Creators of the infamous ‘AI death calculator’ warn against malicious copycats

The makers of the ‘AI death calculator’, which claims to predict when a person will die with 78 percent accuracy, have warned the public of a new threat.

Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark have found that copycat apps have flooded the market since they unveiled their technology, called life2vec, last year, but the team noted that their AI would not be made publicly available online.

The team discovered four fake AIs that predict death and promote “counterfeit services”: AI Doom Calculator, Intelligent Death AI, Death Predictor, and the ambiguously named Telecharger.

The copycats ask users for credit card details, emails and other sensitive information that could help attackers steal money and identities.

“We are aware of social media accounts and at least one fraudulent website claiming to be associated with the life2vec model,” the researchers warned morbidly curious Internet users via their life2vec AI’s official homepage.

“We are not affiliated with these or any other entities claiming to use our technology,” they noted.

The Life2vec team, who first unveiled their powerful AI in the journal Nature Computational Science last December, hope the public will “beware of” dangerous copy-cat scammers who have “nothing to do with us and our work.”

Despite a public clamor for the chance to test their own futures against live2vec’s predictions, researchers have had to keep the operational AI secret to protect the personal information of the people whose data was used to train the system.

That’s because personal information about more than six million real people, including income, occupation, place of residence, injuries and pregnancy history, was fed into the algorithm, lead researcher Sune Lehmann told DailyMail.com.

The Danish computer scientists behind the fortune-telling AI life2vec named four fake “death-predicting” AIs: the AI ​​Doom Calculator, Intelligent Death AI, Death Predictor, and the ambiguously named Telecharger. The concerns about the counterfeits are the work of hackers

And as such, Lehmann says, live2vec is not available for use by the general public – or businesses.

“We are actively working on ways to share some of the results more openly, but this will require further research in a way that can guarantee the privacy of the people in the study,” says Lehmann, professor of networks and complex systems.

Even if the model is finally available to the public, Danish privacy law would make it illegal to use life2vec to make decisions about individuals, such as writing insurance policies or making hiring decisions.

“The model opens up important positive and negative perspectives to discuss and tackle politics,” said Lehmann told Newswise.

‘Similar technologies for predicting life events and human behavior are already being used today within technology companies that, for example, track our behavior on social networks, profile us extremely accurately and use these profiles to predict our behavior and influence us.

“This discussion must be part of the democratic conversation so that we can think about where technology is taking us and whether this is a development we want.”

This potential for corporate or government abuse is of particular interest to the researchers behind live2vec, due to the above-average accuracy of their systems.

The model, trained on data from 2008 to 2016, was able to correctly predict who had died in 2020 in more than three-quarters of the cases.

The technology does this by analyzing the user’s life story: their text prompts.

Lehmann and his team assigned different tokens to each piece of information, and these pieces of data were all mapped in relation to each other.

Categories in people’s life stories span the range of human experiences: a forearm fracture is shown as S52; working in a tobacconist is coded as IND4726, income is represented by 100 different digital tokens; and ‘postpartum hemorrhage’ is O72.

Many of these relationships are intuitive, such as occupation and income: certain jobs pay more money.

But what life2vec does is map out the vast constellation of factors that make up an individual’s life, allowing someone to ask them to make a prediction based on millions of other people and many factors.

It can also make predictions about people’s personalities.

The test asks respondents to rate ten items based on their level of agreement, items such as ‘The first thing I always do in a new place is make friends,’ or I rarely give my opinion during group meetings.’

It’s important to note, Lehmann said, that the data all came from Denmark, so these predictions may not apply to people living in other places — in addition to the fact that most people probably don’t really want to know when they will die.