AI Chatbots that Replicate the Dead and Provide Grief Support
Rise of the Griefbot and the Silicon Valley of the Digital Afterlife
When my mother was given a few weeks to live, desperation came over me to photograph and video her likeness and capture her essence, that special something that is unique to her. As a photographer and documentary filmmaker, the technical implications of documenting a subject are part intuition and part practical theory, the latter requires the logical mind. But capturing my mother’s essence was a struggle because I was documenting with the heart and with thoughts of losing her forever. She was also in the latter stages of dementia and I didn’t want to document that part of her life.
My mother recognized me as someone who cared for her and she was mostly gracious to me. Her beautiful smile and cheeky expression were essences that dementia would never take away from her. And this is where my PhD interrupts. Ten years ago this might have been a PhD about the essence of portrait photography in the 19th and 20th centuries. But here we are in the middle of a new technological revolution that can perhaps take us one step further to our deceased loved ones than still photographs and videos ever could.
We now have the capability to recreate our deceased with artificial intelligence…
