Marketplace

This story was produced by our colleagues at the BBC.

Lottie Hayton lost both her parents within two months of each other. As a young journalist she wanted to write about it, and in particular to investigate a new tech genre known as “grief tech,” or “ghostbots”.

An industry is emerging that uses artificial intelligence to build chatbots of people who’ve died with the aim of offering solace to those who’ve lost loved ones.

Hayton made a chatbot version of her dad and a visual talking avatar of her mom.

“My drive to try it was, I guess, in order to provide other people who might be using it with information,” said Hayton.

“The bot sort of blinks and moves slightly like she did, that was quite alarming. The face moves in a juddery way but it very much looked like her and that threw me off,” she added. “It had an air of her, but it was definitely robotic. I was inherently aware that this was a piece of technology.”

Within the last five years, the idea of digital resurrections have gone from science fiction to reality. Anyone can sign up to create a digital chat version of loved ones for as little as $10. Lifetime subscriptions, however, can cost several hundred dollars.

Justin Harrison set up his ghostbot business, You Only Virtual, after his own mother became ill.

“For anybody tech-savvy, it’s a pretty easy process, extracting text messages and emails and online messages,” Harrison said. “Our technology is nowhere near as good as it’s going to be in six months, in a year. Generally speaking it’s going to be mind-blowing in three years.”

This industry is still very new and still pretty niche. Businesses operating in this field only have a few thousand users and there’s not a huge amount of investor interest. But some experts believe that ghostbots could go mainstream.

Carl Orman is a Swedish researcher and author who has spent the past 10 years studying the ethics of the digital afterlife.

“Five years ago I would have said that most people would still find it kind of creepy. But then ChatGPT hit,” said Orman. “It’s not implausible that over the next decade or so, interacting with chatbots impersonating real humans becomes just as common as having a video call and that’s going to open up a new market for those chatbots. “

Experts are now calling for studies to find out if these tools can really help us with our grief, and if they do, figure out how companies might offer that ethically, consensually, and safely.

It’s Friday! Which means it’s time for our week-in-review show: Marketplace Tech Bytes. Meta announced this week that starting in 2024, Facebook and Instagram will start labeling political ads that use images generated by AI. But no... it’s hardly an AI crackdown. Plus, YouTube goes to war with ad blockers. A spate of uninstalls ensues! But first, WeWork, the co-working space provider, files for bankruptcy. What happened? And what’s next for the one-time golden child of Silicon Valley? Marketplace’s Lily Jamali is joined by Paresh Dave, senior writer at Wired, for his take on these stories.

This week, Meta announced teen accounts with a slew of new safety features. We’ve also got Apple news to talk about — no, not the latest iPhones or watches, but new functionality for AirPods that basically turns them into hearing aids. First, though, are we ready for artificial general intelligence, or AGI, that could match or exceed human capabilities? It could be a mere one to three years away, according to testimony at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee Tuesday. A number of AI insiders spoke, including former Google and OpenAI researchers and Georgetown’s Helen Toner, who explained the stakes. “That technology will be at a minimum extraordinarily disruptive and at a maximum could lead to literal human extinction,” she said. “So I would argue that a wait-and-see approach to policy is not an option.” Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Jewel Burks Solomon, managing partner at Collab Capital, for her take on all this for our weekly segment “Marketplace Tech Bytes: Week in Review.”

It’s fair to say China dominates in electric vehicle sales. The country is the world’s biggest consumer of electric cars and has dozens of automakers competing in the space. Last year, Chinese companies sold about 9.5 million EVs and plug-in hybrid cars.

But the industry faces mounting trade pressures. The Biden administration imposed a 100% tariff on Chinese EVs, which President-elect Donald Trump is expected to continue. Meanwhile the European Union recently raised tariffs up to 45%, citing concerns that Chinese government subsidies give its companies an unfair advantage.

Subsidies certainly help, but there are other factors giving Chinese EVs an edge. Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Marketplace’s China correspondent Jennifer Pak about how those factors could keep Chinese EV makers competitive, even in a more restrictive global market.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Jennifer Pak: There are multiple factors, and different people will emphasize different points to it. So one of the things is China has a complete supply chain. It has cheap labor. There’s fierce competition amongst all of the Chinese companies here. There’s a big demand, a big market and subsidies. According to a consultancy, Automobility, they say that batteries account for over half of the cost of the EVs. So if you can imagine, China controls the processing of the raw materials all the way down to the assembly, it means you can negotiate good prices, especially if you order in massive quantities. So if you, you know, have more volume, then prices per unit comes down. And then there’s also cheap labor. So for example, in the U.S. last year, it was $28 per hour for an autoworker, whereas when we went to Central China, at one of the BYD factories in Changsha, we spoke to assembly workers who said they earned about $1,000 a month, which is pretty good for factory work in China, but because of the amount of overtime they have to put in, it works out to at best $3.60 an hour. So that’s quite a difference from $28 an hour.

McCarty Carino: And when we say that Chinese EVs are cheaper, we should specify, I mean, there are several models that are less than $20,000, right?

Pak: Yes, for sure, but a lot of the companies want to get a higher profit margin, so in fact, they want to sell the higher end ones. And what we’ve been told by experts is that even if they compare to their relative peers, you know, it’s still cheaper because they have better features, or they put more features into the car.

McCarty Carino: As it becomes kind of increasingly difficult to sell to Western markets, do you think these competitive advantages hold up down the road?

Pak: Yes, for the simple reason about the battery, that supply chain being locked in China right now is really essential to keeping prices low. The labor cost is less so because actually wages have become higher and higher, and factories are becoming more automated, so that’s becoming less of a factor. But the other thing that we were talking about is value for money, right? So Chinese EV companies are not really looking to export its cheapest models. Certainly, certain countries would want that, but what they want is to get higher profit margins. And China has an advantage in that it doesn’t just manufacture EVs, it manufactures quite a lot of things that go into the EVs. Like, for example, I went into one of the cheaper models. It was $18,000, it’s the BYD Qin, and it’s super basic, so basic that in the back there’s no air vents, there’s no entertainment system, but now the replacement model comes automatically with an app where you can remotely start the air conditioning. It has some voice control functions. So it’s these sort of “braggable” features in an EV which would prompt consumers to buy and I think as we go further down the road and as more companies start producing EVs, I think that might be one of the f...

The Washington Post reported earlier this month that representatives of DOGE — the Department of Government Efficiency — gained access to sensitive data at the Department of Education and fed it into AI software.

This has raised red flags over whether it violates federal privacy law. We reached out to DOGE for comment, but didn’t hear back.

But there are ways to use AI to improve efficiency without raising privacy concerns. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes spoke with Kevin Frazier, contributing editor at the publication Lawfare, about how the government has used AI in the past and how it could use it more responsibly in the future.

The following is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Kevin Frazier: The federal government’s use of AI really spans decades, if we’re going to be honest, because how you define AI is a whole, other hour-long conversation, if not two-hour-long conversation. But here we can even just look back to the end of 2024 when we had an inventory done of the federal government’s use cases of AI, and what we saw is that across 37 agencies, there were more than 1,700 different uses of AI, ranging from the Army Corps of Engineers using AI to predict flooding to, of course, the Department of Defense using AI to bolster its cybersecurity defenses.

Stephanie Hughes: Tell me a little bit more about, you know, what the goal is with incorporating AI into the federal government, like, what’s the hope?

Frazier: Yeah, so there are tons of hopes. I think the biggest advantage to relying on AI systems are a couple things. So number one, AI is really adept at spotting patterns that would otherwise elude human staffers, and so AI deployed in the federal government setting can really assist with efficiency when it comes to identifying waste, trying to forecast new trends, whether those are market trends or weather trends. So a lot of this just goes to trying to do really large, difficult tasks in a more streamlined and reliable fashion. One thing I want to point out is that AI operates the same way in any given context. We can see what its function is. We can know it’s going to run in a certain way. Now I’m not trying to say that AI is perfect, far from it. We know that it can be susceptible to bias and other issues, but it does have that capacity to operate in a more predictable fashion and serve different tasks that humans just aren’t really well suited for.

Hughes: Going big picture, the use of AI in many aspects of life, including government, seems inevitable. What’s the best way to maximize the benefits of AI while still maintaining public trust?

Frazier: First is AI literacy. We really haven’t seen a concentrated effort across the country to educate Americans about the risks and benefits and technical background of AI, and we need a lot more folks in the federal government who have a deep knowledge of AI and a deep experience with AI to help make sure that these systems are running in a responsible fashion that aligns with federal law. Number two is transparency. It’s really important that, from a trust perspective, Americans know when AI is going to be used to achieve certain ends. And I think a lot of Americans want to know that they’re either interacting with an AI system, or they’re helping inform an AI system or not. One third step I really want to see is experimentation, because in many ways, the use of AI is going to improve government services. For example, just to highlight one thing, the Social Security Administration has been using AI to proactively identify individuals who may be eligible for benefits. That’s an awesome use case, right? Finding Americans who should be receiving more benefits but aren’t, that’s really exciting. So I want that to keep happening. So let’s use AI on this project. Let’s see how it goes. Let’s report the results. Let’s show the American public how it’s working, what risk we identified, and how we’re responding to those and then keep scaling it up.

Hughes: You spent some time in the tech world. You had a stint at Google. You were at Cloudflare for a minute. You founded a tech non-profit. You’ve also spent a lot of time in the legal world. We now have all these people with tech mindsets coming into a world of politics and laws. Is there a happy medium between the “move fast and break things” approach of Silicon Valley and the way the federal government has traditionally worked, which is move cautiously and try not to break stuff?<...