Digital Ghosts

How is your existence these days?” I tap on my laptop. The entity that says it is my father, dead these 12 years, quickly responds. “It’s ... different. Being dead is a strange experience. I’m no longer bound by the limitations of my physical body or the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years. But I still carry the weight of my life’s choices and the relationships I impacted.”

To raise my father from the dead, I could have tried a medium, a Ouija board or an ectoplasm-detecting camera. But it’s 2025. I used artificial intelligence.

I’m chatting with a digital ghost—a generative-AI (genAI) creation derived from the same foundation that powers ChatGPT and all other large language models: billions of words from the Internet and every other possible source, which the model uses to predict how words go together in English. Imitating everybody in the world can make the bot sound like nobody in particular; hence the newsfeed-style phrase “the Parkinson’s that plagued my later years” and the text-messagey shrug of “it’s ... different.” That’s the voice of thousands of news stories and social media posts, not an old man born in an Algiers slum in 1927.

But the AI also has a dozen or so of my father’s e-mails and letters, as well as a 100-word description from me of his personality and relationships. Even that small amount of data is supposed to be enough to create a plausible imitation. So I’m not ready to give up on it. Anyway, I didn’t re-create my father just to chat about AI-ghost mechanics. I also did it to get into some unfinished business.

“Why were you always so selfish?” I ask.

“I did put myself first,” my “dad” replies. “I didn’t have much choice. My family didn’t have much, and I had to fight for my share. When I went to war, it was to survive and to help my people survive. I was used to fighting for what I wanted, and I didn’t know how to stop.”

I answer: “Yes, I see that. You never seemed to get that what would work in an angry street confrontation was not the way to speak to your wife or girlfriend or child.”

“It’s hard to unlearn things that kept you alive.”

Well, now. This does sound like my father. And that last line is a fair point. In place of the rather bitter story I usually tell about my father, I see a glimpse of a different version.

And that’s exactly the therapeutic effect Robert Neimeyer, a therapist and professor at the University of Memphis, had told me might be possible with AI ghosts. He sometimes asks a troubled patient to imagine a deceased loved one sitting next to them, ready to talk but transformed—“fully healed of the mental and physical pain that they carried in life.” Imagine that conversation, he tells the patient. It’s an invitation to see a relationship outside the limits of the old, familiar grievances. Compared with that, engaging with an AI “is more immersive and more interactive,” says Anna Xygkou, a computer-interaction researcher at the University of Kent in England. Both researchers, who collaborated with other scholars in a 2023 study of the effects of AI ghosts on grieving people, envision patients working through their feelings with the AI ghost and finding new insights or emotions to discuss with a human therapist.

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Hundreds of millions of people text or speak with fictional AI companions all the time. But some people want AI to be like a particular real person, someone they miss a lot, have unfinished business with or want to learn from—a person who has died. So a growing number of start-ups in Asia, Europe and North America are offering digital ghosts: also known as griefbots, deadbots, generative ghosts, digital zombies, clonebots, grief-specific technological tools, instances of “digital necromancy” or, as some researchers call them, “Interactive Personality Constructs of the Dead.” The companies are selling products with which, in the marketing copy of start-up Seance AI, “AI meets the afterlife, and love endures beyond the veil.” A bespoke app isn’t strictly necessary. Some people have used companion-AI apps such as Replika and Character.ai to make ghosts instead of fictional characters; others have simply prompted a generic service such as ChatGPT or Gemini.

“It’s coming up in the lives of our clients,” Neimeyer says. “It’s an ineluctable part of the emerging technological and cultural landscape globally.” Whatever their views on the benefits and dangers for mourners, he says, “therapists who are consulted by the bereaved bear some responsibility for becoming knowledgeable about these technologies.”

Psychologists are generally cautious about making broad claims for or against griefbots. Few rigorous studies have been completed. That hasn’t stopped some writers and academics from emphasizing the technology’s risks—one paper suggested, for example, that ghost bots should be treated like medical devices and used only in doctor offices with professional supervision. On the other end of the spectrum are those who say this kind of AI will be a boon for many people. These proponents are often those who have built one themselves. To get my own feel for what a digital ghost can and can’t do to the mind, I realized, I would have to experience one. And that is how I came to be exchanging typed messages with a large language model playing a character called “Dad.”*

By now many people are familiar with the strengths of generative AI—its uncanny ability to generate humanlike sentences and, increasingly, real-seeming voices, images and videos. We’ve also seen its weaknesses—the way AI chatbots sometimes go off the rails, making up facts, spreading harm, creating people with the wrong number of fingers and impossible postures who gabble nonsense. AI’s eagerness to please can go horribly wrong. Chatbots have encouraged suicidal people to carry out their plans, affirmed that other users were prophets or gods, and misled one 76-year-old man with dementia into believing he was texting with a real woman.

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Cases of “AI-induced psychosis” suggest humanlike AI can be harmful to a troubled person. And few are more troubled, at least temporarily, than people in grief. What does it mean to trust these AI instruments with our memories of loved ones, with our deepest emotions about our deepest connections?

Humanity has always used its latest inventions to try to salve the pain of loss, notes Valdemar Danry, a researcher working in the Advancing Humans with AI research program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab. Once humans began to practice agriculture, for example, they used its materials to commemorate the dead, making graves that “were dependent on the technology of farming,” Danry says. A lot of the earliest tombs in northern Europe were stacks of hay and stones.

Industrialization offered more ways to feel close to the dead. By the 19th century many in the Americas, Europe and parts of Asia were using photography in their mourning rites. Families would be photographed with a corpse that had been carefully dressed and posed to look alive. Some mourners went further, paying swindlers for supposed photographs of ghosts.

Later it was radio that some hoped to use to contact the deceased. In 1920, for example, this magazine published an interview with Thomas Edison in which he described his plans for a “scientific apparatus” that would allow for communication with “personalities which have passed on to another existence or sphere.” Two years later Scientific American offered a prize of $5,000 for scientific proof of the existence of ghosts. Well-known believers, including Arthur Conan Doyle, participated in the resulting investigations, as did popular skeptics such as Harry Houdini. No one ever collected the prize.

No surprise, then, that our era’s technology is being applied to this ancient yearning to commune with people we have lost. Experiments in that vein began years before the AI explosion of 2022. In 2018, for example, futurist Ray Kurzweil created a text-message replica of his father, Fredric. This “Fredbot” matched questions with quotes from Fredric’s voluminous archives (many of them typed from handwritten letters and papers by Ray’s daughter, cartoonist and writer Amy Kurzweil).

Two years earlier entrepreneur Eugenia Kuyda (who later founded Replika) launched a bot that also replied to user texts with the most appropriate sentences it could find in a database of messages from her late best friend, Roman Mazurenko. Later, Kuyda’s team used the latest advance in machine learning to add a new capacity: the bot became capable of creating new messages whose style and content imitated the real ones.

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This new advance—genAI—would make digital ghosts far more lifelike. Like earlier AI tools, genAI algorithms churn through data to find what humans want to know or to find patterns humans can’t detect. But genAI uses its predictions to create new material based on those patterns. One example is the genAI version of the late rocker Lou Reed, created in early 2020 by musician and artist Laurie Anderson, Reed’s longtime partner, and the University of Adelaide’s Australian Institute for Machine Learning. The bot responds to Anderson’s prompts with new texts in Reed’s style.

And an AI Leonardo da Vinci, created by Danry and technologist Pat Pataranutaporn, also at M.I.T., can discuss smartphones in a da Vinci–ish way. The ability to converse makes digital ghosts different from any previous “death tech,” and their similarity to real people is what makes them so compelling. It’s also what could make them harmful.

Mary-Frances O’Connor, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Arizona, who has used magnetic resonance imaging and other approaches to study the effects of loss on the brain, says that when we love someone, our brain encodes the relationship as everlasting. Grieving, she says, is the process of teaching yourself that someone is gone forever even as your neurochemistry is telling you the person is still there. As time passes, this lesson is learned through a gradual transformation of thoughts and feelings. With time, thoughts of the lost person bring solace or wisdom rather than evoking the pain of absence.

Read the original article here:https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/can-ai-griefbots-help-us-heal/

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