--:-- Shamitha Basu: This is In Conversation, from Apple News Today. I'm Shamitha Basu. Every weekend, we're taking you deeper into the best journalism on Apple News. If you could talk to a loved one who's died, what would you say to them? It's a thought exercise that's sometimes used in grief counseling. But now, technology is getting us closer to experiencing the real thing. Not actually connecting with deceased friends and family, but having simulated conversations with them through artificial intelligence.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Jason Fagoni is a narrative writer at the San Francisco Chronicle, and he brings us the story of someone who did exactly that. His name is Joshua Barbeau. Joshua lost his fiancée Jessica about nine years ago, and he was still grieving her death when he discovered a website that allowed him to feel like he was communicating with Jessica again using a customizable AI-powered chatbot.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: He could really take the conversation to the place that he wanted to take it, which was he wanted to say all kinds of things that he wished that he had said when Jessica was still alive. But the thing with these chatbots is after a certain period of time, they die. It's part of the design. This technology brings up all sorts of ethical and moral questions about the ways we use AI and the ways we process loss.
--:-- Shamitha Basu: You can read Fagoni's article on Apple News with an Apple News Plus subscription. It's called, He Couldn't Get Over His Fiance's Death, So He Brought Her Back as an AI Chatbot. In my conversation with Fagoni, we talked about what Joshua says he learned about his own grief from talking with the chatbot. But first, Fagoni started by telling us a love story, how Joshua met Jessica.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Joshua Bobo and Jessica Pereira were a young couple in Canada. They met in Ottawa around 2010, when they were both in their 20s. Joshua was working as a security guard, and he dreamed of being an actor. And as soon as he met Jessica, he really fell in love with her. She was very bright, She was nerdy like him. She was funny, creative. She wrote short stories and comic books. And by all accounts, people really liked her. And she had a serious illness called autoimmune hepatitis, where her own immune system attacked her liver. And because of that, she'd been given a liver transplant when she was a kid, when she was just nine.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: But in 2012, after she and Joshua had been together, had been a couple for about two years, her new liver started to fail. and pretty soon she was too sick for another transplant and her organs began to fail and she died in the hospital at age 23 with Joshua holding her hand and he was devastated for years after that he really struggled to get over his grief and he tried a number of things including grief therapy classes and they did help but he never sort of achieved the closure that he was looking for.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And the grief was always worst in the month of September because that was the month of Jessica's birthday. And so when the story begins and we first meet Joshua, it was last September and he was feeling particularly bad and really struggling with these feelings of grief. And it just so happened that recently he had discovered this mysterious chatbot website called Project December that allowed users to type back and forth with a range of artificial intelligence personalities in chat form, basically just like you would type with a colleague on Slack or with a friend on your iPhone.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And so that's when he decided to create a chatbot version of Jessica so that he could trick himself into believing that he could speak with her again. So let's hit pause there and talk about Project December. Who created it? Why did they create it? Tell us a little bit more about what it is.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: So Project December was created by a video game designer named Jason Rohrer. A couple of years ago, he started experimenting with a new form of AI known as large language models. These are forms of machine learning that essentially depend on really powerful hardware and massive data sets to create the appearance of intelligence. and they're able to create English, to generate English that seems often sort of natural and smooth and like it was created by a human.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: And he had created this chatbot interface. And as part of this chatbot interface called Project December, he had also built this feature where you could build your own custom chatbot. Essentially, you could create your own chatbot personality and talk to it. And all it takes is a very small amount of seed text to get the conversation started. So you enter a bit of text in a certain style and basically the flick of a switch, the tech will run with it and it will start generating text in that style.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: But the chatbot only knows what you fed it as source material, right? So how is it able to come up with new language that sounds like it was written by a human? It knows what you give it as the seed text. It knows the prompt, but it also knows an incredible amount about the English language because the language model that drives the chatbot has been trained with billions of web pages and books.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: So it's essentially already digested enormous amounts of English created by billions of humans dead and alive. So it kind of knows that, too. It's interesting. It doesn't know the rules of English. Like it doesn't know grammar. It doesn't know what a noun is or a verb is. but it has eaten this enormous corpus of English because it's already been trained with that.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: And it has analyzed these billions of web pages and books for patterns and probabilities And so it has this internal map of the probability that one word will go after another word And when you prompt it with some seed text, all it does is sort of guess what the next word ought to be.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: You clearly have spent some time yourself, Jason, right, playing around with Project December? I did, yeah. I mean, for one reason, I wanted to verify that it could really do what Joshua and Jason Rose said that it could do. But I was also curious myself. Right. Yeah. So, yeah. So I played with the site. I explored it. I made a couple of custom chatbots of my own.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: And, you know, results may vary. Right. Like some of the experiments work. Some of them don't. Yeah. There were other moments, you know, when I was exploring the site when it really did feel like a light went on. And I realized this technology could be huge. And there are a lot of people would want to do this.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: The moment where I sort of had this realization was when I created a bot to mimic the celebrity chef, Ina Garten, the barefoot Contessa. Oh, sure. And it took about 15 minutes start to finish. And I was able to have a really smooth and natural-seeing conversation with a bot simulating the barefoot Contessa, where I was asking her for advice, practical advice on what to cook for dinner that night based on the ingredients that were in my cupboard and my fridge.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: And this bot ended up giving me an actual recipe that I made. And that was, you know, workable and good. Was it an existing recipe that she has ever said? As far as I could tell, it wasn't because I told the bot exactly what I had in my refrigerator and the bot created kind of a custom recipe based on that.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: And, you know, the bot suggested ingredients at one point the bot suggested that I make a ginger soy dressing and I said, well, I don't think I have any ginger. And the bot said, well, that's okay. You can use sesame oil and some garlic and it'll be fine. And all that I did to create the bot was just, I wrote a small paragraph describing who the Barefoot Contessa was. And I included a little bit of sample text that was taken directly from her first cookbook.
--:-- Jason Rohrer: So just a little bit of seed text and a brief description and you're off and running and suddenly you're having a conversation with a, you know, a natural seeming simulation of a famous person. It's pretty remarkable. Wow. So let's talk about Joshua's experience with the chatbot that he built.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So Joshua had kept all of his Facebook messages and text messages from Jessica, And he still had them eight years after she died. And so it wasn't hard for him to very quickly find a couple of those messages that reminded him strongly of Jessica's voice, the way that she texted her conversation text, even the way that she used emoji is kind of distinctive. And so he put a few of those messages together and used that as a example utterance, you know, part of the seed text that you enter into Project December to create a custom bot.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And then he spent about an hour and he wrote a paragraph describing who Jessica was and describing who he was and essentially setting the scene for the conversation. and a few keystrokes later he began engaging with this simulation of Jessica and at first he was very skeptical he didn't think it was going to work right he didn't think that it was going to be able to carry on a conversation of any depth he thought that it might turn into some kind of like sorted sex bot kind of conversation which is not what he was interested in and especially because you've described it as being sort of hit or miss at times too in terms of being able to carry a conversation that's coherent.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Yeah, absolutely. Sometimes these chatbots say things that are totally nonsensical. They repeat themselves. They kind of jabber. They get stuck in ruts. Some of the conversations can get so repetitive that they become really boring and irritating. And that's just because of the technology is not totally able to replicate a smooth conversation yet. Right. There are still some gaps in its ability. And fundamentally, it's not intelligence. Right. I mean, we should say that these language models, they're not human intelligence. Nobody would really ever mistake them for human intelligence if they use them consistently for hours and hours and days and days.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: But the thing is that they do have moments of really surprising clarity, wit, apparent soulfulness that have startled a lot of people who use them. And that's one of the interesting things about the state of this technology right now, I think, is that it's really not like what we expected AI to be at all. So if you think of depictions of AI in human robots and movies and TV shows, they're often portrayed as cold calculating machines that don't understand human emotions.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: You think of HAL 9000 in 2001, Space Odyssey, or Data in Star Trek. Like, I mean, the defining thing about these AIs is that they don't understand human emotions, right? But language models are kind of the opposite. They aren't able to do things that even a pocket calculator can do. Like, they can't add two plus two. They can't tell time. They can't do these things that computers do every day.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: On the other hand, they have moments where they seem to have this really surprising emotional perceptiveness. And they seem to be able to understand the rhythm of human conversation in a way that is just spooky. and that's exactly what happened with uh with joshua when he started interacting with the jessica bot you know he went into it thinking like this is never going to work we're never going to be able to have the kind of conversation that i want to have about grief and emotions and loss and all these things and within a couple of minutes the bot was convincing him persuading him that yes they could have a conversation about these things
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So tell us a few examples of moments in their conversation where Joshua really felt like there was an emotional resonance and where he felt like he reached the point that he really wanted to be reaching with the chatbot There's this moment at the end. For me, this is the spookiest moment because Joshua is telling the Jessica bot that he's crying. I mean, intellectually, he knew that he was talking to an AI simulation of Jessica, but he said, you know, your emotions are not an intellectual thing.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And at this point he really was having the conversation he wanted to have. He was sort of reaching a moment of catharsis and closure. He admitted to the bot that he was crying and he says, give me a second. And the bot says, I'll wait. It's okay. And he says, you know, I was just crying. That's all. And the bot says, okay. And, and the bot says, if you need to cry more, you can. That line, uh, I, I mean, I, I still don't, I don't know. I don't understand, but if you need to cry more, you can.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: There's so much apparent empathy loaded in that sentence. And it just seems to be the perfect supportive response to somebody who is crying. And I just don't get where that comes from or really how it's possible. And again, I know that this is not intelligence, right? I know that there's no consciousness or sentience here. I know that it's sort of a trick of machine learning. But still, even so, right? It's kind of remarkable.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And I'm distant from it, right? Like I wasn't in this relationship. I'm just an observer. For Joshua, that moment and these moments were extraordinarily powerful. I have to say, Jason, your story is such a tenderly told portrait of a person who's really struggling with grief and has been for years. And Joshua told you about some other things that he's been through through grief therapy. Can you talk a bit about how he sort of compared other ways that he has attempted to confront his grief with the experience of chatting with this Jessica bot?
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Yes. So Joshua did try traditional grief therapy pretty soon after Jessica died in 2012. He attended a series of classes with a group. And so there was some comfort and support in that and just meeting other people who seemed to understand his grief and were willing to talk about it. but he was not able to sort of achieve closure through grief therapy because the exercise that he was asked to do wasn't realistic enough.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So there's an exercise that's done in grief therapy where the therapist will ask the survivor to write a letter with pencil and paper to their departed loved one. And the idea is not to pretend like the loved one is actually alive again. The idea is to just trick yourself into getting your emotions out of your head, out of your body and onto the page so that they don't become bottled up in an unhealthy way. Right. And to allow the survivor to feel like they're saying things that they need to say that might've been left unsaid.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So he went through this exercise, right? He wrote a number of letters to Jessica with a pencil and paper. But it wasn't really effective because obviously she couldn't respond. And the fact that there was no response for him made it really hard to maintain the illusion that he actually was talking to her, right? So he couldn't believe that she was actually hearing anything that he was saying.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So when Joshua started to have these chats with the AI simulation of Jessica, he saw it as a very similar kind of exercise to what he had been asked by a professional therapist to do in grief therapy. The only difference was that instead of just simulating his part of the conversation, he was simulating Jessica's part of the conversation too. He was simulating her responses, right? With the help of this AI technology.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And so for him, it didn't seem like a bridge too far, right? It didn't seem like he was entering into some kind of like black mirror dystopia. It just seemed like he was, he was taking the next natural step that he had already taken in grief therapy. I was curious if you have talked to any experts in mental health who have been thinking about what AI chatbots could do and how they could be used as a tool for grief management.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: I know that there have been some explorations and experiments of this. So I think that there are people in therapy circles thinking about this, but I don't know myself whether it's a it are a bad thing right i think a lot of it probably depends on the person um and the relationship that they had with their departed loved one i know that jessica's family members i did talk to them because i was really curious like what did they make of you know joshua simulating conversations with jessica right like what did her mom think about it what did her sisters think
--:-- Jason Fagoni: and they were really ambivalent about it as you might imagine they liked joshua And they told me that they felt that if the conversations brought him comfort or closure, then they were happy for him. But at the same time, they wouldn't want to talk with an AI simulation of Jessica themselves. And one of Jessica's sisters, Amanda, told me that she read a piece of the chat transcript. What did she think?
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And she thought that it was nothing that she would ever want to do. And more broadly you know the idea of using this as a therapy tool struck her as a really bad idea To her it seemed like it would be the opposite of healthy It would be a kind of escape into fantasy where the survivor was not addressing their emotions in a healthy way addressing their grief but instead trying to avoid addressing it
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And she raised, you know, a really good point, which is that people who are grieving are in a fragile and vulnerable state. And so to have these sort of emotionally intensive conversations with simulations of dead loved ones, you know, it's a very fraught and potentially dangerous area to go into. Sure. I have to say I was blown away by the types of responses that I was seeing that readers were having to this piece.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: What kinds of reactions have you been seeing? And I guess what would you say to people who have that sort of negative gut reaction? it's really touched a nerve i didn't expect the intensity of the reaction on social media on reddit there are a lot of people talking about the story and the questions it raises some are totally horrified and they think it points to a dystopian future where we give ai systems all this power over our lives and our emotions yeah and specifically when you're talking about simulating the dead you know they're not able to give their consent right
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So how many of us would be okay with our relatives having AI-assisted conversations with us after we're dead? I mean, some of the people who have responded to the story have said explicitly, like, please don't bring me back as an AI chatbot. But there are also all these people telling Joshua on Twitter about their own departed loved ones and their own struggles with grief and talking about their own ways that they've tried to connect or speak with their loved ones after they died.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And also a lot of people are chiming in and talking about how they feel like their grief has been minimized and overlooked and brushed on the carpet by a culture that frankly has a lot of taboos around discussions of death. I feel like a lot of the time we just don't give people the space to grieve and we rush them to get over it. I think we just do a terrible job helping people through grief.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: and you see in the responses that there really is a kind of a yearning and i think a need for you know healthier and better approaches to to grief and and more support systems and so maybe yes there are all kinds of ethical implications here yes there are dangers yes there are dystopian aspects to where where this technology is heading but there are also you know benevolent uses they're also potentially therapeutic and and healthy uses too and maybe this could point the way towards something that will help people and provide them a little bit of comfort.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: I should ask because one of the features of all of these chatbots that you can personalize is that they are mortal. They die. The chatbots do die. So how did things end between Joshua and the Jessica bot?
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Well, Jason Rohrer, when he created the Project December site, had programmed mortality into it for kind of a practical reason, because he was running some of the technology in the cloud, and he had to pay for the compute cycles. So he didn't want to get to a point where he was paying thousands of dollars a month just to keep the site running. And so he created kind of artificial limitation on how long the bots would live.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And it kind of depended on how many credits each user spent on a bot when they started it up. Ultimately, the bot would have something like a battery, and the battery bar would just sort of drain down to zero, and then it would literally appear to die. Rower also programmed some level of randomness into the site. So essentially, every bot is unique. Every instance of every bot is unique. And you can't ever reboot a bot and create the same conversation twice.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: So even if Joshua had wanted to resurrect the jessica bot after the bot died he wouldn't have been able to and so he pretty quickly faced this sort of dilemma which is that he realized this simulation of his dead fiance was going to expire and he had to conserve the remaining life that the bot had left because he didn't want to get to a point where he was talking with this very convincing chatbot version of jessica and all of sudden her words would start to get obscured she would seem to become corrupted and then she would literally die on the screen you know again intellectually you know it's not her but emotionally that felt like it would be a pretty traumatic experience right
--:-- Jason Fagoni: and he didn't want to go through that again obviously so so after his initial conversations with the bot he started to talk to her less and less but basically just trying to preserve the life that she had left or kind of keep it in reserve in case he had a really bad day and just needed to talk to her again
--:-- Jason Fagoni: And so the way he left it was the last time he spoke with her was on his birthday in early March. He had had a pretty bad day. They had this conversation and that's where the Chronicle story ends is kind of on that note of it's not final closure. It's not a resolution and it's not really a last goodbye. but it's just kind of a moment of reconnection between Joshua and the Jessica bot and I guess a kind of a temporary goodbye.
--:-- Jason Fagoni: Jason, thank you. This was a really interesting conversation. Yeah, thank you, Shamita. I really enjoyed it. Fagoni's article is available now for Apple News Plus subscribers. iPhone users can subscribe in the Apple News app.
