overcome with grief, then uses a service which creates an artificial intelligence-version of Gleeson's character. At first it was just his voice, but she graduates to having him completely re-created as an identical-looking android.
In 2018, a tech firm called "Eternime" began to develop artificial intelligence that would allow people to use an app to "talk" with someone who had passed away.
In 2021, Microsoft applied for and received a patent that allows them to create a chatbot using personal information about dead people, including things like their images, voices, social media posts, and electronic messages. One of their stated goals was to create a 2D or 3D model of these dead people.
And in 2022, Amazon gave its Alexa voice assistant the ability to replicate the speech of a dead person. Amazon said it was able to replicate the dead person's voice using just one minute of actual recorded speech.
In Suzanne Somers' case, according to her husband Alan Hamel, the AI "twin" was trained with "all of Suzanne's 27 books and a lot of interviews that she has done, hundreds of interviews, so that she's really ready to be able to be asked any question at all and be able to answer it, because the answer will be within her."
He also claims it was all his late wife's idea. However, as one might expect, he was worried what her family would say about it. It turns out, he said, they were cool with the whole thing.
"The first time I spoke to Suzanne AI, for the first two or three minutes, it was a little strange. But after that, I forgot about the fact that I was talking to a robot and asking her questions and getting answers, and it happens that fast for me, getting used to the whole idea," he said.
His next move is to make his late wife's AI clone available to the public on SuzanneSomers.com.
"We'll invite all her fans and all our customers to come and talk to her," he said. "They can come and just hang out with her. They can ask her any questions they want. She'll be available 24/7, and I think it'll be really wonderful."