And Yet… The Paradox of Generative AI Griefbots

“And Yet… The Paradox of Generative AI Griefbots” addresses current advances in generative artificial intelligence technologies that offer LLMs and/or chatbots that can be customized to simulate the personae of lost loved ones with the input of digitized materials (text, image, video, audio). This paper examines the benefits and the dangers of intimate interactions with personalized, always-on chatbots that can provide users with deeply immersive experiences through three distinct theoretical frameworks. The first uses the qualitative research method of autoethnography to reflect on the months-long research-creation process of remediating a single photograph of myself and my father via the AI image generator, Midjourney. This project was undertaken as an experiment in elegy and culminated in two works of e-literature, the Twine visual novels, Infinity +1 and Infinite Eddies, and an early critical essay presented at the British Library MixConference 2023. Each reflects differently on the precarity of memory and the affect I experienced in Midjourney’s capacity to identify and remediate a set of identifiable elements that emphasize an emotional relationship configured through the positioning of our bodies in the frame, while simultaneously reinventing through infinite variations in time and place. Critical references include Hiroki Azuma’s conceptualization of “moe-elements” in anime in Otaku: Japan’s Database Animals (2009), Walter Benjamin’s ““The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” and Nettrice Gaskins’ essay, “The Aura of AI-Generated Art.” The second theoretical framework examines the phenomenon of griefbots and human grieving for the beloved, looking back to Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu and Orpheus’ attempt to recover Eurydice from the Underworld recontextualized from the contemporary vantage of new technological products offered by Replika AI, Project December, Super Brain, and Seance AI. These simulations clearly can be beneficial as (re)mediations bridge the void felt after the loss of loved ones. Notably, Replika AI launched after founder Eugenia Kudya created a chatbot from the emails and text messages of her best friend after his death and a Stanford study (2024) has documented emotional benefits for users, including a decrease in suicidal ideation. Joshua Barbeau has written movingly on his experience of interacting with his lost girlfriend Jessica via game-developer Jason Roher’s AI chatbot platform, December Project, stating that “The whole experience gave me a sense of closure I didn’t even know I still needed.” Intertexts informing this critique include Shannon Vallor’s The AI Mirror, Derrida’s reading of the phármakon as remedy and poison, and Joseph Weisenbaum's warning of the “powerful delusional thinking” in user responses to the first AI Chatbot, Eliza (1976). The third section examines existing and proposed regulatory frameworks, the ethics of AI products, or lack thereof, in the “digital afterlife industry. Of particular note is the categorization of harm from “high risk anthropomorphic behaviour” detailed in Garcia v. Character Technologies Inc., et al. The charge that technology companies intentionally design “generative AI systems with anthropomorphic qualities to obfuscate between fiction and reality.…launching their systems without adequate safety features” provides the critical framework for my analysis.