The Votes Are In!
AI lost the popularity contest
A huge thank you to everyone who answered last week’s poll about AI avatars of your dead loved ones.
The results are in, and either I have hand-picked my readers to think exactly as I do, or we are many of us on the same page with this:
A huge majority – 69% of you – said absolutely not, it’s creepy; another 20% said “maybe.”
The thing is, it’s not just creepy (though it def is!) - I believe that it can be damaging and dangerous to our mental health, and to our grieving process.
Grief sucks the big one. It really does. When someone we love dies, it rocks our world - and sometimes demolishes it. It can take months, years, decades to feel like we’re making progress toward healing.
When my sister died, I was in shock. I was angry. I was devastated. I was bewildered. I was hopeless. And that was just the tip of the feelings iceberg.
If you’ve loved someone who has died, you know what I am talking about.
And as I’ve often said here, grief doesn’t understand schedules or calendars or rationality. Each of us moves through it differently; ultimately, though, we hope that we CAN somehow move through it to a place where we can find peace and, possibly, acceptance. Picking up the pieces of ourselves and learning to live with the “new normal” is a painful and complex process. A new normal that many of us would trade to have our loved one back, of course, but unless we die of grief (it happens) or we kill ourselves, we have to somehow be alive in this world.
You will be whole again but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.” -Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
And having your loved one come back and talk to you – with words that aren’t theirs but words that some computer program calculates what they would say, using a brute-force algorithm – is really just avoiding the hard stuff; pretending that they are still alive is not going to help us pick up the shattered bits of ourselves and learn to live without them.
I talk to my dead sister a lot. Less, these days, since she’s been dead for almost 3 decades, but I still let her know what’s going on and when I need her advice or when I think she’d laugh at something. And despite the decades, I still miss her every single day.
There’s just no way a computer could capture Kathleen. And there’s no way the computer can know what she would say. That avatar of the guy I mentioned last week, who was killed in a road rage murder and who “forgave his killer”? Can we really know that’s what he wanted? Could his “responses” be influenced by anyone who engages with him, or can his algorithms be influenced to get the answer that his family wanted? We all know that our personal computers use our searches as a guide for what to show us next. I hate feeling controlled (or listened to) by my computer. If I brought Kathleen back to “life,” the computer would control her completely. That just feels beyond ick to me.
Of course we miss our dead friends and family. And many of us regret what we said or didn’t say to our person before they died. But - and let’s not mince words - an imposter won’t change the fact that they are gone. As far as the grieving process goes, every time you engage with that person risks ripping off the bandaid; it would be for me.
Are we trying to avoid grieving? That just won’t work. Well, it might for a while, but our feelings have a way of catching up to us. Delaying the reality of our person’s death will only make it harder when reality does hit. Grief is not something to be scared of or shy away from. Our Global North culture is already so uncomfortable with grief, though, that this feels like an easy out.
Jed Brubaker of CU – Boulder says in the Neuroscience News article that “photographs were once believed to steal a person’s soul, and online memorials – widely viewed as creepy a decade ago – are now everywhere.” But this is a false equivalency. I can never confuse the picture of Kate I have on my memento mori altar with the reality of her. A picture, or even a video of her, is NOT her. With the avatar, I might think I’m interacting with her but I’m just interacting with a computer program. It might as well be a picture of Tigger talking to me for all the veracity. Because it’s generative, and because it changes and appears to be conversing with me, it’s inherently confusing my brain. It’s not stealing her soul; it’s co-opting it for profit.
Maybe it’s because I’m the last generation that didn’t grow up with technology and screens at our fingertips that I find this so abhorrent. I like to pretend I’m a Luddite, but I use my phone and my computer daily. I’m not opposed to change, but I am opposed to thoughtless change, and I do not believe that technology will save us. This particular technology - which I have other issues with too - is playing a dangerous game with our brains and our emotions.
As the brilliant Mary Oliver says:
“To live in this world you must be able to do three things: To love what is mortal; To hold it against your bones knowing your own life depends on it; and, when the time comes to let it go, To let it go.”
And that, dear readers, is what it means to be human.