Will Artificial Intelligence Help Us Grieve?

When a loved one passes, will we continue to communicate with the deceased through artificial intelligence? While that sounds like an episode of Black Mirror, the beginnings of a digital afterlife with some potentially positive ramifications recently took place with one man, as Jason Fagone reports in the San Francisco Chronicle. His story centers around writer Joshua Barbeau, a 33-year old who had lost his fiancee eight years earlier from a rare liver disease. At home one night, he accessed a site called Project December. As Fagone notes, the site is "powered by one of the world's most capable artificial intelligence systems, a piece of software known as GPT-3. It knows how to manipulate human language, generating fluent English text in response to a prompt."