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AI project that enables people to contact deceased experts

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Artificial intelligence (AI) has become an integral part of everyday life, enabling activities that were previously impossible with older technology. For example, people can now use AI to create animated videos and craft stories from old family photos.

According to a new report from The subway, Now it’s the turn of researchers and engineers to explore new ways to communicate with the dead using artificial intelligence. For Sherry Turkle, a professor at MIT and longtime observer of the human relationship with technology, the impulse to communicate with the dead is deeply human. It runs through history, from seances and Ouija boards to today’s technological innovations, which are currently at the forefront of the latest advances in AI. Even Thomas Edison himself considered developing a “ghost phone.”

This quest for interconnectedness has just taken an interesting turn with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s announcement of Apple Intelligence. According to Turkle, AI will become more pervasive in everyday life much faster than social media, if not faster. Given the money at stake, she warns that these emotional risks could materialize even faster when it comes to the rapid integration and lure of new technologies, as she explores in her documentary Eternal You.

According to The subway, The documentary Eternal You brings viewers face to face with people like Christi Angel from New York, who used AI to chat with a long-dead friend named Cameroun. Angel found out that Cameroun had died due to the pandemic and wanted to reconnect with him through a service called Project December.

This $10 AI simulation went so far as to input information about Cameroun’s life and have a conversation with a digital version of her. Things got really creepy after that, when she said she was in “hell” and that she was “haunting” her.

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In fact, for Jason Rohrer, the creator of Project December, this kind of unpredictable AI response is more of an AI “black box” problem: something that developers themselves cannot predict. While these results intrigue Rohrer himself, he takes no responsibility for potentially influencing the mood of users like Angel. This has caused frustration among some who believe developers should take more responsibility.

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An example of how it can elicit such strong reactions was in 2020 on the Korean television show *Meeting You*. One of those mothers was Jang Ji-sung, who lost her seven-year-old daughter Nayeon. She finds a digital replica of her child, an event that feels deeply steeped in technology, grief, and closure. This just goes to show how deeply personal these matters are when it comes to interacting with a digital simulation of a loved one.

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