If you love your Twitter account so much that you worry about it dying off once you've passed away yourself, well, that's pretty weird. Nonetheless, you're in luck, because there's an app for that.
A new program called LivesOn employs artificial intelligence capable of reading your tweeting patterns, replicating them and posting original tweets, ensuring that your online presence continues even after you've left the realm of the living.
As the LivesOn slogan says, perhaps one of the only things you'll have to look forward to after death is that "when your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting."
The service originally started as a publicity stunt for the British advertising agency Lean Mean Fighting Machine, but its development has since expanded to include the University of London. It hasn't launched yet, but as the Huffington Post reports, potential users can already register on the site if they choose.
Here's how it works: By registering with LivesOn, a separate Twitter account is created that mirrors your own. The program reads and analyzes your main feed, then begins populating itself with tweets and retweets. It can even follow other people's tweets and will potentially respond to people.
The author Nicholas Carr commented on the situation in his own blog post, wondering if people will even be able to tell the difference.
"As more and more of our earthly self comes to be defined by our online profiles and postings, our digital garb, then it becomes a relatively easy task for a computer to replicate that self, dynamically and without interruption, after we're gone," Carr wrote.
"As long as you keep posting, liking, and tweeting, spewing links to funny GIFs and trenchant longform texts, circulating the occasional, digitally fabricated instagram photo or vine video, your friends and acquaintances will never need know that your body has shuffled off the stage," he added. "For all social intents and purposes — and what other intents and purposes are there? — you'll live forever. I update, therefore I am."
There's been no word yet on whether or not Twitter's infamous porn bots will be able to self-replicate (although, honestly it seems like they already do), but hopes are understandably high.
Will our future computer-powered Twitter selves end up having conversations with other dead Twitter accounts? Will the Internet only be populated with robo tweets after Skynet becomes self-aware? Stay tuned for more info.
