Former Disney Star Sparks Backlash With His New AI App That Clones Your Dead Loved Ones

Saying goodbye to our loved ones and dealing with the grief of losing them is never easy, and pretending otherwise is probably not a good idea.

Former Disney star Calum Worthy wants to cash in on that, however. The actor may have once celebrated genuine friendship, music, and laughs during his time as Dez on Austin & Ally, but people are pretty convinced that he's gotten lost in the sauce, now that he's a co-founder for a very dystopian—and, dare we say, Black Mirror-infused—company.

Last week, Worthy posted a morally convoluted question on Twitter (X):

"What if the loved ones we've lost could be part of our future?"

A key part of the human experience is that it doesn't last forever and that we all have to say goodbye sometime. The fact that life is fleeting is what makes it precious.

But paired with Worthy's question was a video of a pregnant woman, speaking via video to her elderly mother on the phone, about her future baby. Later, when the baby boy is ten months old, the woman is on the phone with her mother again, but the new grandma appears to be in the same outfit as before.

Throughout the rest of the video, the child continues to grow up. We see him talking to his grandmother—but we see that she never appears to age or even change outfits.

The end of the video flashes back to the mom, pre-pregnancy, recording a video of her mother in real time, ostensibly to upload to a platform called "2wai," a play on "two-way calling," that allows users to continue speaking to them after they are gone.

You can watch the commercial here:

In a follow-up tweet, Worthy said of the platform:

"At 2wai, we're building a living archive of humanity, one story at a time."

"It all starts with the social network for avatars: the 2wai app."

"Try the 2wai beta on the App Store. Android coming soon."

According to the details on the 2wai website, beta users will receive access to the AI avatar of Calum Worthy "himself," and other familiar names, like William Shakespeare and Frida Kahlo.

Though Worthy spoke highly of the platform, fellow X users found the cofounder's concept to be creepy.

Others agreed and also thought it cheapened the human existence.

Some cited a Black Mirror episode titled "Be Right Back," in which a grieving woman took advantage of a service that allowed people to stay in touch with their deceased loved ones, all so she could keep talking to her late boyfriend.

Arguably, the best thing we can do to keep our loved ones with us is to keep their memory alive in the form of photographs, videos, mementos, and sharing stories. The idea of depending on a platform to anticipate what they might have said and how they might have behaved is nothing short of dystopian.