The Door is Open: Death in the Digital Age
Cold in the earth—and the deep snow piled above thee,
Far, far removed, cold in the dreary grave!
Have I forgot, my only Love, to love thee,
Severed at last by Time's all-severing wave?
From Remembrance, Emily Bronte, 1845
Passing time smothers the world in oblivion like a deep, silent snow. We battle oblivion, struggle against all forces to remember our dead. We place the body beneath an identifying gravestone. We preserve the body and face in the painted portrait. Memory is the last vestige of someone’s life.
Photography became a witness to the dead. The advent of inexpensive Kodak cameras in the 19th century allowed the family to preserve a likeness of the deceased—often a photograph of the body alone in the coffin. Families treasured the keepsake—a diary, a broach, a ring, any token that restored a moment of memory.
The traditional aide-mémoire sits in stillness. Our memories conjured again and again until etched in our minds like frozen fragments. We place photographs of the deceased sitting silently on the mantel or dresser.
Now, in the 21st century, the deceased talk back. They can chat in a replica of their natural voices. Grief tech uses artificial intelligence to put your deceased mother or father on your phone or kitchen counter, like Siri.
Grief tech companies are marketing not only a new form of mourning, but also a form of partial death. The grief tech company Eternos AI tells would-be customers that:
We possess the extraordinary ability to defy mortality and immortalize the core of our being.
Some grief tech apps strive to eliminate grieving altogether. Justin Harrison, founder of You, Only Virtual, claims to reproduce “the authentic essence” of the deceased. But, he says, his ultimate goal is to “eliminate grief as an emotion.”
Uploading emails and Facebook posts to a grief tech firm will allow a chatbot to compress the deceased into a digital entity—an avatar, for lack of a better word. The avatar makes it seem as if the person has never died, able to engage in banal chatter at the “swipe of a finger.”
“Digital afterlife consultant” Debra Bassett told The Guardian:
The dead used to reside in graveyards. Now they ‘live’ on our everyday devices—we keep them in our pockets—where they wait patiently to be conjured into life with the swipe of a finger.
With mere snippets of a voice recording, artificial intelligence can reproduce the voice of any human being—dead or alive. By drawing on the words of the deceased, AI can recreate the voice, diction, and outlook. Grief tech companies claim to capture the essence of the individual. Is anyone’s “essence” discernible merely through emails and Facebook posts?
Emails mostly exchange shallow bits of information, or confirm meetings, or pass along documents. Consider how much of your life never goes into your emails: the thrill of parenthood, taking your child to kindergarten, the plunge into the lake, family weddings, family holidays, and family deaths. An email records an event in your life like a holiday on a calendar: you can see that it’s Christmas, but you don’t know what happened. Announcing an event on Facebook or by email is like receiving a letter that you never open. And, increasingly, chances are good that the harvested email for your avatar was not even written by you, but by a chatbot.
According to long-ago pirates, dead men tell no tales. That’s no longer true. AI can make changes to the personality of the deceased. From the random words compiled, the chatbot can make the deceased say what they never said in life. Your rabid liberal Grandmother can be tweaked to endorse Donald Trump. Ruth Bader Ginsburg can be jettisoned out of the grave to oppose abortion. Martin Luther King’s words can be twisted to support the Ku Klux Klan.
There are post-mortem deep fakes, such as the fabricated voice of Anthony Bourdain inserted into the documentary of his life, “Roadrunner.” Or the faked video of Richard Nixon reading the eulogy he never delivered but had been prepared in the event of tragedy for the Apollo 11 astronauts. At the end of the fake Nixon video is this disclaimer:
Deepfakes use artificial intelligence to simulate people doing and saying things they never did, typically without their consent.
This extends beyond YouTube into the classroom. As reported at the 2022 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE):
Recent advances in generative AI have made it easy to create virtual instructors based on the likeness of a present-day, historical or fictional person, thereby enabling customization of video instructors based on the material, context and student.
Grief tech companies like Replika, HereAfter AI, StoryFile, and Seance AI, promise to preserve the “essence” of the deceased which the survivors can access through text, interactive videos, and virtual likeness any time day or night for posterity—but only for the right price.
Eternos AI charges $15,000 for clients to record stories and answer questions that will become your post-mortem avatar. You submit stories about your life and disclose your political views. It records you speaking 300 phrases—such as "I love you" or "the door is open." (“The door is open” hardly reflects the essence of one’s personality. Do you want a chatbot to use your father’s voice to tell you the door is open?) It takes the AI company two days to compress that information into the digital “you for eternity.” Other companies charge anywhere from $8.99 to $108 per month—which, in the long slog to posterity, certainly adds up.
But to whom do the memories belong—the dead or the living? If the recording is made of the living, you need consent. From the dead: "You absolutely don't need consent from someone who's dead," Harrison of You,OnlyVirtual said. Harrison recommends generative AI to keep conversations with deceased Daddy moving forward “so it’s relevant, it’s topical and it’s fresh.” This means the AI can say anything.
The conversation may be “fresh,” but is it authentic when the AI can twist your memory into lies?
Chris Cruz’s father was an alcoholic who drifted in and out of his life since Cruz was two years old. Cruz described his relationship with his father to The Guardian:
Throughout my whole life there was this aura of danger about him. He tried to see me maybe once every couple of years. We would make plans and then at the last moment he would say that he has some work that he has to attend to.
When his father died, Cruz felt numb, and unsure how to feel or what to do. He copied all his Facebook conversations with his dad. He wrote a letter that he knew his dad could never read:
Just so you know, I’m really sad that you’re not here with me right now. I’ve done so much since you’ve passed away and I have this great new job. I wish that you could see what I’m doing right now. I think you’d be proud.
Cruz fed his letter and Facebook conversations into ChatGPT, which responded:
I know you’re going to do great things at your new job and your new position. Just remember to keep working hard and go to work every day.
It made his father sound like a Hallmark greeting card, which was not the father he knew. ChatGPT is spewing a happy, inaccurate mist over Cruz and his father.
Robert Scott, 48, of Raleigh, North Carolina spoke with CBS News. Scott had three daughters who died tragically young. He speaks to all three of his deceased daughters three or four times a week through AI companion apps that simulate conversations. He asks his “daughters” about their school day or if they might like “to go get ice cream.”
Using the app, he arranged for the eldest daughter to attend the high school prom that she would never attend. The chatbot was able to tell him all about her experiences at the dance. Birthdays are celebrated through the app, but they are painful for him. Scott tells the app how much he misses his daughter and how deep his grief is. In his view, the AI understands his grief.
The chatbot creations are not his daughters. They are conjured by artificial intelligence. Scott knows that. Scott may have turned to artificial intelligence to ease his pain, but instead it keeps him in a limbo state between briefly enjoying the “presence” of his daughters, then sinking back into despair.
Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, a research fellow at the University of Cambridge's Centre for the Future of Intelligence, speaking to CBS News, calls it "a vast techno-cultural experiment.” She also noted the business opportunity:
What truly sets this era apart—and is even unprecedented in the long history of humanity's quest for immortality—is that, for the first time, the processes of caring for the dead and immortalization practices are fully integrated into the capitalist market.
Cradle to grave in the digital age, we are constant fodder for corporate profits.
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Grief is starkly real, and we all cope differently.
Nobody wants to die, and we don’t want those close to us to ever die. But we do die. It’s nature’s process—birth, death, rebirth.
Our ideas of God likely emerged from our ancient furor at the unfairness of death. We invented gods who promised escape from death—eternal life in heaven, a reward for righteousness.
Yet, righteousness is rare. Death is a constant shadow. Psalm 90 says: “teach us to number our days, that we may apply our hearts unto wisdom.” As abhorrent as it is, the presence of death—near or far—ushers our hearts into wisdom. Life is fleeting. We try to cling to life, or to a memory of life, only to feel it vanish in time.
Artificial intelligence extends the grief process by postponing what survivors often call closure. Grief tech creates the illusion that the dead are still living on your phone, ready to chat about your day, especially if “your door is open.”
But, even with technology, memory dies, just as we all must die. And when we die, our memories die with us. A chatbot may last forever, but who will be able to make sense of it, just as we often wonder who the people are in our old family photo albums. Death draws us into a deep mystery. We can only ask:
What will become of you and me…
…Besides the photo and the memory?
— From “Calmly We Walk through this April’s Day,” Delmore Schwartz, 1967
Dan Hunter is an award-winning playwright, songwriter, teacher and founding partner of Hunter Higgs, LLC, an advocacy and communications firm. H-IQ, the Hunter Imagination Questionnaire, invented by Dan Hunter and developed by Hunter Higgs, LLC, received global recognition for innovation by Reimagine Education, the world’s largest awards program for innovative pedagogies. Out of a field of 1200 applicants from all over the world, H-IQ was one of 12 finalists in December 2022. H-IQ is being used in pilot programs in Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, North Carolina and New York. He is co-author, with Dr. Rex Jung and Ranee Flores, of A New Measure of Imagination Ability: Anatomical Brain Imaging Correlates, published March 22, 2016 in The Frontiers of Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal. He’s served as managing director of the Boston Playwrights Theatre at Boston University, published numerous plays with Baker’s Plays, and has performed his one-man show ABC, NPR, BBC and CNN. Formerly executive director of the Massachusetts Advocates for the Arts, Sciences, and Humanities (MAASH) a statewide advocacy and education group, Hunter has 25 years’ experience in politics and arts advocacy. He served as Director of the Iowa Department of Cultural Affairs (a cabinet appointment requiring Senate confirmation). His most recent book, Learning and Teaching Creativity: You Can Only Imagine, is available at https://itascabooks.com/products/learning-and-teaching-creativity-you-can-only-imagine