The chatbots raising the dead in the digital afterlife

AI industry growth exceeded $40 billion in the US in 2022 and is estimated to reach $1.3 trillion over the next decade. According to a recent report, the Chatbots for Mental Health and Therapy Market will be worth $1.71 Bn by 2031. These offer support, direction, and assistance for mental health issues, including grief. One of the major health issues is the increased frequency of mental disease. It’s estimated that 1 in 4 adults and 1 in 10 children experience mental health issues on a yearly basis. Known players in the mental health and therapy chatbot market are Woebot Health, Wysa, Minstrong Health, and Marigold Health.

Grief tech is changing the way we communicate with our deceased loved ones and how we cope with their passing. Our digital footprint, such as texts, photos, videos, emails, and social media accounts keeps us connected to the people close to us and across the world. AI voice cloning creates digital replicas of a human voice by analyzing and mimicking speech patterns such as accent, tone, and pitch.

One of the biggest influences on the implementation of AI to assist humans in professional fields like therapy has been the language model chatbot. ChatGPT, developed by Open AI is a prominent example and is used for a number of human needs, such as creating outlines, collaborating on content, writing robotic essays, and supporting mental health.

According to a 2021 national survey by Woebot Health, 22% of adults had used a mental health chatbot. Barriers to mental health care are largely economic and AI chatbots may reduce the need for human therapists, as well as create a wealth and health divide where those from underprivileged backgrounds will have little human support. AI technology is changing so fast research can’t keep up with it. To date, there are still only small study samples for researchers and medical professionals to make decisions on. These small studies also mean that there are still biases in AI data.

Tess is a mental health chatbot that, according to the website, is like a therapist or a coach. It can cheer you up when you’re down, treat anxiety, and provide a number of tools and exercises to support positive mental health. The bot works on emotional algorithms and machine learning to respond to users. Tess uses “adaptive machine learning technology,” to respond and interact with the patient. Tess is just one of the many “robot therapists” that are being put to work on an overstretched health service and used in conjunction with traditional human therapy. The positives for mental health chatbots are that they don’t cost anything and that they are more accessible to people who are unsure about sharing personal problems with a stranger. Traditional cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) or talking therapy is ideally suited to chatbots that are available 24/7 and don’t judge.

In the mental health field, natural language tracking has been found to be accurate at detecting and classifying different mental health problems like grief, depression, and anxiety. After the COVID-19 pandemic caused a global mental health crisis, chatbots could fill the demand for limited resources in mental health support.

ChatGPT and other large language models could create a more realistic chatbot of a dead person but doing so can be another headache in estate planning. When someone dies, their belongings are shared between the family left behind or given away to charity. It’s been five years since my mother died and I am still going through both my parent’s belongings and scanning photographs along the way. It’s taken a long time because of bereavement. Whenever I notice feelings of grief while opening a black bin bag full of the memories of my childhood -the photographs and letters belonging to my parents -the bag closes once again and another year goes by.

Death technology such as AI videos or bots created from traces of our loved ones have to be created by the soon-to-be departed or those left behind and for some commercial enterprises, there’s a monthly fee to store these visual or audio interactive ghosts of our dead. Many of these companies will fail or the technology will become obsolete. Imagine having to transfer all your loved ones’ memories from the future equivalent of a tape recorder to a CD.

Silicon Valley of the Digital Afterlife

Hollywood and Silicon Valley are often at the forefront of cutting-edge technology. Remember when Carrie Fisher was digitally resurrected for Star Wars after her untimely death in 2016? No one at that time was discussing it as a death tech for the masses. Since last year, a number of AI death tech companies have hit the market, many promising to recreate the “essence” of our deceased loved ones.

California-based grief tech startups like StoryFile, Replika, and HereAfter AI provide a number of services that aim to support people with the loss of a loved one. StoryFile introduced interactive video conversations with the deceased, Replika is a companion and supportive chatbot avatar that evolves the more users text it.

It is a growing worldwide AI death tech niche that uses deep learning and large language models to recreate the likeness, speech, and personality of the dead. Conversational AI chatbots help machines interact with humans. Generative AI creates new content using machine learning algorithms and trained data to create videos, animated photographs, speech, and text.

Grief tech platforms offer a hierarchy of subscriptions which can come at a hefty price. This might explain why my free subscription to StroryFile looked like a video nasty from the 1980s and nothing like the William Shatner promotion on their website. The one-time premium offering fee is $499 per year which gives access to higher resolution and longer running time videos of the deceased.

Seance AI is a platform that allows users to create online conversations with the deceased and according to the founder Jarren Rocks, is a service that provides closure for the bereaved and is not intended as a long-term continuing bonds platform. You, Only Virtual’s premise is to never say goodbye to our deceased loved ones. Its founder, Justin Harrison makes the fantastical proposition to eliminate grief entirely. At the same time, the platform’s website states that it aims to reproduce “the authentic essence” of our deceased loved ones. If essence is related to our identity and therefore what it means to be human, eliminating grief does not make us human. Confused?

From Silicon Valley to China

China’s AI industry is rapidly advancing and there are a number of companies creating griefbots. Super Brain is designed for the bereaved. Services include visual and audio clips and conversational video-enabled chatbots that mimic the deceased. They aren’t cheap. Customized griefbots can cost between $6,860 to $13,710.

Nanjing Silicon Intelligence (NSI) has access to Huawei’s Pangu large language model and aims to pair digital avatars with LLM datasets to enable digital immortality as entertainment. Co-founder of the NSI, Sun Kai, created the video-enable chatbot platform for the bereaved to communicate with their lost loved ones. China’s AI regulations have specific rules for deepfakes and require the person whose personal information is being used to create a deepfake to be notified and give content. How this is regulated is not certain.

To address these concerns, the UNICEF East Asia and Pacific Regional has compiled a Safer Chatbots Implementation Guide for the region which is experiencing a substation uptake in chatbots as substitutes for mental health care practitioners. North America is dominating the mental health chatbot market and therapy sector, with wellness initiatives addressing gaps in the mental health care system.

Ray Kurzweil edges further to singularity

The future of griefbot technology is being pioneered by futurist and inventor Ray Kurzweil who predicted that people will be able to connect their brains to machines, known as singularity, by 2045. He lost his father when he was 22 and is creating a replicant of his late father by feeding an AI system with his letters, essays, and musical compositions. More ambitious plans include using nanotechnology and DNA from his father’s bones. Of course, Kurzweil will have to dig the bones up first which seems like a lot of effort. The ‘Dad Bot’ would be able to converse with Kurzweil about his work. Writing from personal experience, I think this moving dangerously close to prolonged grief. If we are forever stuck in our deceased loved ones’ past lives, how will we live and enjoy our lives?

Amit Roy-Chowdhury, a Professor of computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside, doesn’t think we are close to recreating AI replicas of the dead that could fool the living.

All artificial intelligence uses algorithms that need to be trained on large datasets. If you have lots of text or voice recordings from a person to train the algorithms, it’s very doable to create a chatbot that responds similarly to the real person. The challenges arise in unstructured environments, where the program has to respond to situations it hasn’t encountered before. Many of these AI systems are essentially just memorizing routines. They are not getting a semantic understanding that would allow them to generate entirely novel, yet reasonable, responses.

When we learn about some very sophisticated use of AI to copy a real person, such as in the documentary about Anthony Bourdain, we tend to extrapolate from that situation that AI is much better than it really is. They were only able to do that with Bourdain because there are so many recordings of him in a variety of situations. If you can record data, you can use it to train an AI, and it will behave along the parameters it has learned. But it can’t respond to more occasional or unique occurrences. Humans have an understanding of the broader semantics and are able to produce entirely new responses and reactions. We know the semantic machinery is messy.

In the future, we will probably be able to design AI that responds in a human-like way to new situations, but we don’t know how long this will take. These debates are happening now in the AI community. There are some who think it will take 50-plus years, and others think we are closer.

There are ongoing legal and ethical concerns surrounding grief tech in relation to consent and data privacy, psychological dependency, bias in datasets, economic access, and technological obsoletion affecting access.

New York has mandated regulations for post-mortem publicity rights which are restricted to celebrities. Technology experts are pushing for a “Do not bot me” clause in estate planning. Some states like California and Connecticut have passed data protection policies protecting collected user data by corporations and institutions. The European Union has gone one step further with its General Data Protection Regulation which could have implications for death and grief tech services.

We have to see commercial grief tech companies for what they are. Customers could be fooled into thinking that they are providing a personal service at a traumatic time in their lives. Stop. They are commercial enterprises. They exist to make money from our needs. I am not saying that all grief tech companies are evil and are solely making money from our grief. They are providing a service that we the consumer have demanded and like photography, we will use it to stay connected to our dead. The technology is new and the relationship with it and its effect on the bereaved is still in research.

Ginger Liu is the founder of Hollywood’s Ginger Media & Entertainment, a Ph.D. Researcher in artificial intelligence and visual arts media — specifically grief tech, digital afterlife, AI, death and mourning practices, AI and photography, biometrics, security, and policy, and an author, writer, artist photographer, and filmmaker. Listen to the Podcast — The Digital Afterlife of Grief.