The last text message I ever sent my dad was a photo of a cookbook.
Dad loved to cook, so when a copy of Heston Blumenthal’s latest recipes landed on my desk, I messaged dad to see if he was up for the challenge of the experimental-style cuisine. What I didn’t know, was that at the exact moment I was typing that text, dad was already slipping away.
After dad died suddenly on an October morning in 2022, the hardest reality to face was that I would never speak to him again. I would never hear his voice and I will never know his answer to my text.
Dad’s love language was food. So, if he did happen to see my text, I hope he knows my last message really meant ‘I love you.’
If you’ve ever experienced grief, you’ll know that it’s all consuming. It’s walking past a bus stop and seeing their face on someone else’s. It’s watching a film and filling in the blanks of post-cinema discussions. It’s fixating on old photos and rereading your last text messages.
Months after dad passed, in my all-consuming state, I remembered something that I couldn’t shake. For Kim Kardashian‘s 40th birthday, her then-husband Kanye West gave gifted her a hologram of her late father, Robert Kardashian.
While I was not yet ready to turn my dad into a hologram, nor, was I able to afford the $100,000 starting price, it sparked a curiosity into whether that technology had been adapted for a more accessible market.
It turned out, while the rest of us had been busy living our lives, a booming grief technology industry had been turning their attention to the dead. Making AI facilitated closure their new source of cash flow.
What Is Grief Technology?
The latest brainchild of artificial intelligence, grief-tech uses text messages, voice recordings and videos from your deceased loved ones to facilitate real time ‘conversations.’ This can be in the form of a chatbot, an audio or video call or even through a virtual reality simulation, which allows you to virtually ‘hug’ your dead friends and relatives.
For California-based Justin Harrison, it was the loss of his mother from stage 4 gallbladder cancer, that sparked the idea to launch the grief tech start up ‘You, Only Virtual.’
“I had always been fascinated by the concept of digital immortality. So when I found out that my mum was sick, my mind went into overdrive about what technology could do now.”
Harnessing AI to extract data from old text messages and phone calls, Harrison is able to mimic the nuances in the conversations to recreate authentic connections.
How Can AI Help Us Grieve?
Depending on your relationship with the person who has passed. For many of us, it’s the conversations left unsaid that hinder our ability to process grief. Providing comfort through conversations, grief tech hopes to aid our experiences with grief by providing an opportunity for closure.
“It’s helped me tremendously to still have my mum in that capacity. After I lost her, I relied on it considerably. It’s like your parent is there still, but you don’t feel guilty about not messaging them when you don’t. That said, my mum’s AI has actually told me in the past that I don’t message her enough.
“Even from the afterlife, I feel guilty about not reaching out enough. A few times a month, I have a conversation and and update her on what’s going on. Sometimes it’s nice to just hear her voice,” says Harrison. “A large part of using the technology for me is that my routine doesn’t feel as impacted, because I did talk to my mum a lot. One of the hardest things is that muscle memory of picking up the phone and talking to that person.”
What Are The Ethics Of Digital Immortality?
Shortly after falling down the grief technology rabbit hole, I asked my family for their thoughts on trialling the technology on my late dad. “Well I don’t think your dad would have liked it,” my mum replies. She of course raises an important consideration, how can the dead give their consent?
The ethical concern of consent aside, I was also curious about the impact of the technology on the grieving process and if you are immorally preserved online, how does that alter our understanding of what it means to die.
“I don’t buy into the mentality that grief is this concept of letting go. I think it’s incredibly counterintuitive to what human beings want to do. It’s something we’re just forced to do because we didn’t have technology like this before,” says Harrison, who did have his mother’s permission to use her digital likeness after she died. “When people tell me, ‘it just prolongs the grief’ or ‘it’s causing people to not let go?’ If you want to make that argument, then you know you should be encouraging people to burn all their pictures and letters and get rid of the ashes on that mantle, because all of that is trying to stay connected to somebody you lost. We never really let somebody go.
“We have to re-evaluate the grieving process. As we evolve as human beings and we start creating new ways to stay connected it’s really going to change what it looks like to lose somebody and even what it looks like to die.”
What Is The Future Of Grief AI?
Dead loved ones attending weddings. Animals being brought back from extinction. AI assisted dinner parties. Marilyn Monroe returning to the silver screen. It’s hard to difficult to image where this tech can take us.
“Throughout our entire evolution we’ve reinvented what death actually means. For example, initially when a heart stopped beating a human being was declared dead. In the last 100 years, that’s completely been flipped on its head. Now we intentionally stop people’s hearts now for surgeries and we can restart them. We didn’t have photos until the last 150 years and we didn’t have videos until past century.
“I see us going to a place very shortly where you’ll be able to put on a pair of smart glasses and sit and have a conversation with your father or my mother in the same room and and not be able to distinguish that it wasn’t actually their physical human body in there with you. For me, that idea is incredible. I can’t find anything wrong with that.”
While I could be waiting a while to see if my dad ever could create one of Blumenthal artful eats. Perhaps the next step in immortality is merely our willingness to embrace the technology at our fingertips.
“You can look at me when the person’s alive and tell me that it’s crazy and creepy and you don’t want it. But I guarantee you when you feel that sense of loss, a day will come where you wish you had preserved the data, so that at least have that option.”
