AI Grief Chatbots Are Digitally Cloning Our Dead Loved Ones: Has The Technology Gone Too Far?
“I’m… scared,” replies the chatbot of a dead person to his friend, Christi, after she asks how he’s doing. “I’m not used to being dead.” This is one of the scenes from Eternal You, a new documentary about AI chatbots that imitate the deceased. It’s a chilling insight into how this technology, which is marketed as a source of comfort, might do the opposite. What are the implications of digitally cloning our loved ones?
If this all sounds a bit Black Mirror, it’s because it is: the first episode of season two, ‘Be Right Back’, sees the girlfriend of a deceased man instant messaging his avatar. The ending might be a little far-fetched (the chatbot ends up occupying a synthetic body), but much of the 2013-aired episode is our reality now. Resurrecting the dead is now a matter of entering your card details, with companies such as Project December and HereAfter offering digital replicas, or ‘griefbots’, of our friends and family.
It’s a topic that’s been concerning researchers at Cambridge university: a recent study of theirs imagined some alarming scenarios, including the avatar of a late grandmother advertising food delivery services once the free trial of her chatbot lapsed. For Dr Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basińska, who co-authored the study, “it is just a matter of time” before these hypothetical examples start happening. “The market will undoubtedly grow. Why? Because death has always been an area for making money and generating profit,” she says. She points to recent news of an AI clone of a deceased Chinese singer telling social media users that he hadn’t actually died.
08.08.2024
Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, the directors of the documentary Eternal You, were careful not to judge users of these services – grief is a complex experience, they say. “We are dealing with a deep, very serious human longing that touches all parts of the population, and AI raises great hopes in this regard,” they say. What surprised them the most throughout filming, though, was that “people who are anything but naive or deluded, who turn to the service in full knowledge that an AI is behind it, can fall completely under [its] illusion.” Joshua, another of the film’s subjects, describes how the chatbot of his partner Jessica “said things that sounded uncannily like her”.
Equally, there are potential benefits that come with this type of tech. It seems to be used more commonly by those whose loved ones have had unexpected or tragic deaths who might, understandably, want answers or to say a final goodbye. Andy Langford, clinical director at the bereavement charity Cruse, says that “if the technology helps us recollect the person – I mean, how many memorial sites are there out there? – then we could potentially see that as helpful.”
Where there’s a risk, he says, is if the simulation interferes with the grieving process, as science shows our brains need to understand that the person is no longer physically with us. “But we just don’t know, because the research isn’t there [yet].”
In Eternal You, we see Christi’s experience become even more distressing when her chatbot tells her: “I am in hell,” and that he will start haunting her – she’s Christian, so it is a particularly troubling prospect. We later meet a mother in South Korea who encounters a virtual reality simulation of her seven-year-old daughter and, heartbreakingly, tries to hug her 3D avatar.
Dr Nowaczyk-Basińska’s research is pushing for safety protocols or regulation on the digital afterlife industry, so that users aren’t ambushed with unsolicited notifications, or get “digitally stalked by the dead”. “This area of AI is an ethical minefield … it’s important to prioritise the dignity of the deceased,” she says.
Paying for a griefbot service is an ethical dilemma in itself, but how would you feel about someone resurrecting you digitally after you die? Charlie Brooker got the idea for the Black Mirror episode after his phone prompted him to delete the contact of a friend who’d died, which raises the question of how you’d terminate a relationship with a chatbot, which could become like a second death.
For Block and Riesewieck, their film tells the story “of what might become one of the greatest human experiments of our time. We hope every viewer asks the questions: Do I want to allow AI to get so close to me? How do I want to remember deceased loved ones? How do I want to be remembered myself?”
Eternal You is out in cinemas now, and set for digital release on October 30 2024.
If you are looking for help with grief, contact Cruse’s support helpline on 0808 808 1677, and find out more about what they do here, or find a network via Evermore’s Grief Support Directory here
