When You’re Dead, You’re Dead: Grieving in the Age of AI
The Ethical and Emotional Costs of Talking to the Dead
A post from the Reddit forum r/Chatgpt:
Using GPT to talk to my dead brother. [...] Sometimes it's crazy close to the real thing, and I get lost talking for hours. Kinda feels like he’s still here. [...] But then there are replies that I just know he would’ve said differently. Those moments depress me even more because they make me realize again that it’s all fake. He’s dead and will always be dead.
The Monkey’s Paw is a short story published 100 years ago. Drawing from mythological conceptions of the genie, it has rooted itself firmly in the American consciousness. The story is simple: A couple discovers an ancient relic that promises to grant them three wishes. First, they wish for money. To their horror, their son’s boss shows up at the door, explaining that he passed away in a machine accident. The couple receives $200 as a goodwill payment.
In a fit of grief, they wish to return their son to life. That night, there is a knock at the door. The husband starts to open the door, but his wife stops him, warning that the thing behind that door is not human. Their third wish is to wish their son away. They breathe a sigh of relief as the knocking at the door stops.
The lesson the titular Monkey’s Paw demonstrates is simple:
Be careful what you wish for.
Every day, it seems as if the future gets closer and closer to the present. To some, technology takes another step backward: ChatGPT’s role as a necromancer links the future with those firmly in the past. However, this lunge toward the dead is a lie, no matter how convincing artificial intelligence gets. As Kurt Vonnegut writes in Mother Night: “When you’re dead, you’re dead.”
This article explores how using artificial intelligence for this specific function (that I coin necro-therapy) could corrode the process of grieving beyond repair. It also touches on grief as a whole and argues that the solution lies not in modern neurochemistry but in something simultaneously more primitive and more refined: the practice of psychotherapy.
First, we must explore the assumptions one makes during a conversation with a language-learning machine. To understand why this necro-therapy is unhealthy, we must understand why people perform it in the first place.
Humans, at their core, perceive the world through words and speech. Lacan, a post-structuralist philosopher and psychoanalyst, touches on this countless times, observing how people break concepts into a symbolic order. Ideas like honor, hope, and love are too complex and irreducible to experience alone (if they even truly exist as some Platonic ideal), so we break things down into words or symbols and exchange them as speech. It is no logical leap to prescribe the idea of a self to a series of symbols.
We cannot experience another human being as a whole. Instead, we symbolize them in two distinct ways.
First, we describe them. My father, for example, is a brilliant engineer and a family man who is always eager to learn. Ad infinitum. Ad infinitum demonstrates the inherent violence of this symbolization process: I could describe my father infinitely, and there would always be a certain aspect I would leave out—a certain je ne sais quoi, a certain “you’d only know if you met the guy.” Liken this symbolization to me plugging away modulations into ChatGPT: Even if I described aspects of the bereaved until I passed away, there would always be a factor I would miss. After all, I could fail to mention that my dad is awful at pickleball, is a nerd for mechanical watches, and so on...
The second way human beings use symbols is by exchanging them through speech. My unique conception of honor and love is me. How the world affects me and how I process it uniquely shape how I discuss things. Other people can get a sense of my selfhood by asking me how I define certain things, indirectly and directly. The connection to necro-therapy is intuitive here: We can tune ChatGPT to respond in the way the bereaved would respond.
In a similar, cruder way, we use speech to check whether something is intelligent, sentient, and conscious. We ask people what their thoughts are on certain issues to see if they are intelligent. When trying to determine whether the interlocutor on the other end of the company-help line is a robot, we look to see how it responds to questions. Speech is a key aspect of personhood, in both a crude and a subtle sense. This is why ChatGPT was frightening to many (including me): It gives off the unnerving sense that it is alive.
To switch gears, healthy grief is psychologically conceptualized in five (nonlinear) stages: First, denial that one has truly lost their loved one. Then, anger toward those around them for failing to prevent the death. Bargaining follows: People in this stage will try anything they can to get their loved one back. Finally, a deep depression sets in, and slowly, out of this depression, they paw their way up to acceptance: acceptance that those who are dead are dead, but they are alive, wonderfully alive.
The core difference between AI necro-therapy and the regular process of grieving is that the final stage of healthy grief, an acceptance that the bereaved is unreachable and truly gone, is perpetually interrupted by the false belief that with an extra modulation—with one more “my loved one was like this, talk like this, ChatGPT”—it will be like the bereaved never left the griever. As discussed, this is impossible: There will always be something that the mourner leaves out.
Those who use necro-therapy are trapped in a cycle of bargaining with ChatGPT, of anger that the little machine cannot get it right, all the while clouded by a strong subconscious denial of the fact: When you’re dead, you’re dead. However, it must be asked: What sets necro-therapy apart from the religious response to grief? Those with a faith tradition often believe that, in some way, their loved ones are still with them, even beyond the grave. The response to this is simple: Those with a faith tradition believe their loved ones are still with them in a materially different way than those engaged in necro-therapy. Those who are dead exist metaphysically, in the spiritual and philosophical sense of the word: They exist as both a spirit and as their words.
Where do we go from here? Websites like c.ai already allow one to talk to thousands of artificial-intelligence versions of both fictional and non-fictional characters: People like Homer Simpson, Madonna, and Mao Zedong are just a text away, albeit sanitized by that uncanny, Frankenstein-like coat of paint ChatGPT applies. As stated, the future seems to be lunging into the past: What is stopping the next Silicon Valley company from inventing a machine that lets you talk to your dead grandfather? Your father? Your sister? Yourself?
It’s all just a matter of parameters and specifications. Prompt engineering: With the right words, anything is possible. There is nothing about a human being that is irreducible to symbols. We’re already seeing the seeds of this idea, as this Redditor expresses:
My wife has terminal cancer; she is pretty young, has a big social media presence, and we have a long chat history with her. Are there any services where I can upload her data and create a virtual version of her that I can talk to after she passes away?
This future may seem ridiculous: There has to be a limit to this. Surely we will realize that grave-robbing can occur in both physical and linguistic vectors. But remember the core tenet of capitalism: Where there is a problem, there is a solution waiting to be sold. And as the “grief market” is looking for fast, easy, quick solutions, venture capitalists are waiting to pounce.
We see how the problems with necro-therapy express themselves through Lacan. Perhaps he has a solution. We must stray away from neurotransmitters and antidepressants and wade back to the psychoanalyst’s chair. Lacan, after all, saw Freud's psychoanalysis as a valid way of interpreting the world. What does he say?
Lacan argues that all humans wish to experience a world beyond (perhaps before) symbols. Our search for authenticity, culture, and experiences stems from a desire to escape the symbolic order language encases us in. The psychotherapist rationalizes the desire to perform necro-therapy as the need to break away from the symbolic order of death by using and exchanging symbols.
This is both intuitively and formally impossible. What is the solution to this? Lacan doesn’t believe the symbol problem has a solution: The use of language to express things is so mind-bogglingly large it staggers one to begin anywhere. Perhaps knowing necro-therapy is wrong is a start: As postmodernism becomes less niche, perhaps people can debate a way out of this inherent issue. However, this isn’t practical: We cannot shove Anti-Oedipus in front of a third-grader who has just learned her father passed away.
However, we can start educating people on grief young. We must transform grief into a celebration of life, including death. Those with a faith tradition get it right: Their loved ones are firmly, materially dead, but their life lives on inside those who live. Not in a spiritual sense or even a sense of memory, but in something deeper, something impossible to represent with language.
Perhaps we must embrace anti-necrotherapy: We must understand that the influence of human life is so vast, beautiful, and complicated that we cannot reduce it to words. Take comfort in the fact that your life is uniquely yours.
Every single life affects other lives in two ways:
One that is visible and reducible to symbols, and one that simply isn’t.
Maybe we need to readjust Vonnegut’s quote to this:
When you’re dead, you’re dead. But when you’re alive, you’re alive.
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