Death bots: Why Grief Isn’t for AI to Monetize

There is only one news paper I regularly read…the free Metro. It’s trashy and idiot proof. Monday – Friday, 900,000-1million copies are printed each day. It fills the commute across London well enough, and gives the main headlines you’d expect, plus lots of little ‘aside’ columns of properly obtuse other news. Last week I had a little out of body experience where I saw myself as a character in a film, reading the Metro, in what would have been a flashback in a movie about the end of the world;
On page 8 there was column named, Death Bots.

‘Co-founded by former Disney TV star Calum Worthy, 2wai lets users feed footage of another person into an AI which generates an avatar with their appearance and personality. A new advert shows a pregnant woman doing this with her mother, then using the app after her mum has died and the baby is born to get the avatar to tell a ‘bedtime story you used to tell us’ to the child.’

Well, I died a bit. Right there on the Northern Line. The idea itself was horrifying, but then the realisation that a former Disney star and friends would be monetising peoples grief. Something so incredibly precious, painful and powerful, that a whole life could be digitalised and loaded into an iPhone. And then you would subscribe to an imitation of your own memories. (Interesting to me also, is the target of women in the ad). I asked my best friend and psychotherapist Lisa Hammond her thoughts. She said it sounded unethical and it would stop people processing grief and preventing the closure we naturally need. Plus there’s no regulation on AI. Great point Lisa, there is not. What if, you could subscribe to other dead people, famous people? What if AI starts ‘creatively’ wandering into saying things your loved one wouldn’t have said? What if the app just fails or goes bust, and you lose your loved one, again? Or it’s sold off to another company, and renamed, DEDAGEN? And now costs more per month.

Many of us wear grief every day. I wear mine like very heavy coat I put on in all weathers.

It’s quick to get on, and I feel the weight of it all over me. And it feels wonderfully hard to wear, and quite special. I hug myself inside it and feel it in my neck, and my stomach and shoulders. I think grief is an honour to have. It’s the evidence of years of love, the most hurty kind of love, and all the time you invested together. And it belongs to you, and only you. No one, absolutely no one, knows what your grief feels like, smells like, sounds like. What items, or songs or occasions remind you of your experience. And it is a tool for creativity, inspiration, and making for a lot us. It’s priceless what you have.

A week later I found another AI article reporting that, in the UK, we’re nearing a dangerous level over 1 million, 16-24 year olds, who are not working, in education or training. And one of the several reasons is that AI has taken many of the first jobs in telecommunications, admin or data entry many of us did at that age. And as predicted, the mental health crisis of that already stressed age group, is getting worse.
I imagined this bleakly futuristic scene, whereby a young person is walking home after loosing their job in data entry. As they pop another anti depressant, get home and flop onto their bed, they open an app called Orwayz-thr , and chat with an AI generated version of their mother. An hour into the ‘call’ a pop up comes up to say, ‘Hey, you’ve reached your daily limit on Orwayz-thr Basic plan. No problem, why not upgrade, so you can chat even more?’.

Are we getting close to this? Are we forgetting that human beings are pretty great at the core, and we have systems in our brains we can shape. When the world gets rough, and you see a lot of negativity it’s better to look inward and to the real you, the real memories. Actual real. I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared of AI. But I’d rather be scared than arriving to a place where my core values are now reliant on high speed accessibility, and things so unnatural, that now even remembrance has stopped being a cognitive skill, and owed by a offshoot of Disney.

Sophie Duncan

Choreographer, Creative Director and Performer -UNITED KINGDOM

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