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Like a horde of zombies coming over the hill, the dead are returning. Holocaust museums now have holograms of survivors and Anne Frank chatbots to answer our questions. Tech-savvy adult children are building AI versions of their dead parents. Griefbots stretch conversations with the dead into the indefinite future. Digital seances can be held to resolve (maybe) whatever issues were left hanging. Future birthdays can be celebrated on Facebook, where posts on the pages of dead people are so lively, it is hard to remember they are gone.
Gone. A word that may soon lose its full charge. I remember bargaining with myself after my mom died, persuading myself that she was not truly gone, never would be, as long as I remembered her. I could even defend the use of present-tense when I spoke about her. And I spoke to her, still do.
But do I want her to answer back?
There is so much I would love to share with her. So many experiences and opinions and insights into the big questions we used to puzzle over together. But what would it feel like to know which of my decisions, actions, and changed habits she disapproved of? This one-sided relationship is rather blissful. I can consult all the stored-up maternal wisdom about big life decisions, then spot a coin on the ground and decide this means she approves of my choice. (A champion spotter of loose change, she gave me pennies regularly, for luck.)
Do I want a computer to contradict my carefully constructed Mom-brain?
I would be a child again, in a way I have not experienced since her death. I am embarrassed to admit that it lasted until her death, wriggling into holes in my psyche and popping out whenever I had to confront her gentle admonitions and remonstrations. We were very different people, close as we were, and the loss of that tight, immersive relationship was in many ways freeing.
Yes, there were many questions I forgot to ask, but anything that mattered was already a permanent part of me. There is juicy gossip I would love to share with her, about the lives of people we both knew well, and there are memories that swell inside me that cannot be shared with anyone but her, because who else would even understand without a longwinded explanation, and why should they bother? So that pressure builds inside me, and I find that I relieve it by sharing new thoughts and experiences with people who are still alive. Which seems more constructive than throwing so much energy at a ghost.
The ghost in the machine. That phrase keeps tugging at me—is it Descartes? Finally I look it up. It comes from a critique of Descartes, mocking his insistence on the separateness of mind and body. Also from a 1993 horror film in which a serial killer’s essence is transferred into a computer, which then uses technology to kill people. My mom would never do that. Her essence would be loving, bossy, tender, worrywart, fun. Would an algorithm capture those traits?
Others have also applied “the ghost in the machine” to AI, I see now—my mind wandered into something rather obvious—but they seem worried about AI becoming self-aware. Would that make my mom-griefbot fully sentient, or would the awareness be limited to the computer itself, and maybe it would decide it did not like my mom and did not want to be her griefbot? Oh, nobody could dislike my mom. My friends and boyfriends all adored her. But then, they had hearts….
In 2019, Justin Harrison nearly died in a motorcycle accident. Two months later, his mom was diagnosed with late-stage cancer. What could he do, he wondered, “to save the most important human in my life.”
Over the next three years, with his mother’s help, he created a neural network, then a bot, finishing just as she died. He patented the technology and now runs an AI platform called You, Only Virtual.
So…he commercialized her? Maybe that characterization is not fair. But people are raking in a lot of profit from others’ loneliness and grief these days—just as they always have, I suppose, but in new and dramatic forms. And I am horrified by the possibilities. We do weird things in grief’s clutches: sniff or kiss their clothes; wear their perfume; hang on to any molecules that might carry or suggest their presence. We decide that the butterfly that just landed so lightly on our shoulder is our returned loved one. We perform odd little rituals of memory, make tiny impromptu shrines. Will a griefbot act as a pacifier, weaning us from superstition? Or will we just spend money we do not have trying to assuage pain that is inevitable?
And what of the poor dead person, their rights? What if they would not have answered as the algorithm insists? This is a bit like Mormons baptizing us whether we like it or not. Tech is imposing itself on minds no longer able to object. And if we ask questions the bot cannot answer, will it hallucinate? Talk about betrayal. It would break my heart to hear my wise mother spout nonsense at me. She was always honest, always consistent—keys to any real relationship. Plus, she rarely snapped at me, as bots are increasingly able to do.
Would someone please tell these bots to be careful not to alter our real past, our real relationship, with their answers? An ongoing conversation will affect our emotions, our ideas of that person, our sense of ourselves in relationship to them. Memories once pure will be subject to strangers’ motives and tech’s distortions. What happened in the real relationship will be layered under this new, evolving facsimile. One woman used to talk to her dad in her head, but after her digital séance, she found she could no longer do so. “It’s changed the internal relationship I have with him,” she says. “It’s almost like he lives in the Dadbot now—I can’t get to him internally.” This technology can even remove our imagination from our control.
The therapeutic gift of a digital séance, it is said, is closure. You can have the conversation you never got to have, maybe never dared to have. The worst grief is the sort twisted by what was said in anger or left unsaid. But recreating such a conversation with a machine, frictionless, feels like cheating. We want a good solid comeback or takedown or way to make amends. How could a machine’s forgiveness heal a flesh wound?
And is there a sharper-edged oxymoron than “digital séance,” juxtaposing cold data with what is mysterious, unpredictable, otherworldly?
I have always loved the characters in TV shows—usually tough old police detectives—who still talk to their dead wives. That would be a comfort, and I fully intend to keep talking to my husband if I am the one widowed. But I do not need to turn him into a bot to do so. I know full well how he will answer most questions, and in what tone, and I have enough imagination to extrapolate even for wild new topics. That AI project at Versailles this summer, letting the statues talk to people? Art has always spoken to us. The trick is not to simulate, but to listen.
When Harrison told his mom-bot that he had a rash, he says “she hounded me about going to the doctor and telling my dad about my skin.” Which I am sure made him feel still loved, still safe in her loving care. But there is a bit of denial at work, too: “I’m challenging this assumption that death is guaranteed and that we will always be confined by this biological vessel that we walk around in,” he tells a writer for Nature. Has he also been challenging his own near-death, three months before his mom’s diagnosis?
Harrison still talks to his mom-bot, but only a few times a month. He says just knowing he can do so is comforting. Most users go through a similar trajectory, he figures, talking to the bot all the time in the early days of mourning, then easing up, setting their loved one aside for occasional consults.
So if the real need here is not to talk to your dead beloved, it must be to pretend they are not gone? Which will only hurt you more every time you flip off the simulation and find yourself confronted by their absence all over again. As though we are Alzheimer’s patients forced to grieve afresh every time someone tells us the truth.
On the other hand, I save quotes for a reason. The smartest way to navigate is often to consult wise minds of the past. They still have plenty to say, and I do not know all those philosophers and playwrights and diplomats the way I know my husband. If an AI can mine their vast writings and extract relevant advice, I will take it gladly. Maybe if my mom had kept a journal or written reams of letters, I would feel more inclined to embrace this opportunity?
Benjamin Charles Germain Lee recently wrote a compelling piece for Longreads about his trip to the Illinois Holocaust Museum and Education Center, his reaction to Q&As with holograms of survivors. Lee has a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence—and his grandmother survived Auschwitz II-Birkenau. We are fast losing the living survivors of those camps, and some groups are finding it politically expedient to deny that the Holocaust ever took place. So he wrestles with the notion of letting his grandmother—who wrote and talked freely about her experiences—speak again.
“The language of computer science is riddled with the metaphor of memory, its fungibility, and its failures…” he remarks. “Euphemisms for aging are similarly pejorative.” His grandmother’s memories were fragile, and suffering and age took a toll: by the end, she was repeating the same few stories, and details were falling away. But that does not leave him eager to resurrect her digitally. “Even if we could fully reanimate Holocaust survivors with AI,” he writes, “doing so would be to reject the natural and inevitable metabolism of memory and mortality that is required of us, no matter how painful.”
Read more by Jeannette Cooperman here.
