Chats with the dead
New technology allows the dead to ‘speak’ to their loved ones — but will it be too painful to listen?
James Dunn is telling me a joke. “Dad bought me a trampoline for my fifth birthday. I just sat in my wheelchair and cried,” he says. “Sorry. That was pretty bad wasn’t it? I should be ashamed of myself, making fun of the disabled.” It’s an exchange like any other, except for one thing. James died almost two years ago and, rather than talking to him, I am chatting to a “bot”, an algorithm created from hundreds of hours of recordings of James that produces textlike messages on a laptop screen, allowing him to speak to me from beyond the grave.
The way technology can change the way we grieve has been debated since it emerged last week that a South Korean woman had been able to “meet” her dead daughter in virtual reality. A documentary called Meeting You shows the extraordinary encounter between Jang Ji-sung and Na-yeon, who died in 2016 at the age of seven.
A production team spent eight months creating a three-dimensional image of the girl, using photographs and videos taken during her life. The “reproduction” could move and speak but could not respond to her mother’s words. The exchange begins with footage of Na-yeon singing and asking if her mother ever thinks about her.
“I do all the time,” Jang replies. The two sit down and share a bowl of seaweed soup, before blowing out the candles on a digital birthday cake. “Please don’t let my dad smoke . . . Please don’t let my mum cry,” the little girl wishes.
Engineered to pull every heartstring, the meeting raises questions about what we want to happen to our data when we die and whether artificial intelligence is a good thing for those we leave behind.
At his London home Peter Trainor, the tech entrepreneur who created the Jamesbot, tells me he has been asking himself the same questions since James died in April 2018 at the age of 24.
The pair had met two years earlier. James was born with a rare genetic condition called epidermolysis bullosa that causes skin to blister and tear. Sufferers are often called “butterfly children” because their skin becomes as fragile as a butterfly’s wings: they usually die from cancers or infections by the time they are in their mid-twenties.
Trainor ran a company — Us Ai — which specialised in realistic corporate chatbots, the sort that pops up and offers help when you log into your online bank. But his real passion was harnessing the potential of AI for the good of humanity. James read a book by Trainor and got in touch. When they met, James was 22 and knew that he did not have long left. He had been diagnosed with skin cancer and was fascinated by the potential of AI to improve and extend his natural life.
“He started asking me all kinds of questions about legacy and how his data could live beyond him,” Trainor recalls. “We had some pretty profound conversations about the fact that his body was in tatters, literally, but his brain was completely intact.”
Trainor has no doubt that James was struggling to come to terms with his mortality. He had just found out that his sister was pregnant and wanted to explore the idea that his nephew might still be able to get to know “Uncle James”. They began a project together. Trainor placed Amazon Echo devices around the home James shared with his mother and father, Lesley and Kenny, and James recorded hundreds of hours of thoughts, memories and jokes. They used the data to create an algorithm that could simulate the real James and then put the software inside a robot, allowing the Jamesbot to travel to places where he could not physically go and to speak to people.
There was no end goal, Trainor recalls, and they never discussed what would happen to all the information when James died. “His mum and dad were there the whole time, knowing that we were doing something that kept him occupied and distracted, and he enjoyed it. We were touching the void if you like,” Trainor says.
They were not the only ones. Around the world people have been experimenting with technology that allows you to “survive” beyond the grave. Dmitry Itskov, a Russian billionaire, founded the 2045 Initiative, which aims to “transfer an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier”.
Eugenia Kuyda was devastated in 2015 when her best friend, Roman Mazurenko, was hit by a car in Moscow and killed at the age of 32. The programmer turned her mind to building a bot that would allow her to communicate with him as though he were still here. She used the huge archive of data he had left behind — without Mazurenko’s permission — to create an AI corpus, an algorithm that meant that she could text him and he would text her back in his own words.
The emotional and psychological fallout of this way of dealing with grief could be complex. Andy Langford, chief operating officer of the Cruse Bereavement Care charity, says: “This is a very new development and as a result there is no qualitative or quantitative research about the impact it will have.”
Some of Mazurenko’s friends found the bot creepy, but his mother, Victoria, was thrilled, telling a journalist that “they continued Roman’s life and saved ours”.
Trainor himself has concerns. By the time James died he was already beginning to have reservations about the ethics of what they were doing. “Even some of the stuff we started to do with James was getting to that point where I was feeling a bit uncomfortable,” he recalls. “We wouldn’t reanimate a corpse, so bringing someone back from the dead using their data is a bit uncomfortable, isn’t it?”
However, he believes that the genie is already out of the bottle. “We are all giving our data away anyway,” Trainor says. In four or five years’ time people be able to hook a device on the wall that will access “their loved one’s social media data, phone information, psychometric, professional, bank statements, whatever and then start having conversations with people”.
The big question is whether we really want to. Sarah Harris, director of bereavement support and education at Child Bereavement UK warns: “We know from our work with bereaved families that what people find supportive in grief is very individual, but having this type of interaction
through an avatar could present a real challenge for some people in accepting the reality of the death and attending to life changes as a result of the death, which are important aspects of grieving.”
Trainor warns that vulnerable people can easily fall victim to unscrupulous tech businesses who will “flog it as grief counselling”. (Courtesy The Sunday Times, UK)