As growing numbers of people turn to grieftech, some are disturbed by its possible consequences. When Christi Angel first talked to a chatbot impersonating her deceased partner, Cameroun, she found the encounter surreal and “very weird”. “Yes, I knew it was an AI system but, once I started chatting, my feeling was I was talking to Cameroun. That’s how real it felt to me,” she says.
However, the experience soon jarred. Angel’s conversation with “Cameroun” took a more sinister turn when the persona assumed by the chatbot said he was “in hell”. Angel, a practising Christian, found the exchange upsetting and returned a second time seeking a form of closure, which the chatbot provided. “It was very unsettling. The only thing that made me feel better was when he said, or it said, he was not in hell.”
Angel, 47, from New York, is one of a growing number of people who have turned to artificial intelligence to cope with grief, a scenario made possible by breakthroughs in generative AI. Her experience, and of others who have tried to assuage their grief with cutting-edge technology, is the subject of a documentary, Eternal You, which receives its UK premiere at the Sheffield Doc/Fest on Saturday ahead of a wider cinema release on 28 June. Its German directors, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, say they find this use of AI problematic. “These vulnerable people, they very shortly forget they are talking to a machine-learning system and that’s a very big problem in regulating these kinds of systems,” says Block.
The platform used by Angel is called Project December and is operated by the video-game designer Jason Rohrer, who denies his site is “death capitalism” – as it is described by Angel’s friend in the film. Rohrer says Project December started as an art project to create chatbot personas. It was then adopted by early users to recreate deceased partners, friends and relatives. The website now advertises Project December with the heading “simulate the dead”. Customers are asked to fill out details about the deceased person, including nickname, character traits and cause of death, which are fed into an AI model. Rohrer says it charges $10 per user to cover the operating costs and “quite a few” people have received solace from it.
Other examples of AI “grieftech” in the film include YOV, which stands for “You, Only Virtual” and allows people to build posthumous “versonas” of themselves before they die so they can live on digitally in chatbot or audio form. The US company can also create versonas from deceased people’s data. Justin Harrison, YOV’s founder, created a versona of his mother, Melodi, with her co-operation before she died in 2022. Harrison, 41, still converses with Melodi’s versona, which can be updated with knowledge of current events and remembers previous discussions, creating what he describes as an “ever-evolving sense of comfort”.
Sherry Turkle, a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US who has specialised in human interaction with technology, warns that AI applications could make it impossible for the bereaved to “let go”. “It’s the unwillingness to mourn. The seance never has to end. It’s something we are inflicting on ourselves because it’s such a seductive technology,” she says. There are positive examples in the documentary. Jang Ji-sung, 47, lost her seven-year-old daughter Nayeon to a rare illness in 2016 and consented to a TV show in her native South Korea producing a virtual-reality version of her child four years later. Footage of the meeting shows an emotional Jang, wearing a VR headset, interacting with her virtual child, who asks: “Mom, did you think about me?” Jang tells the Guardian she found the experience positive. Jang says meeting Nayeon was beneficial as a “one-off experience”, after she lost her daughter so suddenly.
