Death and grieving in the AI age

Two conversations

Twice this week I’ve been in conversation with close friends discussing the loss of a parent. Two different conversations, two different countries, but the same grappling with what it all means in the grand scheme of our own lives.

These are unquestionably some of the most difficult moments in the lives of all people; we all face the loss of a parent or close family member at some point. It’s inevitable and it’s part of what makes us human. But that doesn’t make it any way easier.

I don’t have any answers

As a Christian pastor and minister, I don’t have any answers for situations like this — I wish I did. But I’ve been in the same situation myself. There are no answers to this, no way of speeding up the healing process, which can take years.

The voice in the machine

In one of the two conversations, one friend told me about an AI bot which had been trained on the voice of the parent, by uploading lots of recordings of the parent while they were still alive.

This would allow the adult son to continue to “talk” to his mother even after her death. In reality it’s the AI bot which is generating words, choosing the most likely word to come next, and then speaking that to the grieving son, in a voice which sounds very like his mother. This struck us both as extremely creepy, and from a grieving point of view, entirely unhelpful. Grief takes time to process, a long time, but psychologists will affirm that we do need to pass through these stages and we can’t skip or speed up any of them.

The danger with keeping the loved one ‘alive’ in perpetuity is that they never leave us. Even as we grow older, they do not. They always remain with us, accessible to us, perhaps even more accessible to us than they were in real life. They are as accessible to us as just an icon on our phone screen.

Where has the person actually gone?

Which brings me to my next question — where has the person actually gone? Christian teaching, following Greek philosophy, speaks of the separation of the body and the soul. The body has died, but the soul lives on. Athanasius taught that God didn’t create man in his image only to have man disappear once the body has died. God wants to rescue us, to be reunited with us.

Elsewhere Gregory wrote the human soul is the biggest thing in creation, meaning the body itself is just a tiny piece of who we actually are. Our souls can travel back in time to remember happy moments with those we’ve lost; they can travel ahead in time to imagine us in a brighter tomorrow; they can take us to places we have never even been to in real life. Nothing in creation can constrain our souls. In the same way, God cannot be contained, and if we try to do it, it merely exposes that we just haven’t understood the idea of God in the first place.

Stored in a data centre

So what does this mean for AI? Well, if the voice of the deceased mother can be stored in a data centre somewhere, the digitised voice still exists physically somewhere. But the physical part has died. We know that. So we argue that the person still exists, but it is quite simply untrue.

Yet it shows very clearly the limitations of AI. Because this data exists on a server, etched into the memory on some company’s disk.

This data, so important to the grieving son, can be bought and sold to other parties. The data centre and its servers may belong to one company today, and another tomorrow. Philosophically speaking — who does the mother ‘belong’ to? Or more precisely, who does the memory of the mother belong to? Who does the son contract with to retain access to his mother? As the monthly subscription increases, at what point does the son decide it’s too expensive to continue to pay for access to his mother? Do you begin to see the real ethical problems this raises?

Not a line on an earnings report

AI is a tool, built by increasingly powerful companies for the benefit of their shareholders. If we forget that, we risk giving up part of our own identities and what it means to be truly human, fooled by the promise that our memories of loved ones can exist in perpetuity.

Our faith traditions teach this in an entirely different way. Yes, our memories of those whom we love do continue — but not stored on a piece of silicon. Rather, they are already reunited with the one who created us, as part of the grand plan for all creation in eternity. Not as a line on this year’s annual earnings report.