A new AI company is drawing comparisons to Black Mirror after unveiling an app that lets users create interactive digital avatars of family members who have died.
The company, 2Wai, went viral after founder Calum Worthy shared a video showing a pregnant woman speaking to an AI recreation of her late mother through her phone. The clip then jumps ahead 10 months, with the AI “grandma” reading a bedtime story to the baby.
Years later, the child, now a young boy, casually chats with the avatar on his walk home from school. The final scene shows him as an adult, telling the AI version of his grandmother that she’s about to be a great-grandmother.
“With 2Wai, three minutes can last forever,” the video concludes. Worthy added that the company is “building a living archive of humanity” through its avatar-based social network.
Critics slam AI avatars of dead family members as “demonic”
The concept immediately drew comparisons to Be Right Back, the hit 2013 episode of Black Mirror where a grieving woman uses an AI model of her deceased boyfriend, played by Domhnall Gleeson, built from his online history. In that episode, the technology escalates from chatbots to full physical androids.
Social media users didn’t hold back. Many called the video “nightmare fuel,” “demonic,” and urged that the technology “be destroyed,” sparking a fresh wave of debate over how far AI should go when dealing with the dead.
As AI avatars get more realistic and robotics rapidly advance, it may only be a matter of time before physical android recreations become feasible, raising even bigger ethical questions.
2Wai is currently available for free on the Apple App Store with optional in-app purchases. An Android version is “coming soon.”
Apple will take a mini commission from mini app developers