Loss, Grief and Mourning in the Age of A.I. Imitations

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 2 August 2021

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Last fall, in search of a way to cope with his grief over the death of his fiancée eight years prior, Joshua Barbeau used artificial intelligence software to program a chatbot to simulate his fiancée, based on old texts she’d sent him. Barbeau told the San Francisco Chronicle that his conversations with the A.I. bot allowed him to feel a sense of closure and to better handle his grief. Barbeau isn’t the first to chat with digital imitations of lost loved ones, and as A.I software improves, he’s not likely to be the last. It’s all spawning ethics concerns and broader conversations around grief itself. We’ll talk about postmortem A.I. ethics and how A.I. might impact our mourning processes in the years to come. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:00.0	Support for KikiWED podcasts comes from Landmark College, holding their annual summer institute for educators from June 24 through 26th.
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0:56.0	From KQED.
1:15.0	From KQED, public radio in San Francisco, I'm Alexis Madrigal. As artificial intelligence improves,
1:21.1	us humans continue to find ourselves in novel and confusing situations. A recent San Francisco Chronicle feature recounted the story of a grieving man who lost his fiance in 2012 and desperate
1:26.6	to find closure created an AI chatbot with her text messages.
1:30.3	He knew it wasn't her that he talked with, but it was something.
1:34.3	He's not the first person to do this and he won't be the last, so in the next hour we'll talk about how far AI has come in recent years,
1:40.3	what roles these other intelligences should play in our lives, and the ethics of the
1:45.4	AI afterlife. That's all next on Forum after this news. I'm going to be able to I'm going to
2:01.6	I'm Alexis Madrigal. Last fall marked eight years since Joshua Barbo lost his
2:31.6	fiancé, Jessica, to liver problems. In the years after her death,
2:35.9	he struggled to find peace. Then one day, Barbo stumbled upon a service using some of the most
2:41.0	powerful language generation tools and technology and eventually trained a chatbot with old
2:46.2	text that she'd sent him. So for reasons, perhaps even he didn't understand, he created a Jessica
	...

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