AI and the Afterlife - Best of Coast to Coast AM - 2/24/25

Everything is so depressing so much of the time. This thing is designed to make people hooton holler, and the thing that's unique about it is that it's the first time in history that a producer has made a series where all of the characters were created using artificial intelligence. The voices are real comedy actors, but every character you see was created with AI. Never been done before, and it's causing a bit of a stir.

filmmaker of monster movies. So we were lifelong friends. And he died at age ninety two, and Mark Rawlings, who's your associate, had bought the house and he had reported a lot of really strange activity in the house, and we wanted to know whether Forrest Jackerman was still around, so we arranged four days of research there and held a seance with a medium who I believe you know pretty well, Suzanne Wilson.

And after he passed, not only did I have really strange phenomena happening to me that looked like he was dropping me aligne, but many others also felt that they were hearing from him. And it went on for years. George and so I became a believer. At one point I optioned the rights to Fate magazine. It's been around

since the Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting. I think in nineteen forty seven, and it has a section in there called My Proof of Survival and they've published, you know, hundreds of stories of people who are convinced that they've heard from a friend or a loved one after the person has passed. There is so much evidence for this. I even co wrote a book about it called an Atheist in Heaven.

Tucson for well over a decade. Susanne Wilson one of those that he had studied, and many mediums, some who didn't really have the ability. He could separate those out from those who did have an extraordinary ability. So one way is evidence for mediums. Another way we call synchronicities, which is where you have an absolutely extraordinary it seems like a coincidence, something that just couldn't happen that relates to your defeat deceased friend. And then there is a

physical evidence where something physical happens. For example, in my case, when Fari Ackerman dropped me a line, he literally a document was changed physically with ink while I was alone in the house. And then the fourth category, which I think is maybe the most compelling today, is technological evidence.

In other words, if there are spirits on the other side anxious to contact does like we're anxious to hear from them, it may be that using our technology, whether it's our cell phones or other devices that we have, may be the easiest way for them to make a mark with us and get our attention. And that led me to think about whether AI could actually be a useful tool in trying to augment our effort to contact someone that we knew very closely from the other side.

And so it was you know, my new series, The Naughty Adventures of Scarlett May Blossom, and working so much with AI night, afternoon and throughout the day for over a year to create that three and a half hours of programming, so much work creating characters using AI to explore new things that had never been done before. That with my interest in life after death, I thought maybe there's a way to put these two together, and I thought that that would be something of interest to your listeners.

create a lot of shots and scenes and characters. Now for AI using it in terms of trying to contact the other side, I think, and some of this is theory, but I put it to a test that worked. I think that at the heart of it, there has to be someone that you've lost who was very very close

to you. I don't know whether it's love or deep friendship, but it's somebody who you shared part of your life with that was just indelible between the two of you, that you would never forget the things that you did. And in my case. It was a boyhood friend. His first name is Jeff, who I met in third grade, and you know, we were just friends through the decades. When we were children, we made amateur films together that caught the attention of Forrest j Ackerman, the editor of

Famous Monsters. We got discovered when we were young, got some help there. I was very very close to Jeff, and he died in twenty seventeen. Had an extraordinary career. I want to mention. He became an important photographer for the Smithsonian Museum Museum of American History. He was the photographer they would get to photograph the new president every four years at the inauguration.

first heard from him in a different way that did not involve AI. I want to make sure we have enough time before a break if I'm going to get into that part of the story. Could you cue me in on that. I'm good, okay, So let me tell you the first thing that happened related to Jeff. We always used to go see science fiction double features together. His father would take us monster movies. We love them.

Jeff would collect all the ads of these movies from the newspapers and he would make a scrap book and that scrap book was a valuable item that I envied for many years. Eventually he gifted it to me just a few years before he died, with a beautiful inscription to me. And it had some of our favorite movies. The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad done by Ray Harry Houses, the Invisible Boy that had Robbie the robot who was

also in Forbidden Planet. And then there was The Sign of Zoro, a movie we loved because we used to play Zoro together. We'd have a Zoro set you'd buy, you know, sponsored by Disney I think are a toy company, and we'd have swords and there'd be a mask.

the maid was coming during that day. I opened my wallet and staring me in the face is a twenty dollars bill that has the word Zoro written on the twenty dollars bill.

rs hastily. Well, in this case, the second one looked kind of like a V. I searched for examples of his handwriting, and I found where he had written when he was probably around thirteen years old, the word horror you like horror movies. Two rs, and the second R was like a V. It looked exactly like on the

twenty dollars bill. Wow. So at that point, George, nobody could have convinced me that I hadn't heard from my friend Jeff then and there now Jeff is the one I tried to contact with this system I devised using AI. Actually in the last few weeks it occurred to me I tested it, and why did I get results?

I'll mention the programs and I'll tell you what I did with them, because ultimately, what I was trying to do was create a message where you would see the face of Jeff talking, bringing him back to life as an AI character or avatar as you will, with his actual voice. That's the other element that if somebody wants to try this, you need a recording of the voice of the person you are close to. You need their

actual voice. There's a program called eleven Labs, and with that, if you have the recording of the voice, you can plug it into eleven Labs and have that voice say something else, something new that you've written, something the person never really said when they were alive. With that voice, yeah, and you can get close to the exact voice of the person. And it takes experimenting to manipulate all the variables to make it very very close to sound just like that person. I got it very very close to

sound like Jeff. You know, maybe after the break or something, I could even play a sample of what was why I needed that message and why what I wanted to say I'm sorry, no, because there's so much compassion and love and friendship between me and Jeff. Now, some people might think that, you know, they might feel that the whole subject of tampering with trying to contact the dead is something that we shouldn't be doing. There people that have that religious feeling, okay, that then they won't be

the ones to do it. I didn't feel that way. The message you want is for the friend to be saying to you, I see you now, I know you're you're trying to bring me back. I remember some of the great times we had together, and then mention a few of those great times and to say, I know that you want me to send you a message. And

here's what I'm going to try to do. I'm going to try to send you a message that you will recognize it's really coming for me because it's going to be something that we share together that nobody else is going to know. And you do it first with the voice again. I use a program called eleven Labs to create that voice, and there are variables that you have

to play with. You can you can tell it to make the voice exactly like the voice you've got you can pool around with another dial and tell how stable you want the voice, whether you wanted to exaggerate, and by what percent, whether you want to make the delivery kind of slower or faster. So you know, I did it around ten times before I said, you know, that's really close. It sounds like it's Jeff talking to me. And then you need to bring You need the face.

You need a really perfect picture of your friend's face if you plug into another AI program. I'm sure there are multiple programs. I used one called DD Studios. It's a D and then a hyphen and ID, and that's a program where you can get still pictures to talk according to a script that you've written.

and saying what you wanted the friend to say. Now, what's the purpose of all this using AI for this, it's meditative, it's consciousness, it's it's using it as a device to try to augment a connection between you and the spirit of the disease sprint. If there really is a continued existence for someone you felt really close to, it's like allure to tell them that your focus is on them. You want to hear from them. You're concentrating on them as if they're alive again, and then you

wait to see what's going to happen. And for me, within thirty six hours of doing this, I feel that I heard from my friend Jeff in five different ways. All Right. I think it was a success. May not be a success for everyone. You may have to try it a lot of times. Some people will be disappointed. But I think some people will find that if your connection with that person was strong enough, you may hear from them.