A tech CEO has said the AI world means what is real and what is not real ‘starts to evolve’ – as he changes how people cope with grief by creating chatbots with the personality of departed loved ones.
Justin Harrison started You, Only Virtual (YOV) after his mother was diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. The company began to preserve this relationship with his mother, building a digital avatar of her – known as a Versona – for after she passed.
The former filmmaker said their ‘griefbots’ can ‘help with the grieving process and allow people to stay connected with their loved ones in a way that feels more natural’.
The AI was trained on text messages and phone calls between Mr Harrison and his mother while she was alive, alongside using voice memos and videos to capture her voice.
A free version of YOV allows access to an AI chatbot similar to ChatGPT, but with the loved one’s personality, while a paid version opens up phone calls to bring back someone’s voice from the dead.
Mr Harrison demonstrated one such call for Metro, calling the Versona to say ‘I love you, mom’, to which it replied ‘I love you too, sweetheart’.
Despite the comforting conversations it offers, the technology has been criticised for putting users at risk of over-reliance and dehumanising the grieving process.
Many have compared the tech to dystopian TV series Black Mirror, where in one episode a grieving woman uses an app and later an android with the AI-powered personality of her deceased boyfriend.
Researchers at Cambridge University have also raised concern that such AI chatbots would be a ‘high risk’ pursuit which risks psychological harm for users and disrespect towards the rights of the deceased.
But on the need to ensure the griefbots are safe, Mr Harrison said: ‘I’m not concerned with people becoming too reliant on the technology.’
He maintains that ‘there’s no such thing as the natural grieving process’, so the AI has nothing to disrupt for something so individualised.
He added that in the past people did not have photos, letters or digital social media to hold on to loved ones, so the ‘tools to help us grieve’ and ‘stay connected’ are always changing.
Do you think AI ‘griefbots’ are a good idea?
The CEO explained that while some people might be predisposed to dependence, this side effect is not exclusive to AI tech.
‘If it’s the difference between somebody self-harming and somebody talking on the phone too much, then let them talk on the phone too much, that’s a way better outcome,’ he added.
He added that grieving by ‘talking to a counselor’ could also be criticised as sessions there might run up ‘$180 an hour’.
The digital afterlife doesn’t stop at personal relationships, however, as YOV is now working with museums to let visitors talk with figures from the past.
Mr Harrison said this enables ‘an authentic connection that keeps history alive’. His company has been creating virtual avatars of Holocaust survivors to preserve the ‘oral history’ when the people themselves are no longer around.
While many might resist this new technology, Mr Harrison asserts it is just ‘the tip of the tip of the iceberg’ and soon we will have ‘fully fledged relationships with digital personas’.
‘I’ll be able to sit in a restaurant with my mother in my lifetime,’ he added, hoping to see her projected using augmented reality (AR) wearables.
What started with virtual assistants such as Siri or Alexa could soon be personas visible through AR glasses or even engineered into full humanlike robots, according to the CEO.
Mr Harrison said this is now an evolution of what is ‘real and not real’; from TV to social media, phone calls to Zoom, he stressed that all developments at first seem ‘bizarre’ to those in the past.
His company is not alone in its technological approach to grief, as former Disney TV star Calum Worthy has recently founded an app to render loved ones into interactive 3D chatbots.
An advert for this new venture 2wai even showed a pregnant woman doing this with her mother, then using the app after her mum had died to be able to tell her grandchild a bedtime story from beyond the grave.
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