The Rise of the Griefbot
Exploring the Intersection of AI and Mourning
In 2020, a young Chinese software engineer named Yu Jialin stumbled upon an essay about lip-syncing technology that detailed synchronized lip movements with recorded speech. The concept of a grief bot provided an opportunity to communicate his final words to the man who played a significant role in his upbringing.
Yu recreated his grandfather’s appearance, speech, and mannerisms from family photographs, videos, letters, and phone messages; information he then used to train an AI model about his grandfather’s personality. Initially, the bot’s responses were generic, but as Yu provided more information, it began displaying more accurate representations of his grandfather’s habits and preferences.
Yu’s ambition to recreate his grandfather is one example of a growing trend in China, where the bereaved are using artificial intelligence to resurrect the dead. The rise of grief bots in China coincides with the popularity of Xiaoice, a chatbot assistant that embodies the persona of a teenage girl and has more than 660 million users. In the United States, death tech companies have developed similar grief bots like Replika, which is now marketed as a social AI app. In Canada, Joshua Barbeau used an older program called Project December to digitally recreate his deceased girlfriend.
