AI now offers a new way to bypass grief and loss.
Not by encouraging willful reflection, engagement with other people, or by practicing the N8FP but rather by presenting a novel form of bypassing.
"..a growing market of A.I. products that promise users an experience that closely approximates the impossible: communicating and even "reuniting” with the deceased. Some of the representations — like those offered by HereAfter AI and StoryFile, which also frames its services as being of historical value — can be programmed with the person’s memories and voice to produce realistic holograms or chatbots with which family members or others can converse.
The potential risks of A.I. tools for grieving are significant, not least because the companies producing them are driven by profit — incentivized to exploit desires and delusions that may be unhealthy for their users. A recent study from the University of Cambridge, for instance, evaluated the ethics of “the digital afterlife industry” and posited that these businesses may soon realize there’s even more money to be made by requiring people to pay subscription fees or watch advertisements in order to continue interacting with their dead loved ones’ avatars, especially after hooking them on the ability to converse.
This mixing of reality, fantasy and enterprise is a detriment to grieving."
While arahants don’t grieve, the vast majority of humans do and now AI will short-circuit the necessary and sometimes transformative process of loss and grief into a fantasy bot-world.
Imo, the irony is that while this can appear to be a beneficial balm it actually encourages and deepens attachment and dukkha.
But that’s just my opinion. Any other views on this, especially with respect to Dhamma practice?
For those behind a paywall, the article’s author frames an AI bot as something in the same category as seances and the ouija board. (One company’s commercial offering is highlighted.) The big difference is that the bot can be customized to imitate someone’s beloved – but dead – person every single time they crave contact. This is through use of pre-existing voice recordings of the deceased for the machine learning, for example.
In other words, the reliability of the experience is what makes it so alarming to mental health professionals. Of course, without some heavy guardrails (see the Cambridge study), it will become the drug of choice for some people during the grieving process. From a dhamma perspective, it seems to me it’s just that – a drug that people can use to avoid sorrow and fantasize about their beloved persisting as that “precious self” in some other dimension.
I was reminded a few months ago, during a work call, about how seamlessly AI is creeping into everything. People spoke about using AI to write paragraphs of this, that, and the other thing as a matter of course. In this context it’s not because they think AI is better; it’s because it’s a time-saver. I was taken aback by the ease with which the “habit” was being discussed.
The seam in between the small percentage of cases where huge compute capacity and analytics can be life-saving, potentially, and “AI is thinking about me” is tenuous at best. Readily available bot solutions to feed greed, hate, and delusion (on purpose) appear innocuous to those who lack awareness of how this conditioning happens.
This was going to happen sooner or later. It became a viral story a few years ago when a guy created a chatbot to converse with his deceased girlfriend. It was so realistic, even he couldn’t believe it. Jessica Simulation
That same person did an AMA on Reddit on his entire experience and journey: Reddit AMA
If anyone thinks these links are not appropriate, let me know, I will delete them.
The real question is what those who have passed on would think of all of this?
As pointed out in various suttas and by Nagasena those who have died and have ended up in heaven usually recalibrate to the new environment and enjoy the various pleasant things there for a few days, my point being that only 1 day in Tāvatiṃsa is equivalent to 100 years on earth.
Also, as the suttas mention, all heavenly inhabitants can remember their previous earthly existence so I imagine they would rather be associated with their current state of happiness than loved ones chatting with a bot or hologram based on superficial data of who they used to be.
If a majority knew that there really is a hererafter, people in general would have a radically different outlook than they currently have.
More generous, less violent and really tolerant.
And greedy people would not be able to exploit those in grief!
No wonder the Buddha only had bad things to say about physicalism & materialism.
My first reaction to this is: How on earth are they training their chat bots with enough material from a person’s life to actually mimic them in a convincing way? Maybe if the person left reams and reams of writings behind. Maybe if they used social media for a decade or two. But, really, how well does it actually work in practice? I suspect badly for the most part for a lack of material, and even with lots of material, it would likely still be somewhat artificial to someone who actually knew a person in life well.
Here’s a funny idea for a sitcom: Someone passes away who wrote diaries their entire life. In the diaries that recorded all their innermost thoughts and feelings they would not tell other people much. Someone makes a chatbot based on the diaries for relatives. Comedy then ensues as the chatbot tells the relatives what the person really thought about them.
No telling what might happen to their gravesite though…
“What! Vandalism!? Why…why, I have no idea officer.”
From what was printed in the article, the “conversations” were routine and simple:
Deceased bot: “I miss you and look forward to seeing you again, my love.”
Living person: “It fills my heart to see you again.”
Or, something like that. I suppose photos, videos, and conversational inputs from the deceased’s writings, as you said, and input from the survivors could offer a sort of avatar- charicature of the person.
Meanwhile, it’s another step away from life and skillfully working with loss, let alone the Dhamma imho.
