Griefbots: A sad reality.

When someone dies, the ones left behind are trying to cope with reality.

Doing so is not easy. Death, even though we are all aware that it is part of our reality, is never easy to accept. When a closed one passes away, we are having difficulty in accepting the new reality. Sometimes we would give anything for just five more minutes with the person we lost.

That is where griefbots come into play. (source)

LLMs (Machine Learning bots) built to imitate the person who died, based on data you feed it from past writings of the deceased, old letters, videos, messages et cetera. After configured properly, the AI can then talk to you as if you were speaking to the person you lost.

Is that healthy? Is that right or wrong?

Surely psychology will have a lot to say about how such interventions interfere with a more ‘healthy’ way of dealing with loss. After all, negating the loss itself is by no means a way to handle the loss, since in your mind there is no “loss” after all.

And that actually touches the foundations of the problem: We are usually having hard time dealing with things we are afraid of. And death is one of the first in the list. So we tend to avoid it. Avoid it as a subject of discussion. Avoid to face it even when it stares us in the eye.

Yes, you could ‘talk’ to a griefbot. At some years science could even resurrect people or make us live for ever. That is the goal of many geneticists now anyway. But would that be a ‘good’ thing? Is making a problem go away the solution to the problem?

It may sound naive, but problems are not questions that need answer. They are calls for action and they are the water that the seed of our self needs to grow. No one would grow in a life without any issues. No one would grow in a world where everything goes as planned with no pain or misery. If we remove these problems we will end up removing the very essence of life itself.

The essence of loss is loss.

No, that is not easy to grasp or accept.

But if you do not accept loss.

You will never be able to find yourself…