The most ghoulish use of AI so far

A lot of people think I’m batshit crazy, says Justin Harrison of Grieftech.

I don’t. I think he’s a delusional ghoul.

Harrison has cobbled together a chatbot that uses an imitation of his late mother’s voice and predictive text built from her online communications, and he thinks that it is a cure for grief, because it enables him to talk to his “mother”. It doesn’t. There is no person there. It’s a kind of selfish version of grief, where he can deny her death and pretend it’s OK because his superficial, fake emulation of his mother can pay attention to him. It’s gross and creepy.

In the last few years, I’ve lost my mother and a brother; in years gone by, I’ve lost my father and a sister. They’re dead. The grief comes from the loss of living, human, thinking, behaving human beings who can’t be resurrected by some fraud with a collection of words they may have uttered. But this shallow idiot thinks a chatbot is a substitute.

Harrison is being interviewed, and he thinks he’s being clever by throwing some publicly recorded videos of his interviewer into the chatbot’s database, and then conversing with the computer. The interviewer is not impressed. So Harrison and some other team member argue with him to say that the computer used a spot-on turn turn of phrase. I guess if all we are is a series of turns of phrases, then the simulacrum is perfect. Except we aren’t. There’s no person, no thinking mind, behind the chatbot.

Then the interviewer goes off to talk to a series of people: one who imagined seeing a dead person after taking drugs, another who dreamed that they were visited by the ghost of their father, a medium who claims, with many weird jerky expressions, that they can communicate psychically with a friend. They’re all the same thing: frauds, liars, or deluded people who have convinced themselves that their loved ones are nothing but superficial reflections of their own minds. Justin Harrison is just more of the same, a phony like all the other phonies who have leeched off other people’s honest grief for profit.

After I’m dead, at least I’m reassured that no ghoul is going to be tormenting me with banalities; I’ll be gone. Don’t be fooled that my chatbot copy’s banalities are coming from me, though.