The Download: deepfakes of the dead, and why it’s time to embrace fake meat
There are plenty of people like Sun who want to use AI to preserve, animate, and interact with lost loved ones as they mourn and try to heal. The market is particularly strong in China, where at least half a dozen companies are now offering such technologies and thousands of people have already paid for them.
But some question whether interacting with AI replicas of the dead is truly a healthy way to process grief, and it’s not entirely clear what the legal and ethical implications of this technology may be. Still, if only 1% of Chinese people can accept AI cloning of the dead, that’s still a huge market. Read the full story.
—Zeyi Yang
To read more about China’s flourishing market for deepfakes that clone the dead, check out the latest edition of China Report, our weekly newsletter covering tech in China. Sign up to receive it in your inbox every Tuesday.
How I learned to stop worrying and love fake meat
Fixing our collective meat problem is one of the trickiest challenges in addressing climate change—and for some baffling reason, the world seems intent on making the task even harder.
The latest example occurred last week, when Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a law banning the production, sale, and transportation of cultured meat across the Sunshine State.
The good news is the world is making some real progress in developing meat substitutes that increasingly taste like, look like the traditional versions, whether they’ve been developed from animal cells or plants.
If they catch on and scale up, it could make a real dent in emissions—with the bonus of reducing animal suffering, environmental damage, and the spillover of animal disease into the human population. The bad news is we can’t seem to take the wins when we get them. Read the full story.
—James Temple
