Mourning in the AI era
“The risk of love is loss and the price of loss is grief. But the pain of grief is only a shadow when compared with the pain of never risking love.” — Hilary Stanton Zunin
Studies have repeatedly shown that the experience of bereavement leads to chronic depression in approximately 10–15% of people. For clarification, bereavement refers to a person’s reaction to a loss by death. Grief is the emotional and/or psychological reaction to a significant loss, not necessarily limited to loss by death. Traumatic grief, with symptoms such as preoccupation with the deceased, searching, and yearning, is a potential complication of bereavement related to trauma and separation distress.
One of the more common words I hear from people impacted by grief is the word regret. That last “I love you”, “Sorry” or “Good Bye” keep someone stuck in the past, getting lost in thought about what should have been different. Regret hurts. It hurts emotionally. It hurts psychologically. Regret has been known to keep people from working through grief.
Born from memory
As she grieved, Kuyda found herself reading the endless text messages Roman Mazurenko sent her, thousands of them, from the mundane to the hilarious. The friendship story between Eugenia Kuyda and Roman Mazurenko dates back to 2008 and abruptly ended in late 2015 when he was killed crossing the street by a hit-and-run driver; he was 34. After Roman’s death, Kuyda spent three months gathering up his old text messages of hers and his friends and fed them into a neural network built by developers at her artificial intelligence startup.
On May 24th, Kuyda announced the Roman bot’s existence in a post on Facebook. People had mixed feelings about the existence of Roman bot, and some of the family members were less enthusiastic. But for some, interacting with the bot had a therapeutic effect. The tone of people that interacted with the bot was often confessional, and it turned out that the bot's primary purpose had not been to talk but to listen. [read the complete story here]
Creepy reality or a step forward into a drug-free mourning process?
Memorial bots are the memorial spaces of the future, though they are by no means replacing real humans. This scenario was captured in one of the Black Mirror’s episodes, “Be Right Back,” where the protagonists are Martha and Ash. Overwhelmed and incapable of dealing with her loss, Martha isolates herself, not answering her friends’ messages. A friend of hers signs her up for a program that can virtually replicate a person using their past online communications and social media profiles. Completely absorbed by how much the program resembles Ash, she leaves out her friends and carries the virtual Ash around all the time, never stop talking to it. Relieved at first, she becomes dangerously attached and, soon, frustrated at its incapability to completely resemble Ash.
There are multiple pharmacological approaches to the treatment of complicated grief. Though they can tweak our internal chemical balance to make us feel a little bit better, they can never deal with the pain of regret of communicating more, being more honest or saying “I love you/I am sorry” more often to those that passed away. Such technologies as the Roman bot allowed people to overcome that regret and continue their lives better partially.
Deepfakes, Metaverse and Digital Resurrection
Though deepfakes tools have existed for some time, they’ve recently become increasingly available to the general public. Some Digital Resurrection technologies are already here. One is MyHeritage which offers a way to bring the added dimension of life to a person’s portraits, whether alive or dead, via their Deep Nostalgia option.
Though the technology generates many controversies, usually described as “creepy” or “disturbing,” this is not the first time people faced this type of adversity against technological adoption in mourning. Photography and film were once breakthrough technologies adopted into this process and received their share of controversy. Nevertheless, people rely on pictures and videos to go back, remember and mourn the passing of a loved one.
Combining Generative AI, Deepfakes, Metaverse, or AR technologies can transpose you into a virtual world where the event never happened and might help the person in suffering gradually overcome the pain generated by the event. “But grief is an intensely personal thing, and though not everyone will find these technologies useful, the possibilities they open up for others shouldn’t be discontinued” — Phillip Hodson.
Technology can significantly benefit the public but, at the same time, gives powerful tools to people exploiting the vulnerable. Just as drugs allow you to feel a false sense of happiness, technology can also diverge from the purpose of good into an addictive behavior that gives users a false perspective of reality, impairing the continuation of a peaceful life.
