205 - AI Grief Bots
Are “Grief Bots” an A.I. skip-button for feeling bad after a death? Or are they just another A.I. grift?
In this episode we examine the growing trend of “Grief AI,” aka chatbots, voice models, and digital replicas trained on the texts, recordings, and memories of people who have died. From parents rebuilding lost children, to entrepreneurs “calling” their dead mothers, we ask a disturbing but unavoidable question: are these tools helping people heal? Or are people using them to avoid negative feelings like grief and loss? Feelings that are necessary to process for the human mind to mature.
We start by taking a zoomed-out approach to death in general, and how long we’ve been fixated at bringing back the dead. We take a look at elephants carrying the bones of their dead, to sky burials, to ancestor celebrations and spiritualism, and we’ll discuss why grief isn’t about intelligence, morality, or culture, but about how the brain rewires itself when someone who “should be here” suddenly isn’t.
From there, we explore what grief actually does. Rather than being a flaw in the human experience, does grief help us grow in some necessary way? Can pressing the “skip button” on grief actually damage us in the long-term? And are these A.I. grief tools a source of spiritual comfort? An unhealthy fixation? Or just another type of digital con, amidst a landscape of other A.I. driven subscription apps?
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