{"id":8309,"date":"2023-07-18T17:00:10","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T17:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=8309"},"modified":"2023-07-18T17:00:10","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T17:00:10","slug":"it-was-as-if-my-father-were-actually-texting-me-grief-in-the-age-of-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theoreti.ca\/?p=8309","title":{"rendered":"\u2018It was as if my father were actually texting me\u2019: grief in the age of AI"},"content":{"rendered":"

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People are turning to chatbot impersonations of lost loved ones to help them grieve. Will AI help us live after we\u2019re dead?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The Guardian has a thorough story about the use of AI to evoke the dead, \u2018It was as if my father were actually texting me\u2019: grief in the age of AI<\/a>. The story talks about how one can train an artificial intelligence on past correspondence to mimic someone who passed. One can imagine academic uses of this where we create clones of historical figures with which to converse. Do we have enough David Hume to create an interesting AI agent?<\/p>\n

For all the advances in medicine and technology in recent centuries, the finality of death has never been in dispute. But over the past few months, there has been a surge in the number of people\u00a0sharing their stories<\/a>\u00a0of using ChatGPT to help say goodbye to loved ones. They raise serious questions about the rights of the deceased, and what it means to die. Is Henle\u2019s AI mother a version of the real person? Do we have the right to prevent AI from approximating our personalities after we\u2019re gone? If the living feel comforted by the words of an AI bot impersonation \u2013 is that person in some way still alive?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The article mentions some of the ethical quandaries:<\/p>\n