The Gift from Beyond the Grave: Kim Kardashian's Birthday Present, with Patrick Stokes

Just in time for Halloween, the news hit that Kanye West gifted his wife a hologram of her late father as a 40th birthday surprise. Is this the best or worst present ever? And should we be treating this as a weird headline about those crazy celebrities, or as a wakeup call for us all?

Elaine Kasket, psychologist and author of All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of Your Personal Data (2020) talks to Patrick Stokes, philosopher based at Deakin University in Australia and author of Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (2021) about the massive societal issues raised by Kim's milestone birthday gift.

More context:

Kim's tweet about 'the most thoughtful gift of a lifetime', where you can watch the hologram delivering its message

Tamara's Kneese's article on Slate about Herman Cain and the problems with tweeting after death

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Transcript

Still Spoken Ep1: The Gift from Beyond the Grave – Kim Kardashian’s Birthday Present

Elaine Kasket with Patrick Stokes

[00:00:00] Elaine: Good morning, Patrick.

Patrick: Good morning Elaine. 

Elaine: Well, it's not morning for you, I know that much. 

Patrick: No, no. It's Friday evening here. 

Elaine: Well, this is the miracle of modern technology. 

Patrick: Exactly right. 

Elaine: Um, the reason that we're talking of course is that, uh, I saw a news article when I woke up that I don't think you had seen.

Patrick: No, I hadn't seen it yet, as you could probably tell from my horrified reaction that it was completely new to me. 

Elaine: So why don’t you tell, uh, so why don't you say what the story is then to talk, talk about your reaction when I sent it to you. 

Patrick: So Kim Kardashian has, just...I almost said Kim Kierkegaard, which is my favorite parody account on Twitter. Um, Kim Kardashian has just turned 40 years old. And, um, she's gone off to a private Island where she's basically managed to get everyone to quarantine for a period of time, whatever else to have this big 40th birthday bash. And just as everyone was getting over mocking [00:01:00] the, um, fairly tone deaf way in which she was boasting about doing that, or at least discussing doing that,, she then reveals that as part of the celebration, her husband, Kanye West, you may have heard of him, um, surprised her with a hologram of her dead father, the lawyer, Robert Kardashian, who died in, I think 2003, and who of course is probably best known, um, in addition to being the father of the Kardashian children, but also best known for defending OJ Simpson at one point.

Elaine: Absolutely. And, and of course, as she put on Instagram [or Twitter], I believe, what an incredibly thoughtful. Gift, uh, you know, um, uh, holographically, resurrected dead parent, just when you were at least expecting it. When you're having a milestone birthday, You know, what better gift could there be, we're asking? And so, uh, this is a sort of a different situation where the deep faked, um, dead are foisted upon the [00:02:00] unsuspecting. In this case, thank goodness, at least from what she's saying on Instagram, it was a welcome surprise. Public service announcement: it might not be in all instances.

Patrick: We don’t know if it’s something that Kanye has gone off and done on his own without reference to anyone else in the family, so we just don't know that. 

Elaine: That would be shocking to give him to do something like that. Yeah. That will be so out of character. 

Patrick: Yeah. I was going to say for men at these even temporary and, um, good judgment, that would be very hard to imagine.

Elaine: I'm Elaine Kasket, and I'm a scholar of death and the digital, and I have a book called All the Ghosts in the Machine. And I'm talking to...

Patrick: I'm Patrick Stokes. I'm a philosopher at Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. And I have a book, uh, called Digital Souls. 

Elaine: And we are here today to talk about Kenya West Kim Kardashian, the possibly best and possibly worst birthday present ever, depending on your perspective, and how Kanye West is the most, most, most, most, most, most genius person ever, according to [00:03:00] Robert. Um, yeah. It's so this is these interesting questions here about the ownership, but also as you say, the reaction that people are going to have to it.

Patrick: Um, I just found, I had a really visceral reaction to it. And you and I have talked before about, um, other instances like this. So, um, chatbots of the dead, the late Roman measure, Rinko, who was turned into a chat bot, um, the, uh, TV show Meeting You that was done in Korea late last year, where a woman is reunited with her dead seven-year-old daughter, um, through a VR headset.

Elaine: Another instance of anticipating that though, having sort of signed off on an informed consent for the show, not knowing of course ahead of time, what kind of psychological or emotional effect it would have on her. But another thing where after the fact, despite people's horror, the mother in question said, this was really welcome to me. It helped me heal something. It helped me put something to rest. Um, and that often that reaction, which if it was authentic was often swept aside by people who said, well, no, this is still, this is still horrible. Uh, but yes, that was [00:04:00] another instance of knowingly going into it. 

Patrick:  Yeah. I mean, okay. They go into it. They don't necessarily know what their reaction is going to be. For instance, they know it's going to be difficult, but they have at least consented to it. And they've also. Speaking as the guardian of the interests of the dead person, they've also given the go-ahead to that. And it's not clear, at least in this case, who's, who's given that go ahead or who had the authority to do so, but again, there may be a whole bunch of things behind the scenes we don't know about. It could be that the rest of the Kardashian family were completely on board with this. I, I cannot say, um, shockingly, I am not among their intimates. 

Elaine: Not yet. Not yet. 

Patrick:  Well, I don't think it will be after this, but, um, it seems like, um, we have these issues of ownership. But there's also, and this is the thing that really struck me about it.Um, is that unlike some other things, for instance, chatbots of the dead were the things that the dead person has left behind online. They're online traces, uh, reanimated through using neural networks or AI, [00:05:00] um, in a way that at least if you like, um, sounds like the dead person, it’s somehow based upon what they would have said and is the application of algorithms to things they have said in the past to predict how they would have reacted in a new situation. This to me looks more like, uh, It's not even a speaking for the dead. This is almost speaking on top of the dead. Um, this looks a lot less like a reanimation and more like a kind of ventriloquism. I'm assuming that there was a voice actor who would have done the, um, the words and it's been scripted by somebody else and surprise: Robert Kardashian apparently has a very, very inflated opinion of his son-in-law. So, 

Elaine: Oh yes. I lost count: the most, the most, most, most, most, most, most genius person in the world, Kim's husbands, apparently. Perhaps there's been able to be a voice simulation based upon the raw materials of the, for example, OJ Simpson trial recordings, which could be [00:06:00] one source of source material. Hours and hours of publicly available OJ Simpson, trial recordings...or whether, as you say, a voice actor was hired to voice this hagiographic account. Either way it's, it's taking an additional step. And I suppose for me, it connects to the whole question of deep fakes and the lack of clarity that is becoming more common online as to the living versus dead status of an entity that we encounter.

And there was an article recently in slate magazine. Really excellent overview of phenomena such as Herman Cain, continuing to post pro Trump tweets after his death from COVID. [00:07:00] Most people do know that Herman Cain is dead. However, uh, that kind of thing takes us into pretty dicey territory where people can essentially puppeteer the dead into enacting their own purposes and in manipulating other people's emotions or their political  opinions or any number of other things. And that feels really disturbing to me.

Patrick:  At least this is a case where. No one's under any illusions about what they're dealing with. Um, so at least it's a case where it's clearly not actually him. It’s stagey in a way, he dematerializes at the end of it. Um, and of course he's saying things that the real Robert could ask, he died in 2003, he couldn't possibly know, about grandchildre and so forth.  He does actually indicate at one point that he's sort of haunting them, at least present around them.I shouldn't say haunting. That's probably a little pejorative, but, um, there's something going on there. I think that's, [00:08:00] that's sort of telling if you like that sort of, you know, at least there is a kind of implicit sort of, well, it's not really him in a way that, um, The danger is that with a lot of these reaffirmations, we will get to a point where we will no longer be able to distinguish who is alive or dead, or at least, and this is probably the greater danger we won't be really care.

Um, and so we could actually start taking these things to be, um, replacements for the dead, particularly if they become sufficiently interactive, if they actually start to, um, genuinely mimic the dead to an extent that's good enough that we're happy to say. Yep. Okay. I'm going to basically treat that as if my father is still alive and talking to me through a hologram.

Elaine: Yeah. And of course people have different takes on whether or not, uh, that's a problematic situation in society or, you know, for us as individuals, um, for one of the places my mind goes to, uh, with deep fakes and with this sort of phenomenon, which wasn't the case in this situation, the [00:09:00] Kanye and Kim situation that we're talking about here.

Uh, but the possibility for criminal activity or identity theft and impersonation to take place that could then, you know, you're dealing with somebody who's the digital portion of their estate has not been settled or closed down for various reasons. Chief, amongst which the bereaved or the next to Ken often have a devilishly difficult time addressing the digital portion of the estate because of passwords and double passwords and people not leaving behind lists of places, they have accounts, et cetera. And if something, something somebody can get hold of that information and present a revivified version of the deceased person they can actually bleedthat part of the estate drive they chose. So there's that, and that's a pragmatic concern. But of course there are more philosophical, sociological kind of concerns here. And what's your, what's your thought about that? [00:10:00] 

Patrick:  Yeah, I mean, there's so much going on. I'm still processing this to be honest. Um, it it's, it's quite shocking. Um, one thing that did really jump out at me, um, philosophically was the layers of mediation that are involved here.And it seems like with a lot of these reanimation technologies, Um, the more troubling they get the fewer layers of remediation there are, if you like. So a text bot that picks up your words and just reuses them. Um, seems in a way closer to being the dead person themselves and therefore more troubling in a way then something like this, where it's been mediated through, uh, presumably a motion capture actor at a whole bunch of technicians and a voice actor and a script writer.

Um, and also, and this is the thing that really actually sort of jumped out at me was that there was this sharing of memory. Right. Which is a really, um, intimate thing to do. Right. So at one point, the, the [00:11:00] hologram shares with, um, uh, Kim Kardashian and that's, you know. Oh, um, do you remember when you were little and I drove you around? I think you said something about it, ‘my tiny BMW’.

Elaine: Oh my God. 

Patrick:  Those little details just make it impossible to like anyone involved, but, um, He says, you know, I'm driving around and we would sing this song together and he starts singing with it. And what struck me about that was, of course, it's this moment of intimacy, but it's not like reminiscing where you have two people who have formed a, I've got a grad student working on this at the moment, which is why it's top of mind for me. But we've got two people who have formed a transactive memory system...that is, you've got two people who are sharing a memory and they reconstruct that memory together. Um, that's a very intimate thing to do with someone. And it involves the actual presence of those two people. But in this case, one assumes, this is a story that she's told to somebody else is then told it to whoever wrote the script. And then it's been relayed to an actor. And so it's a [00:12:00] simulacrum of shared memory. It's the simulacrum of, of reminiscing, which, um, to me seemed a little bit troubling because that is a really intimate thing. And it, it has been sort of....um, you know, even if there's a lot of love behind it and there's a good intention behind it, there's something a little bit unsettling about that. 

Elaine: Yeah. The kind of question of, oh, okay. The good intentions behind the manipulation, what you were describing there, uh, reminds me of the well-known technique of. And a medium, for example, or some kind of soothsayer, uh, trying to access some kind of clue or some sort of element or being fed something, you know, um, uh, in order to then take that piece of information and, you know, manipulate it and sort of say your father is saying that, or your mother is remembering that or whatever.

Patrick:  Yeah. Again, it, it it's somewhat shorn of context. So we don't necessarily know, like we don't necessarily know if...I'm assuming that Kanye West has [00:13:00] had a big hand in writing the script that was recited. Uh, I'm assuming that because Robert Kardashian goes out of his way to praise Kanye West. Um, but, um, who knows, maybe he's been told that story by someone else. And she didn't know that he's, that, that he knows about that story. So it may have actually had that moment of, ‘Oh gosh. No one else could have known this.’ Um, that does actually seem to be an interesting feature of. Some discussions all, um, the more, if you like, um, I don't want to say paranormal, but, but, you know, presented or framed as paranormal experiences around this stuff.

So, um, in my forthcoming book, I talk about a couple of things. I talk about David Oberg, who gives the example of, imagine if you got an email from someone saying, you know, um, you deserve to fail on that test, uh, when you're a kid, because I know you were angry with the teacher, but you deserved it. Um, I'm thinking, ‘wait, I never told anyone that who could possibly be sending me this email’. Or there was a case in the U S a few years ago in Pennsylvania, where, um, a man who had been dead for six months apparently started emailing people and included details that [00:14:00] other people couldn't really have known about.

Um, now I suspect in that case, there was one particular person close to the case who did actually know about them and was responsible for sending those emails. But we don't know, but it's interesting that in those cases, the very fact that there is this apparent intimacy there's apparent. Um, sense of ‘hang on...that's something that only you and I knew about, dead person.’ That feeds into this acceptance that feeds into the ability to say, ‘Oh, okay, I'm going to treat this as if it's the person, I'm going to accept this at face value’, rather than sort of digging into it and trying to sort of, you know, lift up the, the sheet and see what's going on in the background.

Elaine: Absolutely. And I suppose, you know, when somebody dies and we miss them and we crave that reconnection with them, if something comes along that really engages our emotions and has the ring of. Plausibility or about it through these machinations, you know, as sometimes that then sort of ceases to matter as you also talk [00:15:00] about in your book, you know, that it's sort of like, even though you intellectually know factually that it's not possible for all practical purposes...telically it might as well be possible. It might as well be true. It might as well be true. You know, and, and you, you mentioned earlier the idea like, well, we don't know context. Absolutely. For example, as you said, we don't know whether, um, he asked other Kardashian family members for their permission. And I wouldn't want there to be an implication, which I don't think you were making ,that then that permission from other family members would make it okay, I guess, from Kim's perspective because they couldn't have predicted that. Every other member of the family could have gone, um, ‘Yeah, that sounds wonderful. Oh, that, so moving that such a good idea. That's great. That'll hit well, you know, that'll land well,’ and then it could have gotten to it and that could have been the most horrifying thing that Kim could have ever imagined.

And so there's an element here too, which is something that I think about [00:16:00] in my book of, um, - we’re like my book, my book - in my book, uh, the, um, you know, people believing that they understand or know or can predict what another grieving person is going to one value and be okay with, because it can sometimes be very hard to see past the ends of our own noses, with respect to our beliefs about what's good or bad or welcome or unwelcome in grief. And so it's a roll of the dice at the very least that this was going to land. I mean, presumably he knows his wife very well and maybe he would have been able to predict this with confidence, but that's not always the case.

Patrick:  Yeah, it is. And then the question becomes, what do you do in cases of conflict? You know, what do you do when you have, um, people who seem to be equally close to the deceased, perhaps have an equal claim somehow to speak for the deceased, uh, who wanted to do totally opposite things. And I think that a lot of that really is an open question. Like we can say pragmatically, well, we'll just default to not doing it then. Cause you know, as a sort of precautionary principle, we can fall [00:17:00] back on, but. I think that's increasingly going to be a big problem with this stuff is - When these conflicts arise, who actually gets to decide or who gets to speak for the dead in that way? And we have legal structures, if you like in some existing social norms that I guess, give us some guidance there, but then they primarily talk in terms of, um, in terms of property, they talk primarily about who owns the things that it leaves behind.

This question of who gets to speak for the dead is a much more difficult, much more fraught question. And when we come to the reanimation question, Um, I don't think we can address that purely in terms of property rights or who has, you know, the intellectual property ownership of the digital traces that did leave behind.

I think we do have to talk about the way in which persons are instantiated in that material. And, um, therefore who has the right to sort of talk about when a person can be resurrected in this way and under what [00:18:00] conditions. 

Elaine:  A hundred percent. I mean, traditionally before all this came to be possible, your legal personality ceased as soon as you're, you know, kind of carbon based life form ceased. And now, I mean, here we go. Robert Kardashian was in essence through his involvement in the OJ Simpson trial, a celebrity, and there's a huge amount of publicly accessible, available audio and video footage of the man, you know? And so at anybody, not just Kanye West, but anybody would have the raw materials to do something like what he did for his wife's birthday. And so if we're, you know, if we continue on in a situation where we don't accord the digital dead some kind of ongoing legal protection, um, you know, I think we're going to be in a very difficult situation or as you're alluding to, and, and you're right. You know, [00:19:00] if somebody in the Kardashian family said, yes, I give you permission essentially. Was that a, was that just a permission in a legal sense? Was that a permission in like, okay. Son-in-law or whatever it is, that's fine with me. You have my go ahead as the widow, for example, you know, but was that actually legally required for Kanye to proceed? I'm not actually sure about that question. I think I know somebody who might be know more about that, but what do you, what do you know on that? Was that legal requirement for him to get that?

Patrick:  I don’t know. I mean, it may well come down to, um, who had the intellectual copyright over the visuals that they used, because I'm assuming the voice is basically just a voice actor trying to sound like, um, Robert Kardashian. Maybe, maybe not. Um, but of course, presumably there's, there's visual footage, that's been fed into a computer to produce essentially a deep fake, um, I mean, I, I'm not entirely obey with all the technical details that would have gone into this. But it does look like [00:20:00] at least at some point there is somebody, some material that's going to be belonged to someone that's been put into that, but that's only going to touch the surface of, um, the, sort of the, the, sort of the moral issue here. Uh, I mean, you mentioned deep fakes earlier, um, and intuitively, there's something really horrible about producing a deep fake of someone doing something degrading or sexualized or whatever that they wouldn't consent to doing. Um, which is of course immediately what the internet started doing with that technology once it became widely available. 

But it’s not entirely clear to me that the wrongness of that is changed when the person is dead, or that if the person dies that you're no longer wronging the person who's depicted in the deepfake, or wronging the person who owns the intellectual property that's gone into the deep fake. Um, it seems like if you were to do that with somebody who's dead, you're harming the person themselves, you're not harming their estate or their loved ones. You are, but perhaps in harming the estate and the loved ones, but you're also doing a harm to that person. It's degrading to the person to [00:21:00] 

Elaine:  Yeah, for example, if after someone's death, you use deep fake technology or a Pepper's Ghost, you know, holographic wizardry, uh, to get them to confess to some deaths or the crime, they committed a life or two, otherwise, you know, humiliates or sort of degrade themselves, that's something that is corrupting of that person's character, memory, image, you know, for those, you know, for anybody who associated with them, then that's consequential. And you know, the idea of being able to turn the data of the dead to any purposes that might suit us, whether it's narcissism or whether it's well-intentioned, you know, here's a connection with your dead dad, or whether it's revenge, or whether it's something else...using the digital dead as fodder for these kinds of living person's purposes is problematic.

Patrick:  Yeah, and I think what's done with it makes a big difference too. Like the [00:22:00] actual specifics of each case are going to matter. Um, so for instance, you know, the holographic, um, shows you can go to where you can pay to go and watch the holographic Berea callous, or, um, buddy Holly or Roy Orbison, Whitney Houston. Um, and apparently they haven't been terribly well received those shows. In a way it's like, well, there's something a little crass or a little exploitative about this, perhaps, but it's the person doing what they did in life anyway. Um, and so it's hard to see that they would have a really obvious sort of objection to that. Reusing, say, the image of Peter Cushing in Rogue One reanimated into the figure of Tarkin, you might say, well, he's played that role before, so it's not a huge stretch to think that this is kind of a reasonably permissible use of the guy, unless there's family members who object or something like that. 

Elaine:  James Dean.

Patrick:  Well, I was just about to say, yeah, That one's more. I think because there you've got James Dean appearing in a movie, which he had nothing to do with in fact [00:23:00] set in a war that occurred after his death, that one, that one troubles me a little bit more. Um, again, you might say, well, the estate owns James Dean and they, they want to license James Dean in this way. They can do that. Um, but when you're actually presenting the person as if they're a living, breathing person, giving a performance, it does seem as if there's something more, really different about that compared to, um, uh, the cases of just reusing old footage of somebody who's died or, um, you know, repurposing that old footage for a new movie.

Elaine:  It's so interesting that you say own James Dean, because it reminds me of, um, the fact that some people attain the status of brands, you know, the celebrity kind of brand. And so that, you know, Tom Petty Official keeps, you know, uh, tweeting or posting, you know, um, any other, you know, so it's expected almost sometimes that the kind of ongoing brand occurs and is managed by others, is owned and operated by others. 

And sometimes celebrities have [00:24:00] additional clauses about the right to use of their image and their voice and everything that the ordinary person is not going to arrange - we're not going to put that in our wills necessarily, but of course, the possibility for this kind of technology to be deployed, employed, by anyone on anyone raises the question of whether we non-celebrities need to be thinking about these things too.

Patrick:  It does, or, you know, whether, um, legislation, you know, legislatures have to be thinking about this stuff because it, it it's, it might be a little much to ask every individual person to be managing, um, their own protection from these users. They may be completely unaware of it, but I mean, but of course the issue in this space is always that the technology is just getting a bit ahead of our legal and ethical responses to it.

Elaine:  Hmm. So what's the final take home message from the Kanye West surprise birthday, present story for you? [00:25:00]

Patrick:  To me, it's that if you want to throw a surprise party for me, please, don't bring my dead father in to say that he's haunting me. That’s probably not my idea of festivity. But also I think, uh, you know, it's, even though in a way it's a lower technology than some of what we've seen - the Pepper's Ghost delusion itself is like 150 year old technology - the deep fake stuff is all relatively new, but we are going to hit a point soon where there's going to be a convergence of these technologies of the deep fake stuff, of our ability to manipulate voices, of our ability to produce genuinely interactive chatbots that sound like a dead person, that are based upon a dead person's traces. We are very, very close to the point where we are going to be dealing with, um, really convincing digital avatars of the dead. And I think we really need to be ready for that ethically by the time it gets here, and legally by the time it gets here, because it's going to get here quicker than we think it's going to.

Elaine:  Well, that's really similar to my call for action, public [00:26:00] service announcement too, because I completely agree with you. I think there's a temptation, partly because of the source of the story, to treat this as this a niche, crazy, ‘Oh, look at what the celebrities are up to now’ kind of reaction. To treat it like that, and to dismiss it because of the source, as it were, would be to ignore all of those really important, possibly imminently critical issues that there are. And you're correct. We are a lot closer than we think to a wholesale ability to deep fake and create avatars of the dead. And unless, I think, we get to the point where we have a global convention, kind of like we had copyright as a global convention, that we have a global convention or regulation or framework for what we can and cannot do with these kinds of data. We're going to find ourselves in quite a lot of pickles that were unimaginable 20 years ago, but which are here now. 

So I'm glad we got a chance to [00:27:00] talk about this today. Thanks for chatting with me about this. 

Patrick:  Thanks very much. 

Elaine:  I'm Elaine Kasket, and you've been listening to Still Spoken a new podcast about how the dead live on through story and through technology. I was speaking with Patrick Stokes of the Deakin University in Australia, whose new book, Digital Souls, is coming out in February 2021 with Bloomsbury. My book, All the Ghosts in the Machine: The Digital Afterlife of your Personal Data, is available now. Details in the show notes.

And thanks for listening.