E2: Grief Bots
5/26/202633 min
When Joshua Barbeau proposed to his girlfriend, Jessica Courtney Periera, she was already in the ICU. 10 years later, Joshua was still grieving her death. That’s when he came across Project December. With just a short writing sample and a prompt, the program enabled him to make a chat bot of Jessica.
Since then, the market for so-called “grief bots” has exploded. Millions of people are using AI to “talk” to the dead. The phenomenon has left cyberpsychologist Elaine Kasket asking the question: what happens when we rely on for-profit AI companies to help us manage something as deeply human as grief? And where’s the line between comfort and self-destruction?
This episode features Joshua Barbeau, and Elaine Kasket, with research from Jason Fagone’s article “The Jessica Simulation”, written for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2021.
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Transcript preview
First 90 secondsSpeaker 00:00
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Speaker 1· Soundbite0:26
[digital jingle] This is a CBC podcast.
Speaker 20:29
[pensive music] There are moments when something new slips into the internet, and most people don't notice. There's no announcement or headline, just a link tucked somewhere obscure, waiting for the right person to find it. In 2020, that person was Joshua Barbeau.
Joshua Barbeau· Guest0:53
I was sitting on my couch in front of my TV with my laptop on my lap, and it was late at night, and I was going down a rabbit hole.
Speaker 21:03
Joshua was looking for the latest version of a video game he wanted to check out. But when he got to the designer's website, there was a note saying it wasn't coming yet.
Joshua Barbeau· Guest1:13
"But hey, here's something else you can play with while you're waiting for it in the meantime. It's called Project December. I just released it, and it's really neat." So I clicked that link, and I ended up being sucked into Project December.
Speaker 21:27
Project December,