The Longing Lab AI ethicist & minister Dylan Thomas Doyle explains griefbots: their pros and cons & future considerations
Episode 34 Dylan Thomas Doyle (PhD) discusses the use of AI in creating "griefbots," which simulate deceased loved ones. Doyle-Burke emphasizes the ethical considerations, potential harms, and psychological impacts of grief-related technology. He highlights the need for careful design and regulation. Doyle-Burke also mentions ongoing research and the cultural nuances of grief across different societies.
Dr. Dylan Thomas Doyle is a researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder who studies the intersection of grief and technology. His research focuses on the ethics of designing AI griefbots – chatbots that are being made to look and sound like our loved ones who have passed away. Dylan is an ordained Unitarian Universalist minister, a hospital chaplain, and the host of popular AI Ethics Podcast, The Radical AI Podcast, and the AI-tocracy podcast. Connect with him at dylan.doyle@colorado.edu
In this episode, (in order) we talked about:
*How griefbots are created from data and what kind of data is used
*Griefbot lingo like fidelity and hallucinations
*Questions and concerns he has for griefbot developers
*The problems that arise with monetizing grief
*Different types of griefbot users and what they want in a griefbot
*Differences between greifbots and prayer as tools to deal with grief
*Why griefbots can psychologically short-circuit” grief
*Narrative therapy practices using griefbots
*The future of griefbots for the death of a romantic relationship (i.e. divorce)
*How cultural perspectives influence our view of griefbots
Quotes
“Griefbots are one way that people can plug into that longing and really try to understand who we are and what the world means to us and what we mean to the world.”
“People talk about elegant code. What does an elegant code look like for a griefbot, a technology that is about death and loss.”
“I never have have done that [made griefbots] yet for myself. It makes me feel weird, so I don't do it. And I think that feeling of weirdness is one of the reasons why I like to study it. Because, at the same time, I have talked to people who use these grief bots, and they really do help them heal.”
“The reason why people get into the death industry in general is because they've lost someone, or they've had a really bad experience of not getting the support or comfort that they've needed when they've had a loved one die, and so they say to themselves, I can do this better.”
“For the people who are using these grief bots, I think what they're longing for is comfort in the face of the unknown.”
“There's a concern and danger that we're just going to have instant gratification for grief, which is kind of kind of scary because grief generally needs time to process.”
“Everyone really does have their own cultural, familial, personal, religious relationship with this word that we call death. I don't think that the solution for bringing comfort is to just build a faster course, to just build a better chatbot that will help us overcome death—which is what some of these companies claim. I think the real solution is to figure out how to use this technology in the same way that we have other tools to help us work through death and work through grief.”