Dr. Monica Patrascu: The Whole Story [Women to Watch]

On the fourth day of Worldcon 2024 in Glasgow, Scotland, Dr. Monica Patrascu stood on stage and posed a profound and unsettling question to the audience: What if you could continue to talk to your loved ones – or, at least, an AI version of them – after they have passed on? This talk was the result of Patrascu’s systems engineering work and years of research into death and dying, but it also drew upon their work as a fiction writer and on their reflections of the impact of large language models (LLMs) on the writing community.