People are using AI to talk to the dead – 12/15/2023 – Equilibrium

Stephenie Lucas Oney is 75 years old, but she still seeks advice from her father. How did he deal with racism?, she wonders. How did he succeed when the odds were against him?

The answers are rooted in William Lucas’s experience as a black man from New York City’s Harlem neighborhood who made his living as a police officer, FBI agent, and judge. But Oney doesn’t receive the guidance in person. His father has been dead for over a year.

Instead, she listens to the answers, delivered in her father’s voice, on her phone through HereAfter AI, an artificial intelligence-powered app that generates answers based on hours of interviews conducted with him before his death in May. 2022.

Her voice brings her comfort, but she said she created the profile more for her four children and eight grandchildren.

“I want kids to hear all these things in his voice,” said Oney, an endocrinologist, from his home in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, “and not from me trying to paraphrase, but to hear it from his point of view, from his time and from your perspective.”

Some people are turning to AI technology as a way to communicate with the dead, but its use as part of the grieving process has raised ethical questions, leaving some who have experienced it distraught.

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 while answering questions. Both generate responses from the answers users give to prompts like “Tell me about your childhood” and “What’s the biggest challenge you’ve faced?”

Its appeal doesn’t surprise Mark Sample, a professor of digital studies at Davidson College who teaches a course called Death in the Digital Age. “Whenever there’s a new form of technology, there’s always this desire to use it to contact the dead,” Sample said. He mentioned Thomas Edison’s failed attempt to invent a “spirit telephone.”

‘My best friend was there’

StoryFile offers a “high fidelity” version in which someone is interviewed in a studio by a historian, but there is also a version that only requires a laptop and webcam to get started. Stephen Smith, one of the founders, had his mother, Marina Smith, a Holocaust educator, try it. His StoryFile avatar answered questions at her funeral in July.

According to StoryFile, around 5,000 people created profiles. Among them was actor Ed Asner, who was interviewed eight weeks before his death in 2021.

The company sent Asner’s StoryFile to his son Matt Asner, who was surprised to see him looking at it and appearing to answer questions.

“I was impressed by it,” Asner said. “It was unbelievable to me how I could have this interaction with my father that was relevant and meaningful, and it was his personality. This man that I really missed, my best friend, was there.”

He played the file at his father’s memorial service. Some people were moved, he said, but others felt uncomfortable.

“There were people who thought it was morbid and got goosebumps,” Asner said. “I don’t share that view,” he added, “but I can understand why they would say that.”

‘A little difficult to watch’

Lynne Nieto gets it too. She and her husband, Augie, founder of gym equipment maker Life Fitness, created a StoryFile before his death in February from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS. They thought about using it on the website of Augie’s Quest, the nonprofit they founded to raise money for ALS research. Maybe your young grandchildren will want to watch it someday.

Nieto first watched the archive about six months after his death. “I’m not going to lie, it was a little hard to watch,” she said, adding that it reminded her of their Saturday morning conversations and felt a little “raw.”

These feelings are not uncommon. These products force consumers to confront the one thing they are programmed not to think about: mortality.

“People are uncomfortable with death and loss,” said James Vlahos, one of the founders of HereAfter AI, in an interview. “It can be a hard sell because people are forced to face a reality they would rather not engage with.”

HereAfter AI grew out of a chatbot that Vlahos created from his father before his death from lung cancer in 2017. Vlahos, a conversational AI expert and journalist who contributed to The New York Times Magazine, wrote about the experience for Wired and soon began receiving requests from people asking if he could create a “mombot”, a “spousebot” and so on.

“I wasn’t thinking about it in a commercial way,” Vlahos said. “And then it became blindingly obvious: This should be a business.”

A question of consent and perspective

Like other AI innovations, chatbots created in the likeness of someone who has died raise ethical questions. Ultimately, it’s a question of consent, said Alex Connock, a senior research fellow at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and author of the book “The Media Business and Artificial Intelligence”.

“As with all ethical questions in AI, it will come down to permission,” he said. “If you did this knowingly and voluntarily, I believe most ethical concerns can be easily circumvented.”

The effects on survivors are less clear. David Spiegel, vice chair of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Stanford School of Medicine, said programs like StoryFile and HereAfter AI can help people deal with grief, like flipping through an old photo album.

“The crucial thing is to keep a realistic perspective on what you’re examining — which is not that this person is still alive, communicating with you,” he said, “but rather that you’re revisiting what they left behind.”

This article was originally published in The New York Times.