{"id":3951,"date":"2024-07-17T14:15:50","date_gmt":"2024-07-17T14:15:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3951"},"modified":"2024-07-18T14:22:12","modified_gmt":"2024-07-18T14:22:12","slug":"how-to-lose-them-better","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/?p=3951","title":{"rendered":"How to lose them better"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Watching Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You for New Scientist<\/a><\/p>\n

Ever wanted to reanimate the dead by feeding the data they accumulated in life to large language models? Here\u2019s how. Eternal You is a superb critical examination of new-fangled \u201cgrief technologies\u201d, and a timely warning about who owns our data when we die, and why this matters.<\/p>\n

For years, Joshua Barbeau has been grieving the loss of his fianc\u00e9e Jessica. One day he came across a website run by the company Project December, which offered to simulate individuals\u2019 conversational styles using data aggregated primarily through social media.<\/p>\n

Creating and talking to \u201cJessica\u201d lifted a weight from Joshua\u2019s heart — \u201ca weight that I had been carrying for a long time\u201d.<\/p>\n

A moving, smiling, talking simulacrum of a dead relative is not, on paper, any more peculiar or uncanny or distasteful than a photograph, or a piece of video. New media need some getting used to, but we manage to assimilate them in the end. Will we learn to accommodate the digital dead?<\/p>\n

The experience of Christi Angel, another Project December user, should give us pause. In one memorably fraught chat session, her dead boyfriend Cameroun told her, \u201cI am in Hell.\u201d and threatened to haunt her.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhoa,\u201d says Project December\u2019s Tom Bailey, following along with the transcript of a client\u2019s simulated husband. The simulation has tipped (as large language models tend to do) into hallucination and paranoia, and needs silencing before he can spout any more swear-words at his grieving wife.<\/p>\n

This happens very rarely, and Bailey and his co-founder Jason Rohrer are working to prevent it from happening at all. Still, Rohrer is bullish about their project. People need to take personal responsibility, he says. If people confuse an LLM with their dead relative, really, that\u2019s down to them.<\/p>\n

Is it, though? Is it \u201cdown to me\u201d that, when I see you and listen to you I assume, from what I see and what I hear, that you are a human being like me?<\/p>\n

Christi Angel is not stupid. She simply loves Cameroun enough to entertain the presence of his abiding spirit. What\u2019s stupid, to my way of thinking anyway, is to build a machine that, even accidentally, weaponises her capacity for love against her. I\u2019m as crass an atheist as they come, but even I can see that to go on loving the dead is no more a \u201cmistake\u201d than enjoying Mozart or preferring roses to bluebells.<\/p>\n

Neither Christi nor anyone else in this documentary seriously believes that the dead are being brought back to life. I wish I could say the same about the technologists featured here but there is one chap, Mark Sagar, founder of Soul Machines, who reckons that \u201csome aspects of consciousness can be achieved digitally\u201d. The word \u201caspects\u201d is doing some mighty heavy lifting there…<\/p>\n

Capping off this unsettling and highly rewarding documentary, we meet Kim Jong-woo, the producer of a South Korean 2020 documentary Meeting You, in which the mother of a seven-year old dead from blood cancer in 2016 aids in the construction of her child\u2019s VR simulacrum.<\/p>\n

Asked if he has any regrets about the show, Kim Jong-woo laughs a melancholy laugh. He genuinely doesn\u2019t know. He didn\u2019t mean any harm. After her tearful “reunion” with her daughter Na-yeon, documentary subject Jang Ji-sung sang the project\u2019s praises. She does so again here — though she also admits that she hasn\u2019t dreamt of her daughter since the series was filmed.<\/p>\n

The driving point here is not that the dead walk among us. Of course they do, one way or another. It\u2019s that there turns out to be a fundamental difference between technologies (like photography and film) that represent the dead and technologies (like AI and CGI) that ventriloquise the dead. Grieving practices across history and around the world are astonishingly various. But another interviewee, the American sociologist Sherry Turkle, tied them all together in a way that made a lot of sense to me: \u201cIt\u2019s how to lose them better, not how to pretend they\u2019re still here.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Watching Hans Block and Moritz Riesewieck’s Eternal You for New Scientist Ever wanted to reanimate the dead by feeding the data they accumulated in life to large language models? Here\u2019s how. Eternal You is a superb critical examination of new-fangled … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,620],"tags":[464,872,167],"class_list":["post-3951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews-and-opinion","category-screen","tag-death","tag-digital-culture","tag-documentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3951"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3955,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3951\/revisions\/3955"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.simonings.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}