When I first read the article about the new Microsoft device that will let you speak to your deceased grandma, I thought they had a new ITC device. I was curious about how they accomplished it. However, as I read on, it turns out the device is an AI representation of your grandma, not an ITC device.
ITC stands for Instrumental Transcommunication. An ITC device is a type of electronic device that is sometimes used by paranormal investigators or ghost hunters to try and communicate with spirits or entities from other realms. These devices are designed to pick up on and interpret signals or sounds that are not typically perceptible to human senses.
How is AI valuable for ghost hunting?
This got me thinking how we could use AI to help in the search for life after death. An AI program can find countless correlations and group hem tby categories all in a blink of an eye...or two.
Here's how I'd like to see AI used in paranormal investigation:
We could use AI to study hours of paranormal video evidence. There are already machine learning algorithms that can detect human motion in video. (Most of the good ones filter out pets to reduce the number of false alarms.) However, as a paranormal investigator, we want to review anything that could be suspicious. The algorithm could look for shadow movement, light anomalies and of course people walking by…and cats. Spirits can manipulate many things, and we want a system that can detect any deviation from the normal. The camera is usually static, so getting the baseline would be easy. Any shadow play or movement would trigger a flag on the recording for later review.
Another use of AI would be in EVP. It is possible to train an AI to hear, identify and classify human speech. This could be used to help investigators find EVPs in the noise. Like the strides made in Far-Field-Voice, a whisper can be heard and understood in a noisy room.
Or let’s get really crazy and use AI to understand the EMF around us and possibly detect an anomaly. This would take an extraordinary device: one to capture the data, store it, and upload it to the cloud.
Paranormal investigators spend all night capturing hours of ghost hunting evidence that must be looked over later. Using AI to help would be a welcomed blessing.