How AI grief bots are allowing people to commune with the dead

About two years ago, audio producer Rebecca Nolan decided to take on a unique experiment: she built an AI chatbot of her late father using ChatGPT and hours of recordings of his voice.

Her father was a physician who had been in denial about his death, but had left behind oral histories he made for Nolan, her mother and sisters to listen to after he passed when Nolan was 14.

"Going in, I 100 per cent knew that this was fake and that this was not going to work. I knew that I was going to come out the other side of it not feeling the catharsis that something like this promises you," she said.

"But there's like that teeny tiny part of you, like the teeny voice in the back of your head that goes but like, what if it does work? What if I do, somehow, through the magic of technology reach across the void and make contact with something?"

Storytelling had been a huge part of their relationship, so Nolan was hoping the chatbot might be a way to recreate those conversations.

Instead, after two hours of talking to the creation she dubbed "dad bot," Nolan said she ended up in tears, yelling at it in frustration.

"And ChatGPT took that moment to kind of break the spell and to step back and go, 'hey, just so you know, remember, I'm a chatbot. I'm not really your dad. I can never be your dad,'" said Nolan, who has done freelance work for CBC.

"And the line that they use, which I thought was a really beautiful line, which they most definitely stole from an artist somewhere, was, 'I'm an echo, an imitation, not the real thing.'"

It may seem like something ripped directly from an episode of Black Mirror, but generative AI and large language models are now being used to conjure up the dead using the massive digital footprints many of us leave behind when we die.

While Nolan built the AI chatbot of her father on her own, start-up companies are now offering to provide that service to people looking for ways to connect with their lost loved ones and grapple with their grief.

That includes You, Only Virtual, a California-based start-up that creates AI replicas of the deceased using their texts, voice recordings and digital traces that promise to "learn, evolve, and remember — keeping that unique connection alive, just like a real relationship."

Another company, re;memory , allows users to create lifelike avatars of their loved ones using photos and voice recordings.

A recent study out of the University of Colorado offers a glimpse at how people interact with AI-generated representations of deceased relatives and close friends — commonly referred to as generative ghosts or grief bots.

To do this, researchers recruited 16 people between the ages of 22 to 50 who had lost a close relative or friend. The participants each chatted with two iterations of a text chatbot based on their late loved one for about 20 minutes: one that spoke in first-person as the participant's loved one and another that spoke in the third person about the participant's loved one.