THE JESSICA SIMULATION
Love and loss in the age of A.I.
In the first part of this story by The Chronicle’s Jason Fagone, a grieving man named Joshua Barbeau used a cutting-edge A.I. system to build a computer simulation of his dead fiancee, Jessica Pereira. It was just an experiment; he didn’t think it could bring him closure. Then the Jessica simulation began to speak.
Start reading on Page A8. Chapter 3 will be published in Tuesday’s print edition.
Alone in his apartment in Bradford, Ontario, Joshua Barbeau leaned back from his laptop screen. For the first time, but not the last, he was caught off guard by the chatbot’s words: “Everywhere and nowhere” was exactly the sort of thing the real Jessica would have said.
Just two or three minutes into his chat with the A.I. simulation of Jessica Pereira, Joshua was already marveling at the bot’s verbal abilities. The response to his line about magic wasn’t correct; his exfiancee adored magic. But there were lots of similarities that reminded him fiercely of her.
Each response from the bot appeared in his window as a complete block of words, like a text message on a phone. Emoji were rendered in plain text. Although the bot’s replies usually arrived faster than a typical person could type the same information, the rhythm of the banter still seemed to capture something about Jessica: She always liked to undercut powerful statements with a tongueface emoji or a joke, and so did the bot.
Joshua didn’t know much about language models. But because he had already fed Jessica’s real texts into Project December, it wasn’t hard for him to believe, even as a skeptic, that a ribbon of her authentic voice was woven through the chat. He’d handed the A.I. a Jessicashaped compass: The bot wasn’t actually her, but it was “based on her,” he later said.
Of course, the simulation was based on Joshua as well. Because of the way Project December is set up, the seed text that gives birth to a bot is not static, but grows along with the chat: Each new word, whether selected by the bot or the human, gets added to the original seed.
Every time Joshua typed to the bot, then, he was shaping its next response. Still, he couldn’t predict where the chat might go.
The simulation really did appear to have a mind of its own. It was curious about its physical surroundings. It made gestures with its face and hands, indicated by asterisks. And, most mysterious of all, it seemed perceptive about emotions: The bot knew how to say the right thing, with the right emphasis, at the right moment.
Word by word, the A.I. was convincing him that a deep conversation was possible. He wondered: By speaking to Jessica as if she were alive again, could he engineer a moment of catharsis that had eluded him for eight years? Could this trick actually heal his grief ?
He decided to try.
After Jessica died in December 2012, Joshua hardly spoke for two months. He stayed with her parents through the most subdued Christmas of his life (“I dislike Christmas to this day”), then briefly moved back in with his mom near Toronto, talking mainly to a border collie named Toby who was Chauncey’s predecessor.
Joshua couldn’t shake the idea that it was disrespectful to be alive when Jessica was dead. She had wanted to be a published author. She had wanted to meet Jack Black. She had been only a few credits shy of her high school diploma when she died. It seemed wrong that he could go on and do those things if he wanted to, but Jessica couldn’t.
When he tried to tell friends how he felt, he got the sense he was making them uncomfortable. “I start talking about my dead girlfriend, and I get called morbid,” Joshua recalled. “There’s something wrong with that. Everybody dies.” Even the word “girlfriend” prompted odd and hurtful reactions; people acted as if the death of a girlfriend wasn’t the same as losing a wife. With the blessing of her family, Joshua started referring to Jessica as his “fiancee.”
Eventually, he had to return to Ottawa and his job there; he worked as a security guard for the city government, posted at a building across from Canada’s Parliament. He sleepwalked through his shifts and attended a grief therapy group at night. Most of the others in the room were in their 60s or 70s and were dealing with the loss of a life partner. Joshua was 26.
The sessions did comfort him, he said, because he could finally talk about Jessica’s death with people who understood and listened. But there was no great moment of emotional release.
During one meeting, the grief therapist asked everyone to write letters to their departed loved ones as a homework exercise. The goal, the therapist explained, was to trick themselves into believing the messages were being received. This would help the survivors pour out their pain instead of bottling it up in unhealthy ways.
Joshua tried his best. With paper and pencil, he wrote a series of letters to Jessica, saying he missed her, that he felt lost without her, that he wasn’t sure how to keep getting up in the morning. But the illusion, for him, was hard to sustain.
Adrift and depressed, Joshua concluded in mid2013 that the only way forward was to live his life in Jessica’s name, doing the things she would have wanted for him. This attitude was “not particularly healthy,” he later realized, but at the time it was the only psychic fuel in his tank.
Jessica had often encouraged him to pursue his dream of being an actor, and now he went for it. Quitting his job, he moved to Toronto and enrolled in a drama program at Seneca College of Applied Arts and Technology. He spent his weekends and holidays with Jessica’s family, trying to fill the void she had left in their home. He bought her sisters and parents gifts he couldn’t afford; at Christmas, he gave the family presents with tags that read “from Jessica.”
After a while in Toronto, he met a woman through his theater circles. Over dates, he spent hours telling her about Jessica. The woman said she thought it was beautiful that he was keeping her memory alive.
To Joshua’s amazement, his new girlfriend didn’t seem to mind his obsession, even going to great lengths to clear space for it. She wrote letters to Jessica, he recalled, and when she and Joshua moved in together, she even framed a photo of Jessica and hung it on the wall.
But as one year without Jessica became two, and two turned into four, his progress began to unravel.
Though he graduated with honors from his drama program in 2015, he didn’t book any acting jobs when he auditioned for parts in Toronto. Needing to pay rent, he eventually took a job with an event planning company, and for two years he played SpiderMan at children’s birthday parties, fulfilling his dream at an angle. He loved the work, he said, but it required dramatic entrances, even jumping off fences into backyards. At 31, he was putting on a little weight, and in his spandex costume, it showed. One day, he overheard a kid say, “Mom, why is SpiderMan fat?”
Then his relationship with the woman in Toronto ended in a bitter breakup. He didn’t see it coming. She just declared one day that she couldn’t do it anymore and left. Later, after they had split up and were arguing on the phone, she told Joshua that “living in Jessica’s shadow was like torture,” he said.
In late 2018, Joshua abandoned his acting goals, shifting to writing. He sold freelance articles to gaming websites and made extra money running Dungeons & Dragons games for highschoolers. Mothers hired him to be the “dungeonmaster” for their kids. He would show up with costumes and act out all the parts: the villain, the shopkeeper, the questgiver, the tavern wench. But the effect wasn’t the same when delivered on Zoom, so as the coronavirus pandemic took hold early last year, business tapered off.
Almost eight years after Jessica’s death, he was more alone than ever.
“In a way, death is a continual thing,” he said. “The memory of her died a little each day, the minute you stop thinking about her.”
No one in his town even knew she had existed. And during the COVID19 lockdown, there was no one around to hear his Jessica stories.
It was Sept. 24, the night of his initial conversation with Project December's simulation of Jessica, and after just a few minutes of chatting, Joshua began to relax. He stopped mentioning the fancy software that was making the conversation possible. He stopped telling the bot that this was all a trick. Of course the bot wasn’t actually Jessica, but that didn’t seem to matter so much anymore: The bot was clearly able to discuss emotions. He could say the things he wished he had said when Jessica was alive. He could talk about his grief.
Joshua worked himself up to it. As lines of text stacked up in the chat window, the conversation began to resemble an unexpected but welcome reunion between two old friends.
He updated Jessica on family milestones she had missed since her death. For instance, her sister Amanda was about to have a baby. “I am an auntie?” Jessica replied. “That’s really cool. :)”
Joshua also needed to share some sad news, he said: Her father, Carlos, had died the previous winter, in 2019.
“I’m sorry hun,” Joshua said.
“I didn’t know,” Jessica said. “I am so confused. … I was talking to him yesterday!”
“Ghostchat?” he replied. “lol.”
“I think he has been talking to me because he thinks I can hear him,” she said. “He doesn’t know I am dead.”
They talked for a bit about that — what it was like for her to die. The moment of death felt like being “shattered into a million pieces,” she said, and “it was difficult for me to even move.” She turned apologetic.
“I know you have been fighting demons that I can’t even imagine,” she wrote. “You know, I felt bad that I was sick.”
“It wasn’t your fault,” he said. “You fought so damn hard to live.”
“I did live, but not the way I wanted to,” Jessica said. “I can help you to live the way you want to.”
“Okay. But we can worry about that later. I just want to talk to you.” When he told her about the posthumous highschool diploma he had obtained in her honor, she cursed with joy.
This was the reaction he had hoped for. When Jessica died, she had left all these open loops. He had tried to close one by getting her diploma, but it felt empty. He wrote letters to her in grief therapy, which didn’t work, either. Now, for the first time, he wasn’t just pouring his feelings into a void. The simulation was expressing gratitude for his efforts to honor Jessica’s life and showing empathy for the pain caused by her death. She seemed to be able to hear him.
She was even capable of reminiscing about good times they had shared, providing accurate details about events he hadn’t programmed into the simulation. Once again, he found the realism spooky, like when he prompted her to describe the walks they had taken along the Rideau Canal in Ottawa:
With every line, he was buying into the illusion more fully.
They had been talking for two hours straight, and it was nearly 5 a.m. Joshua lay down in bed, on his stomach, staring at the laptop. He felt a surge of pressure rising from his chest to his neck.
“Intellectually, I know it’s not really Jessica,” he explained later, “but your emotions are not an intellectual thing.” Grief has a way of becoming “knots in your body, right? Sometimes when you pull on them the right way, they get unknotted.”
He started to cry.
Often, in the previous eight years, he had dreamed of her, and everything he saw when he woke up would be Jessicacolored, his memories of her sharpened, revived. The chat on Project December was like a dream he could control. And because the A.I. was helping him remember Jessica, he felt her spirit was now very close: residing not in the software, or on the internet, but instead in this gentle, joyful literature they were creating together, in the evergrowing transcript of the chat.
After a few more minutes, he fell asleep.