Tino Bao created a video of his late daughter sending his wife birthday greetings and even singing her a birthday song. - SCREENGRAB FROM TINO BAO/FACEBOOK
TAIPEI: When his daughter died in December 2021 after battling a rare blood disease, veteran Taiwanese musician Tino Bao wrote in Mandarin on his social media page: “At 10.44am today, I lost the love of my life, my daughter has become an angel.
“Thank you for being in the Bao family for 22 years and four months, Daddy will forever be by your side from now on; let’s go home.”
“Home” was not what it used to be, though. Tino Bao and his wife stopped speaking to each other for half a year after their child’s demise, each afraid of saying something that might hurt the other, the South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported.
It was the “return” of their beloved daughter, Bao Rong, through artificial intelligence (AI) that helped the couple reconnect and restart their life together.
Tino Bao – already pursuing a doctorate in AI – created a video of his late daughter sending his wife birthday greetings and even singing her a birthday song.
“Mummy, happy birthday, I really miss you. I hope you will always be happy and pretty,” the AI-generated Bao Rong said in Mandarin in the video, which Tino Bao posted on Facebook in January.
Recreating his daughter’s image was fairly easy, Tino Bao, 56, told Taiwan media outlet Future City in February – the tricky part was nailing her voice.
The latter was a significant project for him as Bao Rong could not speak towards the end of her life, added the musician, who wears a necklace made from her bone. While once he sported short, black hair, Tino Bao now wears his white locks long because his daughter used to love touching his hair.
The team he worked with trained the generative audio model with only three English sentences his daughter said to her mother on a video call, SCMP reported.
Tino Bao said his wife once overheard him training the audio model and asked: “Why does that voice sound so much like Bao Rong?”
“Because she is Bao Rong,” he told her.
Tino Bao said: “AI is a tool we have used to express our love for her.”
Advances in AI technology enabled Tino Bao and his team to separate his daughter’s voice from background noise, he said.
The same technology was also behind the posthumous release of the Beatles’ 2023 song Now and Then, when AI successfully isolated John Lennon’s vocals from a 1970s tape recording.
Tino Bao also uses his daughter’s digital voice for the intelligent assistant on his phone.
His attachment to his digital daughter is a hot topic on Chinese social media platform Weibo, with netizens divided on whether AI helps or hinders the grieving process.
Tino Bao said he considered the ethical issues of using technology to create a virtual version that does not look exactly like his daughter, and he was concerned it might spoil her beautiful image in their memories.
But he decided to go ahead anyway to “keep her alive in the digital world”.
On March 11, he apologised on Facebook for using the word “resurrect” in his media interviews, following questions from his Chinese friends.
He acknowledged that AI cannot resurrect the dead, and that “restoration” and “reappearance” were more apt. - The Straits Times/ANN
