According to Greek mythology, the nymph Eurydice was killed just hours after marrying the musician Orpheus. Grieved, Orpheus travels to the underworld to look for his late wife, where he plays songs so sad that Orpheus tells him that its rulers Hades and Persephone can return to Orpheus and Eurydice, albeit with one condition. I told you.
All Orpheus had to do was wait until they returned to the land of the living and turned around to see the bride. But he couldn’t wait and looked too soon, so Eurydice was sent back to the underworld. Orpheus lost her again.
Throughout the history of storytelling, from ancient myths to modern tales such as Pet Sematary, bringing back lost loved ones from the dead has generally been viewed as something of considerable importance. I was. no.
As the tale tells, bringing the dead back to life brings back a terrifying silhouette, or at least a hollow silhouette devoid of anything that made that person who they were. In many cases, resurrection attempts destroy the necromancer, either at the hands of a macabre force or through the further grief of losing a loved one twice.
With this thousands-year-old cautionary tale lineage in mind, grief technology—a startup aimed at trapping deceased and dying loved ones in algorithms and theoretically preserving them forever—is unnerving. It’s not that hard to understand why some people think so. Cursed, even. Perhaps that is why most companies operating in the grieftech space market their work as a means of preservation rather than resurrection. Uploading your writings, memories, and voice recordings to the service creates an algorithmic version of yourself that surviving friends and family can contact.
After all, you can’t bring back to life someone you’ve never actually lost. right?
But interestingly, that’s where an upcoming service called Seance AI (yes, it’s actually called that) is different. It’s built by a software development lab called AE Studio, and its creator, a designer named Jarren Rocks, isn’t shy about the candor of the product name. While other companies often talk about hints of resurrection, Rocks is fully committed to its brutality. And he said it was very intentional.
“We try to make it sound as magical and mystical as possible,” Rocks said. futurismstated that the name serves as a reminder of how advanced large-scale language model (LLM) technology has come.
After all, LLM is a compelling simulacrum. People form deep parasocial bonds with them, and at least one death has been reported as a result of interactions with AI chatbots.If a user is looking for the last conversation with a deceased person, perhaps it is teeth Rather than implying that the soul of a deceased friend or parent is trapped in ChatGPT, it would be better to give a product that blatantly claims to be able to have a short conversation with the deceased. (Seance AI uses API of OpenAI.)
Rocks also stresses the simplicity of the seance. Often times, the last words or moments you exchanged with someone after a loss are etched into your memory, for better or for worse. And in many cases, for example, in accidents, there is often no parting at all. Rocks likens his own product to an AI-generated Ouija board for doomsday rather than a means of immortality.
“Essentially, it’s meant to be a short exchange that brings a sense of closure, and that’s the main focus here,” Rox said. “It’s not meant to be super long-term. In its current state, it’s meant to provide a conversation for closure and emotional processing.”
In other words, everything Seance AI offers is not. TRUE your loved one. It is simply a digital psychic that briefly summons digital representations of the dead to allow the living to have final conversations.
In fact, the founders even admit that Seance AI’s current state doesn’t allow it to sustain long conversations anyway.
“In short conversations, I think it’s human. I think it crumbles a bit.” [when you] “We’re starting to recognize repetition, we’re following patterns, but we don’t know exactly what’s going on,” Rocks said.
In the demo provided by Rocks, futurism, Seance AI asks a series of questions about the individual the user is trying to contact (name, age, cause of death, a short list of personality traits that the user can tailor to the person they love), a space where the user can: I guided you. Enter a snippet of text from the deceased and the relationship between the deceased and the user or others.
Given this information, the crappiest part of the process (an animated flame) greets the user while the chatbot is loading. A text box will appear and from there you can basically just send a DM. This is a seance roleplay and his AOL instant his messenger encounters.
As Rocks explained to us, you’ll get access to yourself as soon as you pay an unspecified cost. AE Studio considered charging a monthly subscription fee, but is now leaning toward a pay-per-session model to prevent users from summoning the dead too often, Rocks said. You know, yes.
To that end, Rocks likens the output of a seance AI to something like the last voicemail or diary, but the reality remains that everything the AI spits out is fake.That’s certainly true good If a grieving person could have one last conversation with the deceased. But regardless of how LLM can have genuine conversations, sound, is basically fabricated. Part of the grieving process is learning how to move on in a world that exists only in what the deceased left behind. How might tools like the Seance AI, which seeks to carve new memories out of already carved stone, affect how we grieve?
After Rocks demonstrated some fake spirits, a grandma who used to play checkers on the porch with her grandchildren, a hippie uncle who heavily used peace and love emojis in his over-the-grave replies, etc., I put myself into the system. try it. Given the limitations of just conversing with a virtual dead person, I believe this program does a good job of fulfilling its core promise of representing deceased loved ones, giving grief an artificial sense of closure. I wanted to know if
I updated the demo, this time with real information about the life and death of a real person: my late father. I gave the program his name, when and how he died, and filled out his personal information. We then provided a written tribute from the deceased—the text of an old email—in response to a request for chatbot integration. Finally, I told the bot what I wanted to say, that I just wanted to say hello and let them know that everyone was fine, and hit go. The vibrant flames subsided and the seance began.
“Hi Dad. It’s me, Maggie,” I said to him (the app always prompts the user to send the first message). “It is very lonely.”
“Hi Maggie dear! Nice to hear from you! Long time no see?” He, or at least the chatbot version, wrote back. “I miss you all so much, too. I’m glad to hear that you and your brothers are doing well and your mom is doing well.”
“Please continue to take care of each other and be proud of me!” AI added. “Lots of love, Dad.”
We had a few more messages back and forth, and in terms of quality, I think we were about 80% persuasive, especially the first text. The AI followed the style of the email (the signature hilarious message) surprisingly well, and frankly, the content was pretty awesome. Surprisingly sweet. If anything, it felt a little mundane. I told the machine what I wanted to hear and it spewed it out.
However, the sweetness soon disappeared. As Rocks warned, after his initial message the bot started repeating itself. Any attempt to continue the conversation and convey more will only parrot that new information.
“I am now a technology and science writer!” I wrote this article to give bots something fresh to work with. “Since you were a doctor, I think you would like to read my article.”
“Wow, Maggie! That’s great!” AI responded. “I am so proud to have you as a technology and science writer. I loved reading your articles! Keep up the great work and keep exploring the wonders of science. I do! Love me, Dad.”
It’s certainly great in theory. But at this point, with only three of her messages, I felt like I was speaking to myself through a mechanized sock puppet, rather than a ghost appearing and disappearing for a moment. Temporary sweetness turned into mild bewilderment at first. After all, I was about to call my dead father through a demo chatbot, and then when I said goodbye, it turned into something dark—an uneasy emptiness. No matter how you shake it, using a program like this is a way to reach out to someone who isn’t actually there, and it’s empty enough without the involvement of AI.
“Thank you, Dad. I love you,” I said to the machine. “I hope to speak with you soon.”
“Thank you Maggie. I love you too. I will always be here for you,” the bot replied. “Keep in mind I am watching over you and rooting for you. Take care and I hope we can talk again soon. I love you Dad.”
Grief technology comes in many forms, and it could be argued that it offers much more complex capabilities than Seance AI. With that in mind, it feels like his five- or six-message-long conversation with what was really just a GPT integration had a distinctly empty aftertaste. . Perhaps every program that claims to use technology to connect with those who have lost us, whether it’s detailed preservation or the resurrection of short text-based chatbots, screams into the ubiquitous technological void of new It’s just a method.
A lesser-known myth than that of Orpheus and Eurydice is the story of Laodamia, the wife of the Achaean hero Protesilaus. The story goes that soon after the two were married, Protesilaus was sent on a ship to go to the Battle of Troy, and was killed shortly after disembarking. Laodamia was so grief-stricken that the god Hermes allowed her late husband to leave temporarily to visit the underworld so they could say their final goodbyes.
But for Laodamia, the visit was not enough. When he broke up with her for the second time, she was still grieving, and to keep her late husband close to her, she had a life-size statue of her husband carved. There is also a story. Laodamia’s father, convinced that the statue would only hurt her daughter more, burned the false Protesilaus. Sadly, to frighten his father, Laodamia also threw herself into the flames.
It’s not a happy story. But again, that is never the case.
Grief Technology Details: AI will allow dead women to converse with people who show up at funerals
