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Topics: News, World News, Technology, Weird
Kit Roberts
A woman has shared the harrowing details of how an AI chatbot designed to help people with grief turned sinister.
Grief is a monumentally difficult thing to process, and over the millennia we have used many ways to help us come to terms with losing the people we love.
Now however, technology is offering a new way which aims to help people to come to terms with their grief.
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Generative AI has allowed for the construction of chatbots which can emulate a deceased person and allow someone to chat with them.
Yes, like that episode of Black Mirror. Some people really just don't take a hint do they?
The technology, called 'grieftech', is designed to allow someone to get some sense of closure after losing a loved one.
But this can quickly turn sour, as Christi Angel found when she lost her friend and first love Cameroun Scruggs in 2020.
Christi and Cameroun had lived hundreds of miles apart and had communicated mainly via texts and emails. She even had to attend Cameroun's funeral via video call due to Covid-19 restrictions.
The digital nature of their friendship made it a prime candidate for the 'grieftech' software, as Christi could chat with the bot in the same way that she would have done with Cameroun.
She said: "He was there for all of my firsts. He was funny, silly, he loved animals – he was just a great person."
A couple of years after Cameroun's death, Christi came across Project December, which uses AI to filter through someone's messages and then build a chatbot that emulates how they spoke.
Christi said: "I got excited. I would have given anything to have a conversation with Cameroun. I wanted to ask him: 'Are you okay? Did you make it to the other side?'"
But things soon took a dark turn when the AI started saying things about 'haunting' rooms.
Finally, when Christi asked if Cameroun had 'followed the light', the chatbot told her no, he was in Hell.
Christi came away very disturbed by the experience, saying: "I thought this [Project December] was supposed to be a good experience, but for me it was creepy and too much."
She added: "I felt like I’d done something really crazy. I turned on every light. I was worried I’d brought some sort of energy in."
Sherry Turkle is a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the US who specialises in human interaction with technology.
Turkle warned that devices like this could prevent people from processing their grief in a healthy way.
She told The Guardian: “It’s the unwillingness to mourn. The seance never has to end. It’s something we are inflicting on ourselves because it’s such a seductive technology."