Scientists are saying that in the very near future, Generative AI will be able to create realistic facsimiles of our dead loved ones, ideally—or eerily to some, to help them through their grieving process.
Whether you believe that this innovation is life (or death) changing, or completely Black Mirror adjacent, this type of content will have severe implications for the future of grief.
So, will Chat GPT soon let you talk to your dearly departed? Is the future already here? Let’s look at how we got here.
Resurrecting the dead using AI: A history
Twitter went absolutely feral in 2020 when video came out of Ye (formerly Kanye West), and his video present to Kim Kardashian of her deceased father, wishing Kim a happy 40th birthday- A gift from the afterlife, that Robert Sr. obviously didn’t record years before his death.
Perhaps it was the dialogue Ye chose to include in the message, or the uncanny valley imperfection in Rob Sr.’s face, but most people thought this was a strange and misplaced process that was “just another weird thing rich people do”.
Just two years removed from this however, versions of what some called science-fiction nightmare fuel, are ready for the public, using AI machine learning.
In June of 2022, Amazon announced a feature that would allow dead loved ones to read stories to children, using just one minute of sample speech from the passed-relative.
Hossein Rahnama, a professor at Toronto Metropolitan University and an MIT Media Lab research affiliate, is developing Augmented Eternity—a platform enabling the creation of interactive digital personas using a deceased person’s photos, texts, emails, social media posts, and public statements.
Many different companies have been able to use AI to create aged up mock-ups of people who died as children- this tech dates back all the way to earlier than 2013.
Using AI to get over grief: Psychologists weigh in
So, lets get back to imagining having a convincing chat-bot that replies to you just as a loved one did. Talking to you through your grief of them being gone.
Some researchers have question on whether or not this would help or hinder the grieving process altogether. “By giving somebody the ability to see their loved one again, is that going to give them some solace, or is it going to become like an addiction?” clinical psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo, director of Medical Virtual Reality at the Institute for Creative Technologies told The Washington Post in November of 2022.
Videos like this, from the 2020 Korean documentary ‘Meeting you’, has others asking the same question. It shows a mother being able to say goodbye to her daughter who died suddenly three years prior in a VR setting, and her responding in a believable way.
Though she comes away from the experience positively, there is the question of if apps like this will cause even more denial and dysphoria.
Nevertheless, grief has always been a deeply personal process, one with millions of approaches, each different and unique to ones own, pace, personal philosophy, and culture.
As Phillip Hodson, a psychotherapist and spokesperson for the UK Council for Psychotherapy, told the Guardian back in 2014 regarding ‘what if’ mockups, “we all grieve in our own way—so it’s up to the individual to decide whether such a process ‘helps’ ‘or ‘works.”
What we do know, is that we collectively have to ensure these features aren’t used maliciously, say in a scam. If Nigerian Princes were enough to drain Grandma’s account, just imagine what a call from her dead husband could do. Would you ever use this tech to ‘reach’ the great beyond?