SOME PEOPLE USING AI TO TALK TO THE DEAD
Use of technology as part of the mourning process raising ethical questions
Dr. Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75, but she still turns to her father for advice. How did he deal with racism, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were stacked against him?
The answers are rooted in William Lucas’ experience as a Black man from the Harlem neighborhood of New York City, who made his living as a police officer, FBI agent and judge. But Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. Her father has been dead for more than a year.
Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an app powered by artificial intelligence that generates responses based on hours of interviews conducted with him before he died in May 2022.
His voice gives her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.
“I want the children to hear all of those things in his voice,” Oney, an endocrinologist, said from her home in Grosse Pointe, Mich., “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, his time and his perspective.”
Some people are turning to AI
technology as a way to commune with the dead, but its use as part of the mourning process has raised ethical questions while leaving some who have experimented with it unsettled.
HereAfter AI was introduced in 2019, two years after the debut of StoryFile, which produces interactive videos in which subjects appear to make eye contact, breathe and blink as they respond to questions. Both generate answers from responses
users gave to prompts such as “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the greatest challenge you faced?”
Their appeal comes as no surprise to Mark Sample, a professor of digital studies at Davidson College in North Carolina who teaches a course called Death in the Digital Age.
“Whenever there is a new form of technology, there is always this urge to use it to contact the dead,” Sample