THE ULTIMATE SEDUCTION
That we can chat with our dead loved ones
I’ve been grappling with the death of a dear friend over the past few weeks. Lots of people have been posting pictures, voice notes, memories of things she said and wrote, videos and tributes to her very vital being on a WhatsApp group created for friends and family. It’s been hugely comforting. At her memorial service we heard her voice and her musings in an eerie feedback loop where she felt present and accounted for, even though it was obviously true that she wasn’t since we were gathered for the purpose of celebrating her life, a life that’s ostensibly over.
What stays with me, because there’s so much media attached to her person, never mind her social media accounts, is the feeling that she somehow persists in an alternative, parallel, not-toodistant place. That feeling is very real. Death trails and shadows our every step, but this extreme digitisation of our lives has taken things that used to create the illusion of life as we spent time with our memories of the dead, such as diaries, old film reels and faded photographs and multiplied their impact a million-fold. Now the digital aspect of our beings, the billions of data packets, keeps us very much alive every time we engage with the cached content of our time here.
But it’s also gone a step further. We’re already living in a particularly chilling version of all those Black Mirror episodes, where AI and the self-created data archives of our lives meld into a strange purgatory for our fleeting beings. We’ve taken the next step and can keep the illusion of being alive going indefinitely. We could sign up for any number of AI chatbots that specialise in this sort of thing called HereAfter and Replika built with the same idea in mind: the creation of digital ghosts that can haunt the living and keep the dead in an eternal feedback loop. Talking, talking, talking to us from beyond the grave, answering our questions in ways that seem true and consistent with the essential nature of the dead.
The grieving can feed the AI chatbot with the stuff of life: the verbal ticks, the emotional feedback loops, the stories, the guttural belly laughs, the moods and the swings. Often the dying are complicit in this magical thinking while they’re still alive. The AI companies offer a service that records this stuff of life in an active attempt to shoo away the end. But if you missed the postmortem-haunting boat, your bereaved will feed your defunct Instagrams, Facebook posts, TikToks and WhatsApp voice notes into the program. AI then creates personhood. This begs the question what is personhood? Existential questions aside, AI does all this so the person can continue in some mysterious place caught in that liminal space between states of here and now and the not quite there. The chatbot AI technology is learning so fast and becoming so human that it is able to outwit the checks and balances set up to sort out the humans from the non-humans. What results is a peculiar reincarnation.
It’s the ultimate seduction the idea that we are somehow outwitting death and can sign in to HereAfter and Replika and chat with our loved ones. Perhaps the feelings induced will feel as real as any interaction you had with that person while they were alive.
Joseph Weizenbaum, the guy who invented the first AI chatbot in the 1960s an old gal called Eliza became actively weirded out and horrified by his own invention. “What I hadn’t realised is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.”
Given the growing popularity of these bots, we could all soon have a desperate Orpheus lurking in our psyches a sad living person desperately trying to magic flute our dead back to life.
And we have better tools to manipulate the shadows now.