Dueling robots created –

MADRID (EFE).— When a loved one dies, we can remember them with photos, videos or messages and even “speak” to them in our minds, but what if they were able to answer us? There is nothing supernatural about this, but rather another application of artificial intelligence (AI), not without socio-ethical questions.

As if challenging death or promising something like eternal life, the digital afterlife industry offers the possibility of creating avatars of those who are no longer with us so that users can converse with them in real time, reproducing their image and voice, only the latter or in writing.

These “grief robots,” or “thanabots,” are created from the deceased’s digital footprint—content on social media, messages, emails—processed by a neural network, which imitates their behavior and way of thinking.

Each person has a way of experiencing grief and these technologies can change the way we deal with it. In this regard, Belén Jiménez, a doctor in Psychology from the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya, believes that it is “essential to ensure respect and dignity for the deceased person as well as the psychological well-being of the user.”

In this area, she adds, there are no “all or nothing” answers, because it is a complex issue that depends on the technology, the grieving person and the designers of the tool, and there are almost no scientific studies.

Conversational videos in which the person records answers to questions about their life, conversations with AI-generated chatbots with the voice of the deceased or just text are what companies such as StoryFile, Eternos.Life, Project December and You, Only Virtual offer to varying degrees. In some cases, the person prepares everything to leave this service active after their death, but it is also possible for their loved ones to do so.

Digital industry

Jiménez, a specialist in how digital media intervenes in the experience of grief, highlights that “we have prejudices regarding this type of tools and it is no wonder if we take into account that they are being created mainly by the growing digital after-death industry,” which seeks “commercial and economic objectives and not necessarily therapeutic ones.”

A recent study by the University of Cambridge analyses three hypothetical scenarios to show the possible consequences of a “careless design” of this technology without safety standards.

The research, led by Katarzyna Nowaczyk-Basinska, describes a scenario in which a grandmother’s bot makes an advertising recommendation to her granddaughter and another in which a child becomes distressed because the replica of the deceased mother starts generating confusing responses. In the third case, a father leaves an avatar with his children for 20 years. One starts receiving an avalanche of unwanted messages and the other ends up emotionally exhausted from interacting with him but is tormented by the fate of the chatbot.

Bots can be designed with the risk of making the mourner believe that the answers they receive are really from their loved one, which could create a relationship of dependency or even “the suffering caused by a second loss if the loved one disappears, for example due to technical problems,” warns Jiménez.

“Eternal You,” a documentary that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival, followed the inception of grief bots and some of the first users, who “seek solace through these apps and would give anything to be able to speak to their deceased loved ones one more time.”

This is what the festival’s directors, Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck, explain on the festival’s website. They also interview the heads of these companies and discuss the issue of grief.

“There were things that scared me and a lot of things that I didn’t want to hear, that I wasn’t ready to hear,” one of the users says in the trailer.

A bot, says Belén Jiménez, can produce responses that are not consistent with the user’s memories of the deceased, which can cause frustration or pain.

Also, the feeling of a second loss “when one realizes the lack of emotional authenticity” that characterized the relationship with the deceased or can somehow alter their memory, “which can lead to uneasiness.”

South Korean television channel MBC made a series of documentaries about immersive reality experiences with virtual recreations so that a mother could spend a few hours with her deceased seven-year-old daughter and a man could reunite with his dead wife. Both expressed their gratitude for the experience.

These “thanatotechnologies” not only transform the experience of grief “but also the very concept of mortality or even of ‘resurrection’,” says Jiménez, for whom traditional religions will coexist “with new and growing ways of understanding the world where digital immortality is an essential element.”

We are, he warns, facing a new technological development, based on AI, “of high risk that must be regulated”, since it involves very complicated socio-ethical challenges.

Each country has its own rules on data protection. In the case of the European Union, if such applications are directed at its citizens, the European AI Regulation and the General Data Protection Regulation would apply.